Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in Image, Bennington Review, The Southern Review, Hudson Review, The Laurel Review, Zone 3, Grist, and others. He lives and teaches in TN.
What Happens
Next
What
people know they best keep to themselves.
Otherwise,
all the earth would turn into a war zone,
a
hellscape of marauders. We are never far from
every
moment upended. The blaze red of maples
turning
yellow cannot heal our hearts, nor can
the
dove’s doleful sound. Daily bread is replaced
by
daily horrors. Specifics are interchangeable.
We
may long for happenstance, pray for the student
walking
home at night, follow Ulysses through
his
years of exile, but someone even now is turning
down
a back road. To say what happens next might
break
us wholly. Every day we live not knowing
which
Reformation might have come into the world.
We
nod to a neighbor who looks at the world through
a
gun’s scope. Through one word or another, we
do
the same, narrowing our sight, locked in, ready.
One Source Of
The Tensions That Plague Us
Not
by accident the man, misspeaking, said monument
instead
of moment, for the two words are interchangeable.
Given
epochs, given eons, a monument is momentary,
and
we fashion moments into monuments to visit often,
believing
they represent a self or an era we no longer
find
our way to. An idea settles in, follows us around,
deepens
the hours, frames our interpretations, though
seldom
do any two people agree about what the idea is,
one
source among others of the tensions that plague us.
Maybe
all our words have been misspoken, confused
for
the true ones that might have healed us or others,
might
have clarified concessions which, increasingly,
we’re
long past owning up to and, even if given, might
make
little difference to our overlapping conversations.
That’s
what a family is, a community, a region, a nation—
a
few or millions of words stumbling over each other,
trying
to gain supremacy, to stand clear and distinct.
Our
voices, no one’s voices, will be here much longer,
and
it was hard to see when they ran parallel to each
another,
if they did, until they did, but then, like one
moment
overtaking another, they were just ordinary,
and
days went on being nowhere but what they were,
spaces
in which what no one thought was there was
there,
hinted at so faintly maybe only one person heard.
Everywhere Over
The Earth
God
help me—I’m trying to become a man
playing
violin in the moments he knows, when
finished,
he’ll be lined up with others and shot.
God
help us—men with other men sought
to
preserve an oak Goethe wrote beneath, yet
turning
souls into ash was no struggle at all.
God
help trees—they can’t speak our horrors,
though
everywhere over the earth they
breathe
back what we give them endlessly.
God
help breath—how bear even one more,
so
many, so many now no longer with us.
From
whence they arrive we cannot devise.
God
help our arriving wherever we’re going,
entering
an ending a final time. God help us
helping
God become the God we are becoming.
Gentleness
He
was trying to figure out gentleness,
the
idea inside the idea of it, where
in
the history of being it began
and
who welcomed it, who set about
to
undermine it, if not eradicate it.
The
summer was finally heating up
so
that mornings on the patio were
beginning
to be unbearable, but
then
a slight shower, a few random
raindrops,
would sprinkle him, like
a
momentary baptism, or so he told
himself
in a language he understood.
If
we are worded into existence, then
what
if each person—separated by
time
and place—is formed from
different
words? Basho was formed
from
stillness, Issa from joyful whimsy.
He
had at best another ten thousand days.
He
conceived of each as a separate poem,
a
mind to enter and inhabit, marveling,
not
necessarily his own but a possibility.
When
Whitman left the astronomer’s
voice
to others and gathered himself
—alone—beneath
stars, battlefields
ceased.
Each flickering presence was
another
mind. There was no applause.
Not
every destroyed city will be rebuilt.
Some
fictions become truer than details
of
a life will admit. A rightness may
have
a small, then smaller, following,
and
a least gesture, noticed by no one,
may
calm the world’s furious spinning.
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