Poems
Keeping the Star
Names of the Ancestors
The Strawberries
The Reply
Trust
Red Willow
KEEPING THE STAR
Keep this star for when you lose the world,
when grief and desire become a blurred door
that floats away across a plain room
without books or kisses.
Look to what grows dark beyond the walls,
that in night which holds the blue sky
singing in its black embrace.
It's all spun around a necessary star,
star of prisons. Keep it:
It has the power to burst from dull thoughts,
breathe in airless colors,
and roll back the filth of our neglect.
Let it pour through the chimney hole
patched with tin! Unloved objects--
empty jars, faces in clippings,
balls of hair spurned by the brush--
all the children of failure
will step forward in its blinding wind,
sons and daughters of that before which
there is no trivial being.
--from Keeping the Star, New Rivers Press, copyright 1988 Thomas R. Smith
NAMES OF THE ANCESTORS
We are moving backward in the granary of our ancestors' names.
When we speak them, wheat fields harvested three thousand years ago
sway again in winds gone on to other galaxies.
Somewhere on that track are all the hands that met mine in the night
and the spoken love word hovering like a hummingbird at the lip of the abundant flower.
The wisdom of sleepers forms a tradition along the arc of generations,
anointing the slippery head of the newborn rising from the sea
and the yellow skull of the corpse set out to dry in the desert.
Now we are touching his twenty layers of embroidered robes.
--from Keeping the Star, New Rivers Press, copyright 1988 Thomas R. Smith
THE STRAWBERRIES
One summer evening
the year we found each other
in the dark of Wisconsin,
we sat on your porch drinking
glasses of chilled white wine.
How quickly the August heat
stole into them as we
fingered perspiring stems!
Afterward I'd walked nearly
two blocks from the amber-
lit steps of that house where
next autumn we'd both live,
when I heard you behind me
as if called by my longing
for you, running breathlessly
to press in my palm strawberries
still cold from your icebox.
Now the simple days and nights
when we stood revealed
in each other's light
for the first time
are gone, gone as the sleepless
affection of those weeks.
I will not mourn them--
they were seeds that entered
earth to make a place
for our desire to grow.
You brought those first fruits
of a summer's plenty
to my open palm, and
blossoms that gave brief glories
to the bedsides of our loving.
The harvests already taken
are alive in the new harvest.
And the strawberries
of that summer night so long ago
whose red pulp passed from chill
to warm on my tongue and then,
in new-found boldness given
with a kiss, on yours,
shine in us still,
red constellation by which
we reckon our position,
begin again to lose our fear
and find once more original courage
that brought us near in the beginning.
--from Horse of Earth, Holy Cow! Press, copyright 1994 Thomas R. Smith
THE REPLY
What good have these poems done?
The question insisted relentlessly
with every mile I drove into
strip-malled heartland that radiant
spring day. My forty-seven years,
my choice and stubborn practice . . .
Later, calmed by a motel's
plastic assurances, I slept, with
miniature golf outside the window,
and dreamt we'd been baking bread.
Our loaves stood stacked with those
of other bakers in a wall of bread,
boules like skulls, nubbled heels
of baguettes like the femurs and tibias
of those five thousand Franciscans
in their terrifying chapel in Portugal.
And I felt suddenly afraid that
this wall, our hope and common labor,
might come in the end to nothing
but bones, though when I stood
behind the wall, I saw each individual
loaf had been clearly marked with
the name of some hungry person to whom
it would be delivered without fail.
--from The Dark Indigo Current, Holy Cow! Press, copyright 2000 Thomas R. Smith
TRUST
It's like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes.
So you take your car to the new mechanic.
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.
The package left with the disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers--
all show up at their intended destinations.
The theft that could have happened doesn't.
Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at the right place.
And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can't read the address.
--from Waking Before Dawn, Red Dragonfly Press, copyright 2006, Thomas R. Smith
RED WILLOW
Red osier dogwood,
the Indians called
it kinnickinnic,
took inside their lungs
smoke from its bark
mixed with bear
root and tobacco
leaves. Lime-green
during warm months,
a cut branch
can grow new roots
even in sandy soil,
earning red willow
its reputation
for resurrection.
At spring equinox
when the summer
yet to be born
has traveled midway
on its long path
out of darkness,
I drive past fields
still sealed by snow,
where March clouds ruffle
like eaglets' down.
The most vivid color
above or below
is the crimson shine
of kinnickinnic
woven from the smoky
gray ditches.
My winter-
emptied heart
gathers itself,
a willow basket,
to catch that dark
alizarin burnish.
Then I too stand up
out of the scabbed ice
of a dead season,
ready to flower and leaf
again from a bare
red stick.
--from Kinnickinnic, Parallel Press, copyright 2008, Thomas R. Smith