On the Far Shore

 

Hastings Hensel Jr.

Across the oxbow

 I saw what I thought

was fallen cypress,

 though rowing closer

I discovered

 hunkered gators

who turned again

 into old canoes,

ivy-covered, disused.

 

 On the far shore

I flipped one over,

 and what I thought

I should have seen—

 a moccasin, cocked

back to strike—

 I didn’t see, but saw

instead black line

 that coiled and climbed

over the gunwales

 and turned into vine.

 

Having Remembered an Ice storm

 

Hastings Hensel Jr.

Stir-crazy, staring out like cats at

that view to die for, which, encased,

 seemed to have died—

the oak trees, frozen, never stirring

when the wind came, nor any music

 from the chimes.

Everywhere the smell of fresh pines

where their limbs had splintered,

 and jays zipped by.

And before the thaw what we thought

was snow, though it was only whitecaps

 that lifted into gulls

pulled into a sky full of cumuli

that, you said, looked like old

 tortoises…slow

and purposeful in their changes.

What else but memory rearranges

 a year, a day

on the near shore where a kite

plummets to become sail, then

 a heron, breezeblown

on the back lawn, then

a moth I find rummaging among

 your summer things?

 

forgetting a flood

 

Hastings Hensel Jr.

Forgetting a Flood

Not even forty days later

and the great event of our time

and place had come and gone.

So began drawdown:

 

The street-sweeping crews

blew through our heaped keepsakes

neutrally, in the wake

of the news crews tracking

 

a new storm rolling in

out of the Southwest.

And all the caskets that

(had it really happened?)

 

once floated like boats down

our streets, were buried again

in rain-freshened griefs.

Now it was back to business:

 

The preachers saw the pews swell

then trickle back down again

to the final old believers,

as Biblical—the one word

 

we’d repeated, slipped

from our tongues, not even

falling to the poets,

who for their recent applause,

 

returned to composing

private, secular poems.

And the waterlines faded.

And the dead stayed silent.

 

To mention, now, The Flood

meant to laugh, recalling what

to us—alive, unharmed,

unreeling from the footage—

 

formed another memory

of a time survived—a joke

that burst from the aftermath

into a deeper laughter,

 

which is like fire, not flood,

which is good, this heat

that helps us (repeat!)

return to the forgetting.