Jeff Hardin
Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Southern Review, Bennington Review, Image, The Laurel Review, The Louisville Review, Poetry South, Literary Matters, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Zone 3, Cutleaf, and others. He lives and teaches in TN.
AN ARC
I don’t know what I was thinking when
I read “Ode, Intimations of Immortality”
to my infant daughter as she lay on
the living room carpet one evening,
the two of us alone the first time. She was
in my care, her know-nothing, bewildered
father—how would we pass the time?
These were the days before she could roll
and crawl away from my trying to speak
some truth, longing to give her the vowel-rich
sound of wisdom, to show how we move
through moment after moment of celestial
light. When I think of my humiliations—
a long list growing longer—there is no
escaping them. They are quicksand. Struggle
only prolongs the inevitable. Did she appear
attentive, bathed in the majesty of words,
her DNA altered, the synapses of her miraculous
mind stitched to words she wouldn’t recall
even if the heavens were to one day open up,
proving, for all to see, that they are not bare?
It’s a small detail, but a window was raised
to let cool wind wash over us, furthering what
I hoped would be the moment’s magnitude.
Possibly, the birds of the poem merged with
the birds in the dogwoods, for in poems
there are liberties to take, fictions to fashion,
tones to try on to hear how far they might
reach. Someone told me once that from alpha
to omega, from morning till night, I live
inside a poem ever expanding and have to
figure out how to fit the daily mundanities
into my existence. A poet, I think, is always
writing letters to death. There is the question
of how we behold the light surrounding us.
Maybe the soul’s immensity weighs in on us.
Or maybe it gives us a way to be weightless,
to sense that we are floating along an arc
we cannot see but know is forever present
in the way that, glimpsing pollen’s dance
above a field, a part of us has already joined
and is now bound elsewhere, seeding the earth.
