John Popielaski
That Special Something
by John Popielaski
ISBN: 978-1-962405-21-8 $17.00
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ISBN 9781962405225
John Popielaski is the author of the poetry collection That Special Something from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions as well as Attuning, a novel forthcoming from Broken Tribe Press in December. His poems have recently appeared in such journals as Canary, Common Ground Review, and Public School Poetry.
Happiness
A piece of skin I’ve been attached to
for a long time fell off, and I wonder
if the stream I’m fording, or the one before it,
introduced a meddlesome bacterium
or cleansed the new wound free of charge.
O, big pond in the mountain,
O, majestic cirque,
and O, O, two-hole
outhouse in the campground down below,
you’ve made me deeply happy,
though in one sense I’m alone.
I bandage, hang my food bag,
lie down stiff now in the lean-to,
listen to a loon coo
as a float plane drones above us
like inevitable intelligence.
It used to be I couldn’t sleep
with such exposure.
Come back to the sun again, I wake
and see a moose head through the mesh,
and I remember Chris McCandless,
that unfortunate adventurer who died
in an abandoned school bus in Alaska,
who declared that happiness
only counts when it is shared.
I like the sentiment but don’t agree
exactly. Misery loves company
but gets along just fine without it.
I focus on the moose’s eyes and nostrils,
and I think of Chris’s grief
when finally he killed the moose
whose preparation was beyond him,
and, although this may sound strange
considering that I am thinking
of his grief, I feel that sharing
this expanse of moments with this moose
has got to count as happiness
because I have no gun, no food-
security concerns, and all there is
between us is the staring.
What I’d Like You to Remember of This Poem Is the Tapping
This morning in the online paper
was a poem, “Pond at Dusk,”
and a respectful commentary
on its parts and its concision,
its refusal to give in
to what I’ll call the old romanticism.
For a week we rented someplace
with a nice view of the highest mountain
in the state, a view that could inspire
someone like myself to climb the mountain,
camp beside it for the night, and come back
to the rented place the following afternoon
to have a seat and several beers and stare
again across the pond at all that granite.
On the seventh day, we drove south
to a camp we own. No pond. No mountain view.
The road to it is narrow, and the rocks
embedded in the road or lying
on its surface, cast up by the heaves
and sighs of frosts and thaws,
are of the jostling kind.
The road is four-tenths of a mile
to the oxidizing lock and cable,
and my habit is to get out of the truck
and walk a tenth down and the tenth back up,
alerting frogs and toads, salamanders, snails, and slugs,
that something irresistible is on its way.
I drive on, stop beside the spruce
that blocked the road two years ago,
inspect the downside and the upside
of the second tenth, and so on.
On the seventh day, conditions dry,
I tapped four snails and moved them to the fern shade.
I admit I felt much better than I would have
had I driven roughshod down the road,
and this is where I think the commentator,
this is where I know my wife,
would say I’m being sentimental
and refusing to accept how death comes
and pretending I can save them all.
Maybe. Maybe. All I know is that
the snails I left were moist enough
in dappled light and that the hummingbird
who levitates before me
like an iridescent cross
remembers me as no impediment
to the suspended nectars here.
