Apart
1
Tell me about yourself in a 100 words or less.
2
I have always believed, if it is not broken, don’t fix it.
I who believe it is not broken. I have never trusted the TV version
of autumn over autumn. I am only interested in people
who have fallen in with anything. It looks like I brought a haiku
to an epic fight. I was there the day the music cried.
My cat hung up on
you. I am not good at lying.
I have a sacred heart.
I have difficulty telling the Mysterious Universe
and the Outside World apart.
Morphine
1
He sits on a bench refolding the map, with difficulty,
now that he knows where he is going,
The bouquet next to him
may be a gift, may have been given to him.
He is on morphine.
He is wearing alligator gloves.
2
Poetry must change
the world.
3
Santana is playing at a party in the past,
so loud you think the party is outdoors.
Window
one
A single syllable of lily, before night.
Mostly green, but gold too,
trees are ejected into the day.
The book says the voices of children
arise clear in spring like toys,
balls or kites, miraculous and
loud, and it is so.
The silence is a public garden.
You go there for the scent of water,
the statues of angels and monsters
and lovers, the magnolia.
You cannot see the future.
It is out of view of the window,
to the west. Darkness is covering the houses.
The branches are going out one by one.
The perfume is of a teenage flame.
The cat rolls in the last dazzle of light.
Each season is contained in the next,
understood simply. You cannot understand
spring, or summer. It is mysterious, as it should be.
The children have gone in, against their wishes, for dinner.
Fair
It’s just like the chair
in my movie, I mean, dream.
There are thirteen things that matter for me here.
1
Five Hundred New
Fairy Tales
Discovered
In Germany.
2
Newly Divorced Man
Gets Creative With
His Ex-Wife’s
Wedding Dress.
3
I want to be paid for the time
I go to my job in my dreams.
The minotaur in the cubicle next to me agrees.
4
The woman I’m with is wearing a perfume called High School.
The light is intentional.
5
Perfume is a gateway drug.
6
I feel totally safe-ish with you.
7
Dusk is ex cathedra. The mica-flecked dark is also.
8
Now that paradise is locked, where will we go?
Now that there is nowhere to go, what will we do with these brochures?
I have set fire to these messages in an ashtray many times in the last
hour
and dumped the ashes in the river of wind.
9
Little wind.
Don’t let it in.
10
Everything is done. The truce is not apparent.
11
The world isn’t fair, ladling out light.
12
It’s spring. Kids run
through streets, with
cherry-stained hands, yelling,
trailing strings.
13
I want more than this.
I know you do.
Rake
1
It is the cutouts or silhouettes
of the leaves that concern
us. What is not here
is on our mind. The door
that opened out on the vista of light
cannot be seen or remembered
at all. It is suggested
that the rake left out
was not elegant, but may be so
now. Think along these lines.
2
There is only one question: How can I help?
This is a direct quote.
3
The man sits down at the paper
and begins to write a letter.
It is understood that there are those
among you to whom the idea of letter
will have to be explained.
Say you are viewing paintings in a museum
for the first time and you are transported to
a clearing and it is mildly hot.
The dragonflies are flashing and the base
of the mountain hums.
Two liters of root beer or ginger ale
are poured over you. You equate
this to the imagery in the paintings
you have seen and the emotion that is
stirred. It’s crazy, of course, but that is
why you’ve put pen to paper.
You add something
witty and charming because
you are writing to someone close to
you. And you sign your name.
That’s all.
Or you want to say the world is a garden.
Your small garden, which is wild, beautiful
and disordered, connects you to the larger world.
The birds make a terrific racket,
praise it and call it singing.
The soil smells like green darkness,
praise the slight air of oregano and dark chocolate.
You say you live for the civil twilight
when the bats try out the night
and the embers even out.
Say you coast in one of the boats
to the center of the lake.
Tell me the silk the milkweed emits
means the world to you
and you talk all day with cats and rats
as if they understood.
Tell me you have fallen for the darkness
and petals, but save the last dance for me.
Level
1
Item: She parked under the dogwood
and hoped the blossoms
would undo and cover
her dark car.
She would photograph it.
There is a mysterious
rain in the fields, I am told.
Finite amount of crows
in oak at dusk.
2
I would not want
to seem
as if I knew
something about
faith or the way
to it,
if I did not.
To know a thing is
simple.
When you do not
know it,
it is complex,
with many layers.
There are many places
I would want to return
to without a dark heart.
Now as I purchase blueberries
on the sidewalk, I see my
heart as lightened.
The wind rustles Mirror
Lake once more. The pines or reflections?
It is hard to tell.
3
Through the night of trees
and tree frog hum,
a clearing in the leaves.
A falls starts up. Sheet
by aluminum sheet.
Mostly gray, thunder distant in the day.
All happens so fast,
as though a letter had grown wings.
Perhaps there is a place
to set up the compass
and level,
to better see from one point to another,
the present to the past.
Maybe it is this park.
Customer Service
1
Somehow it is my father at the customer service window.
I feel sadness. I don’t know what to do with it.
He hands me a brochure to take home, to think about it later.
I realize the cicadas I heard were in a dream.
The weather breaks.
The rides at the carnival are closed.
I cannot love the past again.
The city asks, Do you desire a glass coffin?
A skyline in haze and mist.
2
I see a red dog and I want it painted black.
No more will my green seagull turn a deeper
blue.
I want to see bats fly out from the sky.
I want to see it plainly, plainly, plainly.
3
There is a music.
It is like when you are reading and listening to music.
The story is longer and more drawn out.
There are people here and there.
You interact and four-hundred pages later you interact again.
Music, on the other hand, happens inside.
You are not really thinking about it.
It is a river.
(after Richard Aldrich)
4
The weather breaks. I realize
the cicadas I heard were in a dream.
I feel a sadness I do not know what to do with.
One that overcomes and confounds.
The rides at the carnival are closed.
I cannot have the past again.
A city skyline in a mist of heat and exhaust.
The wind asks, Do you desire a glass coffin?
Somehow it is my father at the customer service window.
He hands me a brochure to take home, to think about it later.
Leonard Gontarek’s recent book is He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs
A new book of poems is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press
in 2016.
In 2015, his poem, 37
Photos From The Bridge, was a Poetry winner for the Big Bridges
MotionPoems project and the basis for the winning film from the
Big Bridges poetry/
film contest sponsored by MotionPoems and the Weisman Art Museum in
Minneapolis.