Poetry by Leonard Neufeldt

The Immortal

In the evening you make your loses simple,
Whiter than bones, still to come.

You're alone in a foreign city,
And you've waited for a lover's letter.

Today the letter arrived. He is coming,
What wilth the high costs elsewhere.

But wary of anything you've planned
He refuses to rescue you.

Awake all night, you realize
How young he is, much younger than you,

How preoccupied with his own death,
And all the work that remains to be done.

That much is clear. But the angle of rain
On the paving bricks conceals the street;

Light shatters like glass. You consider
Buliding a night sadness around the moon,

But it elbows aside a cloud's shivered aureole.
And it's time for you to change. Before dawn

You grind coffee and prepare new lists.
Your list of what to forget starts

With what you've been, your list
for remembering with stairs a child never climbed

To rooms that may still be unfiinished.
Later that morning in the impossible workings

Of a spring storm you're out of the city
Without a name, your watery flesh

Looking for landmarks. You climb an embankment
Near the gray canal locks and imagine

An exceptional grave mound, and dry-eyed morners
By the thousands. You join their chants of sorrow;

You weep. As you haven't wept in years.
The world empties like sleeves. You stay.

If only what you lose didn't return the same.
There's so much you're ready to give up.

You fear returning to the city, your street,
Your room, the letters you must write.

Mindful of the immortal
You see omens everywhere.

(Click here for an interpretation of this poem by Dara Joy Jaworowicz.)


The tree with a hole in front of our yard

    for Di Brandt, and those who were angry

Some in Yarrow will tell it differently,
forests emptying, or holes
in the sky at the poles of our world
where we can lose everything.

For years our flowering chestnut
was a circle in our eye,
roundness so dark and unconditional
we didn't notice until our Oregon cousin
ripped it open after vomiting his gin,
rode the largest bough down to earth,
and let sky in as though
to prove it round,
but tress have holes gaping with disbelief.

When a boy knows he's failed to explain
a perfect circle to Father, and the sky opening,
he is silent about the vacancy within,
new and large, unhealable.
But the chestnut didn't die,
first one side of the gap and then the other
to its last, outermost branch.

Some of us stood in the emptiness
long after it had healed over,
trying to remember
word for word what Father said,
as if a child's wonder or a father's answer
are magic. They are more like trees
or the sky seeking to close itself.

(Click here for an imitation of this poem by Dara Joy Jaworowicz.)




All poems posted with permission from the author.
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