The Jocund
By: Joe Bueter
the flower wailed, I saw it
while the women sat like vases, smoking
at their brown benches
I always watch the script of cigarettes
the neglected soccer field
at the top of the hill, below the sky,
across the highway
is it always singing autumn?
or just when I see it
from the supply room window
and the seagulls that jumped
when the construction worker
and welder glowed
against the morning trees
I saw it from class
to Charles Johnson
it’s in our eyes to see
originally published in Kalliope 2003
Warm Lakes
By: Joe Bueter
At a public landing on Otsego Lake,
it could have been any of the infinite ones,
we men of Evergreen and Cyprus Streets
dipped our winter-fair ankles
in one of the many pot marks of Michigan
created by the slow and mystic
ebb and flow of the icebergs.
My brother, best friend and I
all had hair of corn:
gritted yellow and bleached like the rows of the crop
we glided past on the way. My proof of this:
on the walls of their home and
above the piano in mine,
in summer pictures.
Our hair not yet forced into brown and black
by the coloring
that comes with growing older.
On the speedboat, these fathers of ours
wore boxy sunglasses like Top Gun pilots
and spurned waves like Maverick, Merlin.
I did not see the politics
of their jobs selling pharmaceuticals,
that would later drive our families
from Michigan to New Jersey.
A place without lakes.
A place where knowledge of blueberry fights,
sprinkler running, hanging on, evaporated.
originally published in Kalliope 2004
winner of the Mathew Mihelcic Poetry Award
Chore in a San Francisco Suburb
By: Joe Bueter
to the apparently unconfirmed Mark Twain quote:
“The coldest winter I ever saw
was the summer I spent in San Francisco”
I.
In the sheerest of Junes, I can see and feel my breath
as I stain the deck at the sunniest quantum of the day.
I have a new respect for the maxims of Twain
as I slop caramel onto wood, as I wear two long sleeve shirts
against the wind that streams through Half Moon Bay
from its own bildungsroman in the Pacific, over King Mountain,
skimming above the handmade reservoir to the developments
and their splintered decks and their curators.
However I am not alone, a deer’s eye looks up to me from a crack
in the deck
where two feet below ivy and stucco are her bed and headboard
till the eucalyptus stops quaking like it has all day.
In Michigan you could not see a deer if you were a deer,
in New Jersey you can test your brakes against the speed of one,
but here we are both on the awkward side of the fence
and for the first time my pupils do not balloon at her nor hers at
me.
II.
After melting in the shower and scouring from my finger tips
wood stain—
a product reported to be considered cancerous in California–
I call you in Boca Raton to tell you I have a friend in the West, a
doe.
Which saps the frayed rush of your excited inhale.
I have told you of many brief friends made through eyes–
usually a luggaged traveler in the quick, ether-spaced romances
of airports or with a new mother in the barbershop cutting my
hair,
but always a person. By a sleight-of-the-hand, the subject is
changed
and we soon relax at the satisfying click of cell phones slapping shut.
Relief, as through the air between the coasts, I begin to smell
your slight sweat from the clouds of humidity and friends at the
beach.
Relief, before you have a chance to worry.
originally published in Kalliope 2005
winner of the Jake Cranage Award for Poetry