Joseph Hesch – Page 3

Fields of Lavender

These fields of lavender stretch
like bolts of corduroy from where we bask
in this soleil d’été, imaginary
Theo and I. Their perfume sweet
and intoxicating, when we need not
their breath, for we are living a dream.
A breeze combs the wales this way
and that. They sway like tiny willows
to the aeolian flute come up from the sea,
that brilliant reflector of the Sun’s face
and never to be my own.

For I am heir to the darkness,
yang to shining yin of this Arles light.
I shall record my impressions of it for you,
because I shall not see you again.
I am leaving soon, dark dawn drawing me
in its charcoal-covered hands, drawing me
as a stick man of two-dimensions, drawing me
smaller and smaller as I approach
that distant vanishing point out there
on these fields of lavender.

The Search

The search begins and ends
in this same spot every day,
where the concrete beneath me
is as hard as a cold-blooded heart
but as giving of daylong warmth
as a full bottle.

The seeking is much better at night,
when you can’t see the memories
in the face of the sun.
Those are the ones that hurt
if you stare too long at them.
And faces are meant to be ignored.

Illumination and clarity
are overrated anyway when
what you’re trying to remember
is how to forget, and the memory
is as rough as this concrete upon
which the search begins and ends.

I prefer the hard and warm
of this perch, and the comfort
of that bottle, to the soft
and cold arms that won’t let me go,
chill and flaccid as the lips
they drew to mine.

—Joseph Hesch

Cold Comfort

Ruddy-faced, the ragged wanderer wraps his
coffee cup and his smoke in one hand.
His other he keeps in the pocket
of his third-hand Mets jacket.

Whether he’s grasping something within
or he’s just trying to keep it warm
is a mystery. Odds are 4-to-1 no cash
shares those five fingers’ holey berth.

Joyous, head high, the urban drifter
throws smiles like sunbeams right into the
faces of these straight-life, shivering souls
with whom he coasts starkly bright morning streets.

Their eyes are up, too, but they focus
past the no one that walks near them,
seeing instead only the faces in the
steamed-up coffee-shop window.

That’s the one framing their same
familiar frowning reflections as yesterday.

—Joseph Hesch

The Final Bar

Left hand wraps the neck of my Larrivee
and I press four fingers into a G-major shape.
I like the fuller sound of my pinky on the high E,
ring finger on the B, both third fret.
G, C9, D, the I-IV-V progression.
Then E-A-B. All nice big cowboy chords,
twelve bars, like the progression
from January to December.
It’s always like that…the years,
the mindless strumming through life.
This past one was good to great,
with its share of sad, so I turn the chords
into 7ths and play it all as a slow Blues.
E7-E7-E7-E7/A7-A7-E7-E7/B7-B7-E7-B7
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
This gets pretty boring, the passage
of chords, of days, of months,
unless I throw in some solo runs.
I sometimes show off
(for myself, up in my Lair).
You know, just to be free of Life’s structure.
But this thing has to end.
I can hear my critics downstairs,
so, as I come back ’round to Bar 11,
I go grab my I Chord, the E,
and let it ring nice and long,
closing my eyes to remember it
until my next time.
They have a word for finishing up
on that tonic chord. We resolve back to it.
Just like in that last bar of a year,
a life, we end things with resolution.
Shhh… it’s still ringing.

– Joseph Hesch

Playing with Their Eyes Closed

Theirs was band made of
a slide guitar and a violin,
a duo whose members each played
with one ear tuned inwardly,
the other absently to their partner.
They’d jam beneath the broadleaf oak,
whose canopy protected them
from the cold and cleansing rain
that often followed them there.
Their compositions were made
of dreamy minor chords,
swooping sad harmonies,
the call and response of
each one’s own weepy blues and
dissonant solos in F and B.
Such duos never last, though.
Once each their storms stopped,
its rain still fell from the ancient leaves,
echoes no one wished to hear.
Strings drenched in the shadowy
drops of Me never sing so well
as under the sunny skies of Us.
Didn’t matter to them. They always
played with their eyes closed.

– Joseph Hesch

The Song Remains the Same

The song comes on, in the random,
shuffling way life occurs,
the happenstance of seeing one another
across a parking lot and you
studiously ignoring or maybe
running away. The song comes on
and I’m confronted with the
old decision to ignore, or to skip,
or to turn the whole thing off.
The song comes on, and once
I’d hit Repeat because once
I connected it with you. Even now
I do, seeing you in the long ago,
before the collapse of
a make-believe house constructed
on some fantasy Sandman’s leavings.
All those nights of
Repeat…Repeat…Repeat.
So the song comes on and I reach
for the Skip button to run from
its first two bars. I know each beat
and note by two memories. And I pause.
The heartbeat of it, the voice,
they don’t belong to you anymore,
they belong to the song.
And the song remains the same.
I’m the one who’s changed,
Turn it up.

– Joseph Hesch

I Hear the Angels Hum

Out under the maples, noon light
dappling the scene like drops of sun,
Joe strums his Martin, humming along
his own accompaniment. His fingers
glide along the ebony board,
pressing the strings into tuneful
Cs and Gs, and even the F-sharps
and B-minors that come out like
the ragged brushing of steel-string
corduroy trouser legs when I try them.
I’m a little jealous as I watch
and listen, hacking away at
my fallow word garden,
pressing my uncalloused fingers down
in search of the chords
to some sort of art, too.
Mine is an arrhythmic melody
played on a soulless keyboard,
the worksong of one lost in empty silence.
I heard it first from the angels
who whispered in my ear
the last five nights, while
dark dappled on dark and
my instrument gathered dust
as it lay upon the pillow.
Mine is a solo piece, I know,
but I hear the angels humming
along with me anyway.

– Joseph Hesch

Concerto

Pain has long washed over me
like the waves of a symphony orchestra.
It’s manifestation from pizzicato strings,
up the ranks to shrill reeds and blaring brass.
The concert master within plucks a string,
a twinge, a spark in my body,
or draws his bow long, back and forth,
so seamlessly extending the exquisite tone
across my neck, my shoulder, all the parts
grown to accept the groaning background music
of a life full with this symphony
of self-written suffering. Today,
muffled timpani, always there, almost-hidden
by itself in the left side of the back row,
thuds its dull soreness, the ensemble resting
for a few bars. It’s a manly ache, this,
a limping, crippling thump played
with a pair of lives I’ve left ungrieved,
the heartbeat of my days, my nights,
this concerto of my times.

– Joseph Hesch

Dust to Dust

So today I wrote a poem for you,
because if I didn’t, I’d forget
these words. I’d forget the times
I wondered if you were there,
forget how I once lost my voice
yet still sang for you anyway.
I’d most surely forget my way.
I can’t give much more than this,
and most of it is dust,
some sparkling still.
It illuminates the dark
under my bed, the walls
and even the ceiling
upon which I wrote this.
And it lights the path
back where this journey began.
Or maybe I’m just too old
to understand it never did.

– Joseph Hesch

Rooftop Icarus

I recall how the tiny bits of gravel
on the shingles dug into my bare knees,
leaving them looking like a scraped
old orange with a sample of the
gray or brown grit dug in there
to remind me about the slipperiness
of gravity. About how the higher you climbed,
the greater the fall. About being an Icarus
with denim and flannel wings.
That’s what I most remember, even more
than seeing a larger world from above,
while so much below appeared smaller.
Lying there, the flat of my back to
the pitched drape of decision my climb
to a higher plane offered.
In the morning or evening you had
a choice of staring into that light
or skittering over to the solar leeward side
of the house, where a too-quick move
could leave you scraped and bloody
or sliding with a skipped heartbeat
and then the air-hammer nailing of
that very abridged account of
your existence to the inside of your chest.
Believe me, it is the only time in your life
where you’re happy to end up in the gutter.

– Joseph Hesch

The Discovery of Grass

Grass. Photo by Nevit Dilmen

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. ~ William Blake

I saw grass for the first time today.
Oh, I’ve seen, sown and sawn Suburbia’s
mostly-green undergarment all my life.
But today it glowed upon my mind’s eyes like
a child’s first birthday present inside a shiny box.
I enjoy that infant-like discovery
of something I know I’ve held in my senses
since first I sensed. Maybe it’s
the light’s different angle reflected to this
ever-shrinking man, or this shallower air
I breathe that, say, a pumpkin pie baking
can infuse with the aroma of earthy heaven
upon heavenly earth.

Or perhaps it’s just me, searching for
something new in a life of so much now old.
Like today, the cords in the blinds
in front of me never had that figure-eight
infinity-upon-infinity existence before
my vision’s finite reach captured them here
in I’s, Y’s and F’s like this.
Such observations make me wish
for a few infinities so that I
might try discovering
the Whats and Whys of your world,
which I’ll never see, and those of mine,
which you’ll never understand.
Nor, apparently, will I.

– Joseph Hesch

In Audience with the Queen

A female North Atlantic right whale with her calf in the ocean.

On the mid-afternoon boat out of Boston,
we headed southeast past lobster traps
and gliding slicks of motor fuel,
all there to run the engine that transported
tourists from flush to a good deal poorer
in the time it took to eat one meal
at Ostra or The Capital Grille.
We were still digesting Quincy Market pizza,
feeling the breeze on our bare legs
poking out from the deck above’s
meager shade, as the hot sun sprayed jewels
off our bow. Above us, a radio squawked
that another boat had spotted her due east and
we canted to port, a vee-shaped churn
of golden foam trailing behind us as we
became smaller and smaller on the
blinding mirror of sea. She soon appeared
off the starboard bow, birds circling her
as if she was a conscious island, the gray queen
sinuously weaving her barnacled weft over
and under the Atlantic’s green warp waves.
And then it was pretty much over.
The boat powered up and sped us back to the
dock in Boston, as we winced with sunburnt legs
and bleary eyes into a sun that was setting
over the city, which bloomed bigger with
each rumble and bump, each passing trawler’s
casting of wakes our way. I remember the image
of the dimming eastern distance, where I
left behind my feeling of human superiority
and all my other images of that day,
having dropped my camera over the side
when I bowed in my audience with the queen.

– Joseph Hesch

How to Write a Poem

A daydreaming gentleman;
from an original 1912 postcard published in Germany

First you sit down and
look out the window.
Whether a framed bit of glass or
a soft hole in your soul,
doesn’t matter. Then you wait,
looking for the ripples in
the breeze and listening for
the colors of nature,
human and otherwise,
to reveal themselves.
Did I mention you have to
do this with your heart?
Sorry, those are the rules.
I never realized, when I
was a boy, that I was writing
poems when I would stare
at the world and you,
whether you were in front of me
or not. I just forgot
to write down the details of
how the air around you glowed,
how the songs of birds shone
blue and yellow and how it
felt to touch you with my heart
when I wasn’t touching you at all.
Until today.

Twilight Will Be Enough

So many live our lives
groping from one darkness
to the next, praying
for the spark of hope
to light our way,
for we are certain
we’ll never see dawn,
never feel even sunset.

Others live in the sun-bright
moment of now.
They follow illumination
from within to find their way
through the dark times
until the Great Light
they enter.

And there are those of us,
like me, who’ve been through
the dark, the light,
and back again. For me,
the twilight will be enough,
as long as I feel the blind warmth
of your hand guiding me.

– Joseph Hesch

Last Cast of the Day

I wonder what would happen if we just
ran into one another someday.
It’s not going to happen, but what if?
Would your chest jump a little,
gassed on adrenalin or maybe bile?
Would you get all prickly around
your ears and face as blood
pushed all the elevator buttons?

Would you turn and cross the street,
like you meant to do that all along,
never looking at me, rather than
present your face to mine in a guarded
“Hi, old friend” moment?
Would we even recognize one another,
after age and life and lies have made like
locusts or glaciers on our my faces?

Would you be okay with an every-five-years
reunion of our class of two? I’d be the one
with the sticker on my chest that said
“Hi, my name is …” since I seldom know
who I am anymore other than old.
I don’t know why I wonder these things
from time to time. Maybe it’s the hopeful,
unworthy masochist in me.

You know, the one who each day
casts lines of memory and imagination
into the dark ocean of time,
never knowing what I’ll haul in.
Today it’s been muddy, writhing
questions and wonders. That’s how it goes
when you fish for words and hope.
There’s always another chance tomorrow.

– Joseph Hesch

Overlooking the Obvious

I’m open to your suggestion,
I said to the sky.
And the wind replied with a sigh,
giving me the cold shoulder
and a shivering, withering brush-off.
I’m willing to look at things
in a new light, I told low winter sun.
She blinked behind a wisp,
a sky-borne snow scarf,
ducked behind a gray curtain,
making shadow puppets
of the passing clouds.
C’mon, Nature, fill me
with inspiration,
I whispered to the cardinals,
these pennants adorning
skeleton maples.
An empty mitten oak leaf
scurried across virgin snowpack
to its slushy demise.
And Nature said, “I just did.”

– Joseph Hesch

Going Fast

When I was young, fasting meant
PBJ or grilled cheese at lunch,
creamed tuna or fish sticks for dinner
on our meatless Lenten Fridays.
The priests and nuns said God
willed us to change up the menu,
but never explained why, just that
once it was complete we earned our
Easter candy and a week of ham.
Now you tell me you’re forcing
a spiritual, a physical hunger
upon yourself, because you long
for some abstraction, an ideal,
not something tangible like
a Coney Island hotdog
or carne asada burrito.

Maybe if I knew how hunger
would bring about “better,”
I’d understand how this sacrifice
of gustatory satisfaction works.
Will you recognize it on
your tongue when your sacrifice
brings the fabulous prize you seek?
When your fast for a greater good
is finally sated, when the world’s
bêtes noires negated, could you
please tell me one more thing?
Peace, does it taste like
chocolate bunnies?

– Joseph Hesch

Crunch of Time

There was a long proofing, but
you’d never know from looking
at this unleavened life.
Its Kansas prairie topography
hints at a plainness
in flavor and texture.
But you don’t know
the ingredient list populating
this old family recipe.
I don’t need to know yours either.
That’s because the product’s
more than a list of parts.
The height of your crown,
the crispness of your crust
doesn’t impress me very much.
I want to taste you,
see what seasoning of life
added to your individuality.
There’s pepper and thyme
in this piece of me.
Please forgive
the piss and vinegar.

– Joseph Hesch

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