|
Three Poems by Jeffrey Johnson
Late Sports News
His thick jowls have fallen; he wears wire rim lenses.
Fifty-three years past his birth as George Herman,
the Sultan of Swat has throat cancer.
Still he waits by the phone in a plain dressing robe
for a long distance call from an owner who promised.
The Babe never managed, he wants to try that now,
mold an expansion club ex nihilo,
make it a team for the ages.
Nevertheless
Above the interstate highway race
two men, one bareheaded,
both black in coverall clothes,
feed a wood fire the size of a small car
with the sheddings of winter.
They work slowly, sowing the flame
to the soil and the air,
thinking of boats on the water and lunch,
not the method or end of their work.
Their pace is the sun and the progress of fire
through dry pine.
They are warmed by their work fire.
An old-farmer smoke gets up between them
to lean on the snow-covered stubble.
The smoke pleases the men
the way another old-timer
or the Paraclete might: half-ignored,
flapping away in the background,
useful through silence as well as sarcasm,
hanging with them in the evening at home.
Made in America
The old poets knew that a jazz-singing father,
entering the house over the threshold of years,
renewed the world for his children.
High above the melody’s highway, jazz singing
surprises and pops constellations in the winter sky.
Bending back home, the father resolves the day.
Old story lines run past quiet eyes without bending
until new verses begin behind and ahead of his pace
when the sun's economy pulls words and music out together again
to another day of improvisation.
Jeffrey Johnson is the author of Acquainted with the Night: The Shadow of Death in Contemporary Poetry, and the forthcoming Harbors of Heaven, both from Cowley Publications. He is pastor of Peace Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Wayland, Massachusetts, and studied at St. Olaf College, Yale Divinity School, and Boston University. Johnson’s poems and essays have appeared in The Christian Century, First Things, Christianity and Literature, Anglican Theological Review, Encounter, and The Mars Hill Review.
Buy his books:
Harbors of Heaven: at Powell’s; at Amazon
Acquainted with the Night: at Powell’s; at Amazon
Copyright © 2005 Jeffrey Johnson. All rights reserved.
This page was posted in May 2005.
|
