A Friend Calls
You were sitting in a space
that was usually empty―
by my friend in a diner booth
where we’d meet for lunch―
She introduced you
as you cradled an iced tea, mentioning―
you were engaged.
That evening we strolled
to the ocean anyway,
stepping in an endless tide
that took us one shore to the next―
we stepped away, you were married
and we never spoke again.
Yet decades later, my friend calls
to say you passed away.
But I imagine you just transformed
to water, mists or rain―
I imagine your thin bones, so cold in life,
were buried in warm sand
while your sandy hair dispersed
into breezes that once wound
around each strand—freed
from the body, straying
in the boughs
or in long grasses on the ground.
For spirits are mostly water―evaporating,
precipitating back into the world.
So sometimes you return
in the faintest storms,
in streams in the midnight sky,
brackish with the salt of stars
that I still cross in sleep
where part of me is searching―
sifting in the waves with you
or staring across a diner table
as if gazing
into a dream.
.
Columbus Day Storm
Four years old, watching birds
sewing the musical notes
of their bodies into the trees,
I felt I didn’t want to grow old.
But the Columbus Day storm of ’62
tore the songs off the boughs.
Shingles flew in the windows
in an icefall of glass
and I hid in my room.
The extratropical cyclone
canceled our postage stamp house.
So in a few weeks,
with car windows down,
as reedy scrub pines
and stands of juniper
whispered our names,
we crossed the Oregon border.
60 years later, storm clouds still settle
in our old neighbor’s yard
where I was once trapped
by brambles and nettles,
rasping like my parents’ voices
into my skin.
And still a faint tendril
of storm drifts behind―
lifting my thinning hair,
stirring the lank ivy
over the headstones
in a shaded Kentucky cemetery
where my family lies buried―
So I wander
with the wild grasses
toward the edge of a highway
where I watch the rest of a day
split like an egg―the sky’s
yolk of blue drips on the hills
and quarter notes of birds
write on staffs
of telephone lines―
making a sheet music of air
I can still read
as they flock all at once―
moving with ease
sewing up the horizon,
patching clouds of new
and half forgotten light.
.
David Cazden‘s poetry has appeared in The New Republic, Passages North, Heavy Feather Review, The Chiron Review, and elsewhere. His third book of poetry is New Stars and Constellations (Bainbridge Island Press, 2024). https://www.davidcazden.net/
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 