Three Poems

Of Absence

The interloper
Spoke
From the life spent—The
Circling

From the bails—the good
Wine
For all you good
Young Men
And
Women

Caught in the rain
Top the
Timber fruit hills

The front porch gleaming
With some courage—

That one is something worth for
The taking
Worth starting over—Of
Absence

From the fear there would
Never again
Be
Another time—this

Another cherry
Tree



The Man in the Lake

There’s a special croon by
the lake. The shed you said creaks. Built from the old
town oak. A special way to
talk about death—quietly—
without much. You knew
this too. Remember?
Weekends by the cemetery—
the train passing over on
our way to school after
we’d steal books from
the new wave shop? Your
big hands. How we’d make
dinner and count the cuts?
Stitch up what we could.
I’d tell a joke and you’d
utter something of the sort?
We traveled back from the
brink to run this message.
There were men; boys.
There was your father, the
fire, the barn. That night
by the water when I wasn’t
enough, there was you, but
there was also me. A man
in the lake appeared and
we both saw red. You got
taller. You got loud. A gong spelling out the slippage
of time. We heard what
felt right. You slept on the
floor—and I made it holy.
No matter the day—it was
noon. No matter the year—
Spring. Night crept in from
the back. The bugs started
singing. Happy Birthday.
Happy Birthday. You’re
another year older. Another
year further away. I carve
out the lake. You start
changing color.



Jesus Saves

You wake and the rain is setting you down,
trying on an old song. It’s a short one.

A short story: Man loses his way and packs
up the west. Builds a nice prairie and a big house.

It’s beautiful, filled with new mahogany, held up by
glass doors and glass walls. Bed sheet drawers and hand-me-down crystal.

Man took pride in his hand. He could
carve his heart out, paint it all over town.

He could get up late, point out his cracks and the sun would still go out.

Man had time. Man made space again.

Space to do what a man can. Soak up the land—kiss a girl.

Man stood on the hill by the river each morning and he stared waiting for nothing to come.

Something that wouldn’t split him in two.

Man was waiting for what will make him strong. Strong enough to fill the rooms that constitute a life.

Girls, boys; lives perhaps best left alone, best put down—holed up with the bugs.

Man would end his nights cleaning his gun—Apollo,
he’d say, stole his light, too.

He’d dust off the tables, the years, built long and wide.

He keeps the night at bay. He lays his head.

Man curses the world he loved first without a fist.
Not a thought to spare; it can be easy.

You live. You live. You live. You live.
The world was mean. Man made God.


____
Christopher Elias Hammond lives in Virginia.