V E R S E and I M A G E

—Alberto Caeiro

For a few moments each night before I fall asleep,

I lie in my bed and think about God,

about that old God-with-Thunder calling softly

to young Samuel in the night,

about Elie Wiesel rebuking that God or his betrayal

on a flame-licked night at Auschwitz.

One theologian says the Enlightenment led to Auschwitz,

while an open window led to penicillin,

but what led Fleming to bring forth penicillin

from a moldy dish but his mind,

the same mind that imagines monkeys typing Hamlet?

Who could have imagined children in America

caged by lockdown, watching a red-blooded American

storm the Capitol in a Camp Auschwitz T-shirt?

Though I was raised to dare not think of disobeying God,

Wiesel showed me questions are belief’s ripening,

and I want to ask what Jesus wrote in the sand before

he looked up and spoke words that made a mob

drop their stones and walk away one by one, oldest first,

leaving him alone with the shamed woman.

Each Gospel describes the feeding of the five thousand, but none

count the children or their mothers quietly providing.

Alas, poor Hamlet, when you shuffled off this mortal coil

where were the women to mourn for you?

I’m not Samuel, though I’ve spent time as child and man

alone with my questions in a lonely bed,

but alone or not, like the boy Samuel, I lie here each night

and listen until I fall asleep.

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Past Rock City and the cattle on a thousand hills,

broken trees poke through the gray wool

of the late-winter mountainside waiting for

rapture to seize the dogwoods below them.

Stones lie scattered like pillows in whitewater

bleeding out into the calmness spooling

under the footbridge across the Davidson,

where trout float all day in the shadows,

facing upstream toward Pisgah, and beyond,

the backcountry called Shining Rock,

thick with bears. And she, being Holy Ghost,

is neither hawk nor wind under wing,

is not turn of leaf in laurel thicket

nor any of the thousand shades of green

shadowed by clouds rolling over balds,

nor any shadow passing swiftly across the land.

She is not bear or scent of bear,

nor chill prickling the hiker’s neck at

seeing the hunched shape too big to be dog.

She is not the pause between the spondees

of the quickened heart nor the synapses

firing muscles for flight. Not the dimple

in the water where the mayfly lands, nor

the shimmer of the rising trout.

She is neither baby’s cry nor moss on tombstones,

neither the darting nor the dimming of eyes.

Yet without her, there is no telling.

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There is a huge imagination at work here. At work and at play. David Poston casts his net wide into the sea of human experience and draws it forth sparking and squirming. Culture, literature, music, art, the shining fish that define and enlarge us, all are schooling within these poems. And most of all religion: faith and doubt, questions whose answers have come unstrung and drift away while we chase after them like gossamer from a dandelion. Will we discover new answers to take their places?

As I read page by page through Letting Go, its world opens before me. It meanders and climbs, it explores and discovers. In my conversation with the poems and the poet, I ask myself what I have let go, and what I must yet let go. The faith of a child – will it lead only to emptiness and despair, or can there still be a wellspring of joy in this angry world? People I have loved – can they still live in my heart? In the book’s closing poem, a trapeze artist lets go at the apogee of her incredible graceful soaring. In complete trust, she releases. What comes next? No, don’t ask, live only in the beauty of this moment if you can. Live for a moment in the beautiful precision of lanuage, the poems’ grand imagination. Live in poetry’s welcome invitation to the next question, and the next.

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Last month,

as the Fourth of July barrage

dissolved into the night

and people around me

gathered camp chairs and blankets

for the slog through everyone’s trash

back to their cars,

I stood there in the dark

waiting for one more

bright flowering

I knew would never come.

Now, lying alone

just before dawn

waiting for the Perseids

to flare across

the edge of sight

as the sky begins to pale

behind a rumple of mist

where the dark lake waits,

I shouldn’t worry about

which faint streaking

will be the last.

I’m remembering

my ninety-year-old father

bursting into laughter

at the Dairy Queen

as he ate a banana split,

and what was so funny to him

was the sudden thought—

he said this—

that it might be

the last one he ever ate,

and what could I do

but laugh with him

and remember later

that he was right?

❀

David Poston’s Letting Go is available from Fernwood Press. David grew up in rural North Carolina and still calls the Tar Heel State home. He has received awards from the Writer’s Workshop of Asheville, Charlotte Writers Club, and Southeastern Writers’ Association. His poetry and book reviews have appeared widely, including the NC Literary Review, and he is a former editor of the anthology Kakalak.

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