2 poems by David Hargreaves

Vision

No one really knew,

though everyone knew what it should be

  -John Koethe

To be a true poet, they say you must have

Vision. If not—at least a manifesto.

      For me,

it’s winter dawn backlighting

our front-yard hawthorn, shadows

mottling surface schmutz

on the picture window—

    clean it?

Just one more thing not to do today:

woodshed full of unsplit logs,

basement sump-pump

keeps tripping the breaker.

     I should call dad,

though he’s been dead seven years.

So it’s me who must step up

to attend city-council meetings,

push back against the local No-Nothings,

attempting a putsch at the public library.

Or I could just stay put

and wheelbarrow rotten crabapples

to the compost pile beside the ferns,

beneath the owl-snoozing redwood.

Still, the one thing I can do is wait

for the evening lowlight to salve

the hawthorn branches

   plumped with waxwings

gorging December

berries. And then at last my own

slanted sightline through the window,

this time of year, time of day

when the glass admits

a clear view, brief, but lucid.

Survival Training

Deep in a wilderness of plurals

I’ve not come to grieve,

but to erase

how I imagine

my brother knowing

he’s drowning, his panic,

perhaps then peacefully

letting go—I’m left

a heart-beaten

recurrent nightmare.

Yet, here and now,

I’m grateful for twilight,

sleeping bag, and the rain

typing an elegy on the blue tarp

over my head; grateful

for the wind that rustles

the ash limbs releasing

drops that splatter the tarp

out of time

with the reverb of vernal

pond frogs; thankful

their chorus distracts me

pulsating on

and on

about their own

desires.

Beyond the firelight and dying

embers hissing at the drizzle—a voice

perhaps?

  A plaintive whisper?

I’m not sure if I should believe

the hair standing up

on the back my neck.

______

Born in Detroit, now a long-time resident of Oregon, David Hargreaves is a poet, translator and linguist. His most recent translation, of Chittadhar Hrḍaya’s “River,” from Nepal Bhasa, appeared in the anthology “River Poems” (Everyman’s Library, 2022).