Peter Weltner

Poetry

 

 

The Village

 

A shallow creek, a peaceful lake

in the park, squirrels, songbirds, meadows.

The smell of baking bread, of fresh flowers

in crystal vases on the table by the foyer.

The whirr of her sewing machine. She’s mak-

ing a new dress.  In our backyard, by willows,

Mother unbraids her hair.  Hours

pass as luminous as her laughter.

Sitting in her swing.

Or a morning on the green.

The village’s streets and square,

earth, sky, all I’d seen,

my people kind and fair:

why old men die while dreaming

 

 

In the Last of the Thousand Lands

 

Haltingly, an old woman’s walking

far from home.  The road

is muddy in the early spring.

Husband, children are dead.  The load

on her back is like a bag of sorrow.

 

Snow is slowly melting in a meadow.

Birds peck at seeds in a tree.

A farmer is plowing fresh land,

the just turned field rust-tawny

where sliced and sheared.  A stand

 

of birches.  Faint mist.  Pale sky.

The pebbles, rocks by her path

glisten like mica.  Such beauty

she sees, though mindful of death,

stones sparkling like stars.  A crow

 

looks glad it’s time for sow-

ing.  Green sprigs are like dreaming,

like dawn ever-shining, limbs

stripped of ice, newly blooming,

the pungent woods, the hymns

 

finches are singing.  The forest

is where she must wearily go

to reach oak, golden ash, the rest,

the sleep she is seeking, to know

what trees know, the roots below

 

her feet, the ground like a window

she spies through.  To walk

through years frightened, then catch sight

of loveliness.  She watches a hawk

fly like an arrow through white

 

clouds toward a garden of camellias,

dahlias, irises, roses–

like a lover’s last flowers she’s

been given as day fast closes

to evening’s shade and shadow.

 

No more grief.  Weeping.  Sorrow.

It is the thousandth land

she’s reached, journey’s end.

“I’m tired,” she says, and

waits for him, her dearest friend.

 

And he comes like solace to

an aged wanderer, to her,

Imagination, to who-

ever is a traveler,

who wishes life might bestow

 

on her today or tomorrow

before it is too soon over,

a vision of woods, plowed

fields, birds, clear water,

flowers, blue skies endowed

 

by grace of nature, by which

I mean by hope, dream,

desire, all the rich,

sweet mind conceives of that might seem

more real than dying if art could make it so.

 

 

 

A Promise

 

A curved, black, spindle back chair.  A once plush red

cushion faded to rose-soft orange or pink.  A pale

olive green sweater drapes over it.  The floor boards–shed,

barn dark–are centuries old.  Tan, like a rusted nail,

two shoes, work boots, laces untied, rest.  Ceramic

cups, a bowl for cats.  A part of a chair, carved

arms, the paint worn smooth, no wood exposed.  A hutch, thick

slats, built solid.  One door’s swung open.  It’s piled

with stacks of white or gray porcelain bowls and plates.

On its side, the weathered wood of an antique ironing board

hangs from a nail.  The ghost of a snow shovel waits

out the glass door propped on a wall.  Old things adored,

the snow shining bright as a flashbulb.  So ancient deeds burn

through time.  I promise.  He’s just stepped out.  He’ll soon return.

 

 

Maine

 

1.

 

The island’s a massive stark boulder,

a lavender cast to its snow cover,

sharp edges of jagged rock exposed

round a thin shoreline.

Flat white clouds gather

in a hazy sky, the water

a dark Prussian blue.  Exposed

to sunlight, it glitters, shining

with a satiny sheen.  Black and spare,

two rowboats, their two men

working on nets, keenly aware

of how cold the water is,

how thin the catch will likely be

since, despite the morning sun,

the sky is darkening at the horizon,

threatening rain or sleet by noon.

 

2.

 

Woods in summer, thickly

canopied.  Dense green moss

and weeds on unbroken ground.

The trees’ and bushes’ leaves weave

together into a seamless tapestry,

a burnished golden gloss,

gilt-brilliant, a flowery yellow

shining like sun off water.

The forest’s hush is the sound

of a world emptied of people.  A break

in the foliage opens to water more blue

than the sky, a hill that gently dips

to a crystalline lake, falls spill into it,

and a boy and his toy boat

waiting to make their maiden voyage.

 

 

 

Peter Weltner is Danse Macabre’s esteemed 2017 Artist-in-Residence. He has published six books of fiction, including The Risk of His Music and How the Body Prays, and, in 2017, The Return of What’s Been Lost, five poetry chapbooks, among them The One-Winged Body and Water’s Eye (both in collaboration with the artist Galen Garwood), and six full length collections of poetry, News from the World at My Birth: A History, The Outerlands, To the Final Cinder, Stone Altars, Late Summer Storm in Early Winter (with photographs and paintings by Galen Garwood), and most recently The Light of the Sun Become Sea.  He and his husband live in San Francisco by the ocean.