Richard Hedderman
Richard Hedderman is a poet and writer whose work has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies both in the U.S. and abroad. Publications include The Stockholm Review of Literature, The American Journal of Poetry, Rattle, Chicago Quarterly Review, Pinyon, Santa Fe Literary Review, Kestrel, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and several anthologies including In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press). A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, his most recent book of poems is Choosing a Stone (Finish Line Press). He lives in Milwaukee where he teaches creative writing at Mount Mary University.
TELL THE WIND
Tell the wind that television is a mirage in the wasteland
of the living room. Tell the wind it sounds like rain when I listen
to the evening news— a dense, tireless downpour. Tell the wind.
Tell the wind that the thistles have learned to divide into stars,
that the moon tugs stones into the shallows. Tell the wind.
Tell the wind that by dawn the rain will have stopped
counting the roads, that the grass already misses its long fingers.
Tell the wind that we worship in a temple, and it is a temple
of knives. Tell the wind. Tell the wind that in war, there are never
two sides— only one, and it is suffering. Tell the wind.
Tell the wind when the desert opens its salty mouth hawks rise
to comfort the dead and grieve the living. Tell the wind
that the exiles’ flags burn in pure oxygen, that at night the birds
return to the leaves of the Bible. Tell the wind as it hunches
the backs of the hills with snow that the scarecrow remains lashed
to a snow fence with cords of blood. Tell the wind. Tell the wind
it shrouds the dead locomotives with gravel and rust. Tell the wind
that sparks are weeping from the welder’s torch. Tell the wind.
Tell the wind you must taste the silt in the tiny river
of your own wrist. Tell the wind to hum to the barbed wire.
ENTROPY
“The measure of a system’s thermal energy that is unavailable for doing useful
work.” —Encyclopedia Britannica
I flunked chemistry
junior year of high school—
a stain on my permanent
record, which left an indelible
blot to dog—or even
hound–me through
miserable decades of
failure to launch
a career in the field.
It could have been
all the daydreaming
I accomplished
that year, harder than
it sounds what with
Sister Thomas carrying
on endlessly about acids,
nucleotides,
the monatomic ion,
while perversely refuting
Planck’s constant
and touting with
fiendish devotion the
practical applications
of the null hypothesis.
She yammered, I stared
out the classroom
window watching clouds
huddle in the flat sky
above the football field
where they’d part and run
patterns, rolling and
tumbling over one
another, then meet and
separate with astonishing
fluidity. And I would
augur in their vaporous
writhings a brilliant
future for myself
the way oracles
of old would divine
the outcome of battle
in the entrails of a hen.
I gazed languidly
at the sky and saw
for myself an astonishing
life ahead, where
I would at last
grasp the concept
of the free radical,
then fail stunningly
to great acclaim
then fail again
with lavish abandon.
So, I declined to learn
whatever I needed
to pass then made
myself scarce before
they could teach
me anything more
about cluster
compounds, noble
gas or weak acids—
about entropy.
