V E R S E ❦ I M A G E

Heavenly body, we circle, approach, broad ellipse, eye each other across the expanse, still closer, with proximity our velocity increases. Will we join, mutual revolution, orbit, or will we sling each other into outer darkness?

Am I speaking to you, lines of verse? Or are you speaking to me? From a distance you attract but how finely do I perceive your true nature? Like the person I have loved for so many years: at the moment I say, “I know the real You,” at that precise moment you surprise me, swift and sudden, slap or caress, and I must humble myself or be humbled by the universe of you.

Heavenly body, I continue. Your placid visage resolves, light that blinds, deepest shadow. We move each other, we move before each other, we move but never cross the same path twice, we flow and bud and the moments we create are like no other moments. There is more to you than can be known.

. .  lunar eclipse January 21, 2019; photo by Bill Griffin . .

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I knew Bruce Lader from a distance. We greeted each other at poetry gatherings, shared the occasional comment about the program or a reader. He was solid and planed as an oak table; he met my eye and I had no fear of being shaken; he invited me into his calm.

And then I read two of his books of poetry. The lines compel you to be shaken. He taught for years in New York City, rough and troubled teenagers, and those characters populate many of his poems. Scary at times. And he writes of relationships and longing, about culture and human frailty in images bright and dark but always hand-hewn and polished from the rock of reality. Joanna Catherine Scott wrote of his book Landscapes of Longing: It does not hold back. Open it with care.

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Gravity

Fugitives from each other,
they skulk along dark corridors
of denial, kidnap shadows
cast by a slivered moon
of eclipsed emotions.

Wordlessness betrays them
at the apogee of centrifugal flight,
as they ransom the desperate
anodyne of sex.

. . . Without a fingerprint
the tides of bodily language
have shifted elliptic;
will a touch burn or freeze?
mend or violate?
The quark of midnight:
inexorable undertow,

they treadmill between grief
and fault, looking for a vague
similitude of conjunction
nothing can rescue.

Bruce Lader, from Landscapes of Longing, Main Street Rag Publishing, 2009
[first appearance in Poetry Salzburg Review]

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Siege

All night, freezing rain – the lights
won’t make up their mind;
then everything’s dark. Trees are walking dead.

In the tar pit of time, a transformer
groans like a dinosaur, becomes extinct.
The turncoat furnace sleeps.

Daybreak we are hostages of the ice storm,
light candles, stove, put a bucket
under the leak by the sliding doors,
resuscitate the fireplace, check for damage.

Storm – odd word for weather
so calm where ice builds by degrees,
immures us inside a cold hurricane’s eye.

The neighborhood is a breath
of blown glass. Crack, crash – trees discard
sodden branches. A dove is still
on a telephone wire of silver stalactites.

Debris is strewn over the battlefield
of tree bones. Broken limbs have toppled
the fence, could crush the roof.
We need a generator, radio batteries.
Is there enough food?

Wounded are throwing shivers
helter-skelter against the windows.
A transparent antler points
as a ghost staggers to shelter.

The phone’s gone dead.
In a million offices, packs of wolves
circle, move closer, with fiery silver eyes.

Bruce Lader, from Discovering Mortality, March Street Press, 2005
[first appearance in The Potomac Review]

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Bruce also published Fugitive Hope in 2014, ISBN-13: 978-0991009183.

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