Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley’s SPREZZATURA is published by Lynx House Press, 2025.  His work was selected for Best American Poetry 2021 and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing, and four Pushcart Prizes.  One Sky to the Next, was winner of the Longleaf Press book Prize for 2022.  He has edited over a dozen critical collections and anthologies, most recently NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS—Interviews & Essays. 

To Good Pablo in Bad Times

The cypress are bent south, their shapes forced by the wind—
they grow old, and like me,
point to a poetics of emptiness in the sky. Nevertheless, sitting
in the lacy shade of pepper trees,
I think of you, maestro, and want to call you back from
the solar mists, the nitrate fields
of Tarapaca, from the winds blowing toward the empty rooms
of eternity. Step back from the
extravagance of the waves and tell me death means less than
the undertow dragging back
the tides, the sea winds singing for nothing in our blood.
Give us a grito for the resistance,
something to chase politicos over the cliff, give us some coplas
to repair the heartache, the stiffness
and fissures in the soul, a trail of shining foam, crusts of sunlight
to rebuke the mentirosos who
deny each human appeal. No one’s fooled as we lose one comrade
after another, when every breeze
underestimates the sorrow of empty streets and houses, of the dying
civic roses. So now if I praise
my broken shoes, the two tomato plants I grow each spring,
if I wave a dishtowel as
the happy flag of whatever remains of our republic, help us keep
these few scraps of joy from
blowing away with the blue leaves each evening as the light goes
out along the shore, inside
of which the soul spins down and is lost like the kiss of salt in
spindrift dissolving over the sea.

Old School

y ya ha pasado tanto tiempo
que ya tal vez no existe nada,
ni la pradera ni el ontoño
—Neruda

I haven’t the faintest idea where the linking verbs went,
the ones trailing the clouds
out the classroom windows? And that blank in which
the subject was supposed to be
written in the diagram on the board—I was the last to see
it was You-Understood.
I could identify the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the Temple
of Artemis, and the Mausoleum
at Halicarnassus in our text, but that was ancient history
even then, and nothing
that was going to save me from staying after school to clap
erasers, lost in thunderheads
of chalk dust ascending all around me and numbing the air. . . .
Sure, I could recite
my rhymes, my 2 potatoes versus 4, but was flummoxed
when it came to fractions,
numbers carried over, the quotient from the long division of
afternoon, the bell at 3:00
that released us to the playing field and sliding into home for
the immediate glory of the dust . . .
All during Arithmetic, not a hint from jays and mocking birds
who sassed back from
the scrub oaks and pepper trees when the nun turned her back,
and so set a bad example
for Schneider, Sozzi, Villa-Señor and myself in the back row
hoping to avoid detection
as we passed notes and baseball cards during a rainy-day session
when the collective cloudbank
of our breath fogged the windows like a plague out of Egypt.
Who could spell transubstantiation
anyway? And how in the world did St. Teresa of Avila levitate
by just skipping lunch
and dinner? And that was no more removed from the curriculum
than General Science in which
Antoine Lavoisier dismantled phlogiston in favor of oxygen, both
equally invisible, so more
to be taken on faith. No one explained the chemistry going on
inside leaves, the multiplication
tables of stars? How did our bones take hold given the trace
minerals scattered in space?
Will we return to an ossuary of light once our time was up
and the undetectable grit
of every quark had half-way settled down? Will we line up at arms’
distance and pledge allegiance
to the dark, sing creeds and anthems because of the fear of flames
reaching out for us?

The future? There wasn’t going to be one if we didn’t work out
set-theory equations and
drop our measly 2-bit allowances into the poor box for admission
to the company of saints.
The only problem I fully grasped was the holes in the bottoms
of my high-top P.F. Flyers
as I ran the bases or raced across the schoolyard forgetting
the order of angels, unable
to factor in even one unknown or solve with any certainty for
X hidden behind clouds
that never lost their way, or birds who, without ever pausing
to think, did not fly out
of order in the air. In my uniform shirt with silver stars pasted on
the collar for French, for Art,
I never imagined I’d greet my remaining days without believing
there was joy to be had
beyond the Corporal Works of Mercy. Overlooking the Pacific,
the question now is
how to conduct myself given the circumstantial evidence of dust,
unsure as I’ve ever been
what might reach past the scaffolding of our atoms racing out
on a galactic undertow
of time whenever I think I understand some small part of it. . . .

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