The Popcorn Dance
Poems
Charles Hibbard
Copyright 2015 Charles Hibbard
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1. Medicine Bundle
Get one or more representatives of the plant kingdom... Get one or more representatives of the mineral kingdom... Get one or more representatives of the animal kingdom... Get one or more representatives of the technical kingdom...
–“Barefoot Windwalker,” The Sacred Bundle
Jeffrey pine to sift the night air,
gray half moon surveilling,
an eclipse of pigeons,
steel rails bright with rolling...
Or maybe:
Parallel green ridges hem
a sash, or slash, of blue lake,
loon’s wobbling wail
an urgent curve of sail...
No, wait:
Sprigs of sage, winter-dry,
twinned heart of crystal calcite,
clump of fur from vanished cat,
alarm clock’s sleepless eye...
One last try:
Squash blossoms – two,
blue opal with embers,
your gaze turned my way.
Contrail. Chime of e-mail.
2. Blue Reverie, 1938
One evening in midtown
saxophonist to the microphone
to coil his latest dream
around this plodding 4
and yank it off its feet –
only, a few bars on,
to stand it up again
and saunter away with it
hand in hand – alien streams,
each from its unknown
country, predestined meet
and flow together down
toward seas they never reach.
3. Torch Lake Dream
The dream is silent
like old wavering glass
a moving mesh of light
drawn on green sands
of the lake bottom.
The boat, high-sided
and narrow, oarless,
barely rocks on a perfect
regularity of ripples.
Faint voice of water.
Buried below
that transparency
the world before me
enigmatic as being.
It will be still
long after I step to shore
4. Tornado Warning
Piles of black clouds to the west
but no worries. After all
this is not Kansas.
We’re hungry
our phones need charging
some coffee would be nice.
At 3 p.m. the trees begin to bow.
Outside the window
low frayed cloud hems drag
some left, some right.
Rotation is implied.
Leaves scatter, then branches
a tree or two flies by.
In the bushes a flash of gold:
one heedless butterfly
bright on the backdrop of storm
wobbles in evasive loops
looking for whatever they look for.
Then the curtain of rain.
5. Santa Clara Station
Hem of black sky
staked down all around
by sodium lamps
black sky
one cricket
black sky
one cricket
dongdong–dongdong
dongdong–dongdong
dongdong–dongdong
dongdong–dongdong
Union Pacific
thirty-three weary
teen-tagged cars
shaking
screamslam of brakes
shivercrash
down rolling line
rolling line
rolling line
rolling line
red tail light
red light shrinking
red light
black sky
black sky
black sky
one cricket
6. After Cocktails with Circe
Always the same thought
just inside the midnight door:
Shall I admit to being home yet?
Her knitting on the chair
where she left it tonight
my sweater nearly done
and she sitting on the bed
I built some years ago
lowering a nightgown over her head.
Her softening figure glows
in lamplight as she waits.
Closing my eyes to that vision
(as every evening of late)
I’ll just draw out this thread
and quietly ravel the dozen rows
she stitched today from the shrinking
skein of her patience. We both know
she knows. Yet this rewinding
might delay the inevitable
myth-making for one more day.
7. My First Cat
My first cat
had short gray fur and white paws.
Dropped and deserted by her mother
on filthy city streets
what chance did she have?
Clumsy as a rhino
never understood the box
she earned my wrath
or tolerance at best.
She got her two squares a day
but everyone yelled at her
including later cats.
Except my third girlfriend
who despite her own sleek body
I now see felt some bond
with that stumbling innocent
and is now, decades after
ditching me, an old lady
under siege in Israel.
8. Food Bank Volunteers
Rectangular swimmers
silvered up from Arctic waters
battered fried and bagged
in frosted plastic, frozen still
in jumbled panicky schools.
What we’ll do today to be saved:
label the bags as fish
and seal those cornered pucks
in cardboard aquariums
for shipping to empty kitchens.
We have uneasy dreams
of rainy deserted seas
but like all those others
we must feed
if we have to we eat up
every living thing on earth.
9. In This Economy II
Human nature abhors
a vacuum. Every hole
must be dug
and then filled,
the patient soil
once more
spread its thighs
so from every pit
the bones may unfold
and rise to their feet
veiled in black nets
and the city
the whole world
walk out from under us.
10. Alger WA
Before 7
before the sun
a drapery of fog
over Skagit wetlands.
Horses hang their heads
as I forage for my breakfast
in thorny thickets by the old
redundant highway. The rusty guard dog
who slept through my voyage out
on my return takes issue with
my quasi-legal berries
and loudly charges.
We talk.
His coat is soaked with mist.
11. Rose Like a Semaphore
Rose like a semaphore
r />
in the morning gloom
when briefly touched
tall firm as back
in the day a smooth
yearning curve aglow
with blood. Too transient
signal – there would be life
yet
12. 70
Pushing 70
there's a lot of walking
backward counting
up (not yet down) the days
nights and afternoons
cars and campfires
schoolrooms kisses
risings retirings and fondling
deadpan beads of the retreating
rosary wondering if
shear numbers
can sum to some
kind of life.
13. Hier ist kein warum
I once spent weeks
in a pit blocked by cave-in
beneath a mile of rock.
A bite of rotten meat
and one of dry bread,
a swig of water for each of us
when it seemed a day
had passed. Adrift in black
my friends were nothing
but smells and sad voices.
Our deaths were real
so when rescue arrived,
miracles, too, were real
and seemed to matter.
We knew that death had done
its worst, that our lives
now could not be canceled.
Yet here I am, 50 years on:
wifed, childed, grandchilded,
a trembling wreck
laid out on a messy bed.
That other was at least
a death worthy of a song.
This is nothing. Not dying,
but dying out, a guttering.
And over this twisted wick
just a thread of smoke
will spiral up and be gone.
14. In the British Library
More than a century ago
a young boy first netted the song
of the white-rumped shama –
a few ripples engraved in wax.
A hundred generations back
but you can hear it today
wraith of a vanished forest
calling down a gallery dimmed
to honor the Magna Carta
and other artifacts.
Before that, all birds are still.
We have only hearsay
that they sang at all.
But imagine a fine spring day
and the shama singing something like
Once again Love, that loosener of limbs,
bittersweet and feral, seizes me
He was celebrated
in his time, in a small world
and his songs were all flung
without price to the wind
shredded
whirled away.
He was beautiful and young
manyskilled
mythweaver
He goes his way among dim shapes. Having been breathed out
I Don’t Think We’re in California Any More
15. Corona Heights
At three in the morning
you’re lying awake wondering
when can I get up there
once more? Time is short.
I need to see it all
once more: the stony
little peak, the summer-dry grass,
the south bay frozen
in distance. To see the warblers
framed in the Red Gum trees.
At the same time you know
with 3 a.m. assurance
there’s no point.
You’ve seen all you can see.
No matter how hard you look
you will not fix it
and that hill, those warblers,
that urgent wind from the ocean
can never be your present again.
16. Twilight
Slow tug shoves a line of barges
upriver in cold twilight.
Quieter than whispered confidence
the curling water,
who knows how many miles?
But mooring time has come.
The engine slows.
A silent figure strolls
forward along the cargo
to tie up for the night.
Undulating, his wake
overtakes him,
careless tail of consequence,
and moves on up the river.
17. 2014: Finding My Roots
I see a bed
with me in it
by myself
a window
and outside it
winter
18. Twilight II
Bare winter branches now
leafed with cold starlings
black against the sunset.
They mass at dusk in rows
of wind-stripped maples
to gab and whistle
at passersby plodding below
and post their white memos
to humanity on icy railings.
It’s unknown how they pass
the small dark hours
but at sunrise they unfold,
congratulate each other
and drop back into the sky.
19. Stained Glass Commission
First, the warm studio
refutes the freeze outside;
then the jingling of crickets
casts a spell against the snow.
In the corner a little room of glass,
where a drowsy lizard sprawls
on a branch, enchanted by a lamp
and lulled by that summer song.
The glass artist stands
in a jumble of color –
his racks of thrift store plates
and panes, saucers and shards
of street debris. In his hand
a glass of red wine radiates.
Soft-voiced he says
This could help make it
feel your own, a piece
to warm the walls
and the unknown past
of your new home.
The lizard sharply turns our way
then freezes, recalled
by the flattery of the lamp.
For now, eyes half closed,
he ignores his carefree vassals
the crickets, who sing
and dance like popping corn
on the heated sand below.
20. Robert Street Bridge
I think the mergansers
prefer sunshine to clouds.
How that light flatters the white
of their sides as they convene
in friendly crowds below the bridge!
How it inspires the green
of their crowns! Their feet
paddling in the murk could be
golden carp in a royal pond.
Vanity alone would recommend
the sun to them (and them to the sun).
Perhaps they like only
that it helps them see
deeper in the dark river
or draws the minnows upward.
But I think they praise it
for no known reason, just that
the sudden rays rotate their day
one hundred and eighty degrees.
21. War Memorial Plaza
A hot wind blows over the plaza hill
this April Fool’s Day. But bronze soldiers
stand about in the sudden spring,
unappeasable as winter crows,
dressed for any old war you can think of.
They stare at the ground or the horizon,
shouldering their obsolete weapons,
helmets tilted back from furrowed brows,
tired of their long, pointless watch.
Above them the colors fly,
snapping lik
e small-arms fire
as the spring wind charges down
the slope toward the center of town.
But the bronze soldiers will not be led.
The far freeway’s river rush
and clank of halyard on flagpole steel
the only other sounds in this empty field.
22. Storm Shelter
Rain tonight they say
and golf-ball-sized hail
so open the kitchen window
it opens up and out
the full moon will rest
on that mirror
racing the clouds
but nothing cold or wet
can enter. There’s safety
in that, and in the warmth
of wet brick.
Translations
23. Little Diary of Aging (VIII)
To the old
come those nightly half-dreams,
vague, illogical, that lead them
here and there, since even
decaying faculties at times
demand an outing:
and lost friends resurface
amid sleepy wanderings
in the stupor of surrendered being.
But even here there’s something
not entirely unaware –
as when the boatman
of the old Arno ferry,
his vessel run ashore,
bails out its bilges and dumps
the water in the river,
where it resumes its flow –
the old, stale water
swirling among the pilings,
though the boat is aground
there on the mudflat
among the reeds.
– Carlo Betocchi
24. Summer
And even for us
vain summer
drops in
with all our greenest sins;
here’s the breeze,
an arid guest
that makes a rustling
among the magnolia leaves;
and plays now
its tranquil
melody on the prow
of every leaf, then goes,
and spares the leaves
and leaves
the tree green,