John Popielaski
John Popielaski is the author of a novel, The Hollow Middle (Unsolicited Press), as well as a few poetry collections, including the chapbook Isn’t It Romantic? (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Clade Song, The Hollins Critic, Poetrybay, and Roanoke Review.
Anecdote of Way Northeast of Tennessee
Tread lightly from this wooded wetland
by the rising discontinued road
the map shows
as an orderly progression
of parallel dashes leading from
a jar or two the wilderness
surrounds, which needn’t mean
the wilderness believes the jar
or two are worth surrounding
or have alteration powers
other than what sedimentation
and gravity allow.
Walk a little
in the mud and find your footing thanks
to ledge and stones so old
they’ve been impressed
with faithful likenesses
of plants so old
humility sets in.
Watch out for the tawny
slugs whose kingdom this
has been for so long
there is not a fallen leaf they don’t know,
not a decomposing trunk or stone
or mud slick they have not
with regal speed
and intimate adhesion
taken in, a tour
evincing no mismanagement,
no graft, no waste,
no hubris or preponderance
of self.
When the tentacles retract,
remember it is you
who are the source
of the retraction, the imbalance
in the kingdom, so again
tread lightly and apologize for being
the exclusive one, the only
one who’s clothed and shod,
whose body is
at various removes
from earth and snooty.
The daughter of the dairy
farmer’s black sheep
of a son lives in the new house
on the hilltop where the road
is uniform and tarred.
Ignore the stretch of junk
outside the fence that pens
her goats. Don’t agonize
about what’s leaking,
leaching from that sprawling pile,
heading for the kingdom
when it rains, how it’s ingested,
passed on to the Class B
waterway below, to the Kenduskeag,
the Penobscot, and the bay.
Pretend to be admiring
the field of corn across the road
and know her father came
to town some months ago and tried
again to be a dairyman.
Know all he did was hang
surveyor’s tapes on trees
that were not his and changed
the boundary of a poet’s lot
below and was reported.
Know his mother tried to stop him
in a kitchen on the wood’s edge
when he held the favorite
of his handguns to his head
and stared at her before the end.
Wonder did the wilderness rise up
to the casing on the floor
and sprawl around, no longer wild.
Let’s agree the bullet took
dominion everywhere
some time ago, as overwhelming
as the chainsaw and the car.
But I am sitting at the bottom
of the discontinued road
and listening to the brook,
which doesn’t sound impaired,
flow in a southerly direction.
Everywhere are seed deposits
and mosquitoes undeterred.
And here beside my wrinkled hand
this beetle rolling on.
A Generous Inaction
Question #28 is asking
in what ways have I enjoyed grace
from a stranger or a mere
acquaintance. Just so
we are on the same page,
instead of elegance of movement
I take grace to mean
what it’s supposed to mean
in There but for the grace
of God go I, a jinx perhaps
if one considers that the man
reputed to have said a version of it first
while watching what the upright
used to make the English gallows do
was chained one morning to a stake
and burned beside a young man
who’d refused to say Why not?
and wink at his inquisitor when asked
if he believed the bread and wine
became in fact the body and the blood.
So in what ways have I enjoyed
unmerited benevolence
or favor that was of this world
and not of from a stranger or a mere
acquaintance is the question.
Yesterday a man in Washington
stood on a roadside by his lawn
and with his open hands
warned drivers of a line of deer
that crossed the road in dashes.
As happens now, a driver shot him
and confessed to the police
when he was found that in his mind
he feared those open hands
were coming for his life.
A month ago, I stopped short
on a shoulderless road
because a painted turtle wasn’t fast enough.
I raised my index finger, gesturing
This won’t take but a minute
to the driver stuck behind me,
never thinking that she could have
later claimed my springing from my truck
with such a finger was a provocation
that absolved her of preemption.
But she waited, and she waved and smiled
as I ran back to my truck,
my thumb up to express salvation,
which she also didn’t shoot me for—
a generous inaction
I can’t thank her for enough.
