Wear Your Helmet
Poems
Charles Hibbard
Copyright 2016 Charles Hibbard
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Table of Contents
1. Early March
2. Community Chorus
3. Hang Glider
4. The Music
5. Swallow
6. June
7. What Can We Save?
8. The Puzzle of Roadkill
9. Demolition Day
10. Leaving
11. Austin State Hospital Cemetery
12. Clouds
13. Bedtime
14. Fundamentals
15. Revolution
16. Endangered Species
17. Jack
18. Capri
19. Porto Empedocle
20. Villa Romana del Casale
21. The Renaissance Lute
22. November 8
23. And If You Can’t Change Your Life?
24. Trinity Episcopal Church, Built 1845
25. Worth Living
1. Early March
Like Carthage plowed
and salted the city lies
beaten down by winter, now
withdrawing to its polar lair.
The tops of the trees still bow
waiting for another icy blow;
too much blue sky shows
through their thousand
crossed fingers, where
a cardinal thinks of singing
and tattered clouds slide by
happy as June.
Here below, it’s all dunes
of winter dust and the last
slumping hills of snow.
But sunshine kneads the meadows
and the dead rabble of grass
is combed over bubbles
of frost-heaved soil, as though
the earth itself were on the boil.
2. Community Chorus
On the riser of bald
and graying heads
that orange sweater glows
like a hot young sun
too bright for staring
but target of a hundred
sidelong glances;
as one last flaring
October maple on a drab
hillside burns alive
but will bare its branches
in solitude only long after
the rest of that wistful slope
has cleared to the parking lot
and driven home
through dusk and cold.
3. Hang Glider
I.
All the others
expected birds
so I think only I
saw him up there
suspended briefly
in a clearing
between slow
evolving clouds.
Shocking silence
of high altitude
presumably human
speck below a flake
of red sail
then vanished
into that long
gone afternoon.
II.
Now we know better:
it’s hot down here
on the desert floor
but cool up there
in the blue, so high
we earthbound
can barely see you
cruising the sliding
gaps between clouds
that guide the fanning
rays of sunlight.
You may yet escape
this labyrinth!
Unfurl your red sail
and leap, rise,
ride on those tall
pillars of hot air!
Wax is obsolete!
Soar as near the sun
as you please.
Wear your helmet.
4. The Music
The music was caged
inside a vaulted hall.
Sunlight struck
through tall glass
to the gleam
of organ pipes
and the players
working in black
to reconstruct
a tidy old song.
Outside the windows a band
of cottonwoods jammed,
bowed by a warm wind
and swaying against the glass.
That messy rush of leaves
was banished from the room;
but the beckoning branches
are all that I recall.
I wanted the windows open.
I wanted to hear that afternoon.
5. Swallow
During these ascents, often at twilight, the birds climb up to one and a half miles. – James Gorman, NYT, 10/27/16.
You may spend all your days
cruising the lower layers
above the flatlands,
in the smoky air of cities,
swallowing all the fat flies
and drifting spiders
that come your way.
But you can climb at night
a mile or two high,
leave that mundane below
a deep cushion of sky,
close your eyes
and coast carefree
through dreams of flight.
6. June
Our nighthawk
is back, scoring
the soft night sky
above city bricks
morning glories
unfurled on fences
blue flag the dawn
hibernators snort awake
and burst into streets
abreeze with the first
countable warmth
while thunderheads
rise on black feet
to sober the childish sun.
Take a table outside.
It’s June, the Friday
evening of summer.
No need to rush July.
Interlude: Summer House
7. What Can We Save?
One way is to recall it
as it was new, before
parents made it old for us:
logs still with their bark
and oozing sap,
floorboards pale
as the hearts of pines,
shiny brass bedsteads
and the windows gleaming
where the boys stood
in their various heights
to dream the endless
walk of the waves
and watch the moon,
over hills only lately
swept clear of trees,
water the lake with light.
They could shutter the house
for winter, that first Labor Day,
knowing for sure it would all
be waiting for them in May.
But as things stand now
perhaps it’s better just
to give sway to this wind,
and look back even further
to when there was only sun
jittering on poplars,
no cabin, no clearing
no slightest tear
in the quilt of fragrant woods.
And safely distant through
gaps between the trees,
only fair weather clouds
above the shock of blue.
8. The Puzzle of Roadkill
...this century-old house
in the wrecker’s sights,
like the holy construct
of a mouse in headlights,
to be ripped apart
door by window,
night by quiet night,
tick by tock, ghost by ghost,
smeared down the road
and left a lump,
ignominious mound
of fur and skin, disjunct
eyeballs, splintered bone,
a mangle of once tidy
rooms strewn down
tomorrows until at most
a memory remains,
and far beyond.
9. Demolition Day
Bedrooms and kitchen
torn open to the sky
chimney and hearth stones
scattered hornets routed
and swarming mad
mice and squirrels outed
and skittering unroofed
ants boil shiny black
in sunlight bats fly blind
and hang themselves
blinking in trees serpents
driven from ancient dens
snake through grass to new
homes or nowhere...
All these spirits must fly
crawl or slink away
before someone can raise
tomorrow on this open grave.
10. Leaving
This afternoon is gray
and soft, a scrim
of silver light.
From hills across the lake
gone summers glide
toward this window
in orderly rows
without flash or gleam
herded by the wind.
Stolid old pines
frame the view.
Below, one last dog
dozing on dry grass,
and voices of those
who are able to stay
a few days longer.
I have to catch a flight.
And Moving Right Along...
11. Austin State Hospital Cemetery
The rolling well-mown field
is sparsely strewn with stained stone
crosses and broken plinths, as though
even in death these wild unknowns
must be buffered from each other
by space and grass. Three thousand
interred beneath this treeless rise,
though “It’s a myth they were ever
buried one on top of another”;
the scattered stones mark the spots
where a few memories poke through
the manicured lawn of forgotten.
A small shrine – cross hand-carved
from a shingle, plastic flowers,
prom photo, and heartfelt words:
“Tears are not a sign of weakness
but the mark of an unspeakable love”
– is backed up against the fence
that encloses that silence,
with its unspeakable hint that love
might not be all we need it to be.
12. Clouds
We’re not talking
on this speeding train
but my wife’s shoulder
presses firmly on mine
as she knits an intricate
landscape of colored strings.
Beyond the window summer
clouds grow and dwindle,
reach and retreat, tower and curl:
they’re not castles or hills
not camels or whales
but airfill only, piled high:
remoteness, stately drift,
unquiet boundaries
firm as any flesh.
13. Seventy-one
At bedtime I notice the bones
in the back of my narrow hand.
(“It’s all going to end
badly.”) My wife appears
from the bathroom and prepares
for bed – more slowly
than yesterday? My skin
doesn’t look the same tonight
I think it needs some cream.
But coffee tomorrow morning
and no alarm
seventy-one and sunny
migrants exploiting a south wind.
14. Fundamentals
And suppose they’re right
our fevered brothers
with their sacred books
and guns and blades
determined to make us
avert our gaze
from everything but
what can’t be seen...
If a star is just a star
and a tree just a tree
perhaps it’s wiser to pluck
our offending eyes
than to let them look
too closely at any things
or try to name the atoms
that join to synthesize
a love.
15. Revolution
Screams and shouts
and running feet
plate glass sags
like melting ice
bullhorns bellow gas
forces of order briefly
back on their boot heels
as the world takes another turn.
Days that make history
seem almost real
almost worth living.
...and there they are, too
the befuddled old
stringing out
superseded lives
collars turned up
hats pulled down
against the storm
on aching knees
peeking out windows
at the mayhem below
waiting for a lull
the chance to limp
and list along
glass-glittered streets
clutching their empty
shopping bags.
16. Endangered Species
Springtime in Audubon’s woods.
In his day the trees and swamps
were plush with birds.
Today we may still welcome
some kind of spring; but his May
was to ours as ten is to one,
a plenum of sex and song.
Needlessly numerous, some now
would say of those birds – so many
it could be hard to know
just where to point his gun.
Point and shoot and paint;
seven hundred species saved
on paper. Meanwhile Audubon
lost all his teeth,
not to mention his mind,
before he was finally done.
17. Jack
Always hurricane weather
in the flip-flop climate
where you tried to escape
from winter: your roof
cartwheeling down the street
“friends” blown downwind
your marriage beached
and leaning on the trunk
of a snapped-off palm.
Flying always into the eye
of your own history.
You started to talk
about leave-taking
so I kept talking too
and a grip on your arm
until I got the old laugh.
But after I left
there was one more blow.
Wherever
you’re off to now
I hope the breezes
are gentler, flowing
only in the kindest
of open-ended curves.
18. Capri
Nosing against the cliffs, crowds of crowded boats
wait their turn at the Blue Grotto.
And cruising by,
four happy
Americans at Capri
strewn in sunshine
on our cockleshell deck.
Italians drive us.
Plowing the sea nearby are other vessels, bigger, tourists
seated in rows, hats tugged low over sunburned noses.
Nearly naked with privilege
we send them our sympathy
and contempt, as our sailor
idles his craft to let us slide
down the side into the
sea’s
ruffled glass, or glides us
high over our blue shadow
through arches of stone.
On the cliffs far above
red bougainvillea spills
over walls of white villas,
their heavy-lidded windows
unimpressed by our glow.
19. Porto Empedocle
Liugi Pirandello was born in this town;
and him today we hail
where a magpie sits on a power line
flicking his long black tail.
20. Villa Romana del Casale
The news from Rome was bad.
I imagine him
strolling this garden
to clear his head
while someone silent
followed behind him
waving away the flies.
Wind humming low
in umbrella pines
calmed his whirling mind
or maybe helped him
harden some resolve
– or meant nothing at all
in his crowded life
whatever the same breeze
among these newer pines
may sing to me now,
sweeping away all that time.
21. The Renaissance Lute
So soft, the song
of that little lute,
intimate as a child
humming to its own play.
You could imagine
some dancing too:
the swish of silk
gentle as a smile
meant for you alone.
What was a musician
in those long-gone days?
What was a lutenist
before spotlights
microphones and amps?
Clever fingers
and skintight pants.
The lutenist bows
and turns to leave,
slinging his little ax
over one shoulder,
tipping back
his feathered cap
or tugging it down
to darken his glance.
A lady or two may
watch him as he goes.
22. November 8
Winter does come around.
There will be no basking
for a time. Winter
is for weather-stripping
window frames, stuffing
the chinks in your walls
drawing the drapes
lighting a fire.
Buy a new coat, a hat
that covers your ears
a sweater for the chill
fold an extra quilt
at the foot of the bed.
Go out and walk
in the long, dim light.
Darkness will have its day