Jared Pearce

Poetry

 

 

Dad’s Staying at My Home (1)

 

Before breakfast I’m listening beside the curtains:

Birds, I say, out at the feeder; a couple, maybe.

Quite a few, Dad says.  He pours milk

on his porridge and in a bite halves his toast.

 

He has explained he knew, when my aunt died,

that he could pull her back from beyond the veil

drawn over her irrevocable blue eyes,

but he also knew God had stopped him cold.

 

I don’t remember if I told him I had a vision—

if it had mattered that I had seen the face of God,

that at one point I, too, had touched back

my mind’s drapery and counted every sparrow.

 

 

Dad’s Staying at My Home (3)

 

When he slips between rooms, he tips

on the light switch, does what he sees

he had wanted, and then leaves, the room

blazing like seventh heaven through the winter.

 

As a youth I was vigilant to keep those

unused lights dead—Dad had economized

the California darkness, pared-down

my wasteful flicks, until I was a Tarzan

 

Swinging from circuit to circuit.  Now I tread

on the light he wings sparking the house

with electric bolts.  Look up, boy, he says,

and the miniature angels burrow into my brains.

 

 

 

Holding & Moving

 

My son and I are working a ninety degree corner

against our new eight by four-foot bookcase:

 

He shoulders the hall-way, plants his foot

against the baseboard to pull apart the house,

 

While on my hands and knees I pave-smooth the stairs

and stretch my hands through the steep-pitched ceiling.

 

He doesn’t think the house can swallow it whole,

the bookcase snagging on the teeth-like banisters.

 

I’m running my fingers through her thick carpet,

begging for forgiveness, for just one more chance.

 

Enraged, he tears wide the legs of her handrails,

and gouges into the plaster from his hard joints,

 

So I’m thinking all our dance was for nothing—

how we circled the house around our shelves, a thing

 

To hold things in the thing that holds us all, like a love

that wants to exist in only giving, but must remain

 

Itself if it’s to give itself away.  Those aren’t tears

I’m wiping, it’s sweat; the bookcase is in place, snug

 

From doorframe to corner, ready to conceive again

the stories we grew up on, stories full of quests and distress,

 

Hard men and women banging up against each other

to get where they wanted, to fix their worlds just so.

 

 

 

In Praise of Lateness

 

Look at those robins, standing on the ice

still layering half this planet, their

scaled feet burning embarrassment,

their five worn hearts hunting heat and something

to eat under an iron sky belting a sealed

soil, no matter their sharp beaks or fine

hunger.  The overdressed red breasts

mill about the yard, their sun kissed

 

almanac caught them out of time and out

of place, for worms have gripped the earth,

shut in their dreams of rot and stash,

they stay put, awaiting their own call,

a sign for moving from within the deep,

however shallow that deep may be.

 

 

 

Landing

 

Coming down the birds

open, tail so broken

it might never close, and wings

so wide wrenched, ratcheting

their bodies to the wind

to unwind all at once.

 

Pinions pointed ahead,

they nearly embrace their target:

once, twice, they summon in

quick succession their bit

of the planet before snapping

shut themselves, contained

 

Again against what they know

they’ll soon enough rise above.

 

 

 

Jared Pearce teaches writing and literature at William Penn University.  Some of his poems are forthcoming from Corvus, The Cape Rock, and Asymptote, while others have recently been shared in Cargo, Amarillo Bay, CircleShow, and Bird's Thumb.