Poems By Huck Fairman

December 30th, 2014  |  Published in December 2014

Mourning Chant

Turning again, yes turning back to the bedroom

in late afternoon when the door had closed finally,

and seeing again, yes seeing on the end of the bed

the white shawl that had been held – no, clasped –

by hands I’d enclosed in my heart,

and looking but not seeing out the window

that held, yes held part of a reflection

of part of something receding,

as my thoughts encircled her again as she folded

the shawl over her arms and paused staring past me

and set it down next to, not into, her bag,

and I not seeing this but only its soft white strands

on the green-blue spread and her legs moving,

yes moving past me and out of the room.

And I remember later lifting the shawl limp and white

like a tiny child, it fitting my arm easily

and bringing it part way up to my face

then turning to the closet door and raising it,

yes raising it up to the first bare shelf,

before turning, yes turning away from the door forever.

 

 

Mr. Boodles #1

 

Mr. Boodles swug a swig of bourbon

and spun on his bar stool

squinting at the turning room.

Who will it be tonight, he asked,

and laughed eyeing the amber swill

which was, great Jesus, procuring

another angel face, all orange

and indistinction – bewitching

if he could just see past the shimmering

quick-silver mirror image

of his own left eye.

 

Once he had a pretty girl,

Mr. Boodles was thinking,

round, long-haired, and red

or some such succulence, like fruit, he recalled.

Yet why did he think of yams?

No, he remembered, her hair

in the wind, rusted, tangled with leaves,

Medusa of the Fall;

and her smile, though she did not smile

much at him, he confessed,

but like into a mirror,

specifically the one in her room

on the dirty turquoise closet door

draped with bras and other underthings

like old pancakes, at which he did not

like to look,

and a few headbands no longer in vogue

yet symbolizing youth to her,

he somehow felt.

That was once, that is.

Then there was another …

 

 

The Coelacanth

 

In the night

when sight slackens to clouds

or luminescent waves

and streaks of light hint across them

reminiscent of Saturnian rings,

when spirits from the downed draught

flood in wild whirl over the eye

and wash upon the brain,

when night lies most deep and most visible,

then do I feel my descent

back to primordial time,

to the tar pit,

to undulating inland seas

and the marble-eyed coelacanth

sucking me into its tunnels black as nothing,

this side of the first thought, the first eye.

There I can hear its gills sway

in the warm sea waters

and taste their salt,

and there I can sense walls within the space

of my existence,

unseen arcs of pallid, ancient flesh

hanging white in the wings of my vision,

vision of sights not seen yet sensed

like that fish unsought yet caught

in ocean currents as old as other men than I,

of the last love fallen in one year

when give gave way to fear,

and of family desperations

nursed by no common tongue

in time of one common cry.
TO A MOURNING FRIEND

 

 

           When we lose a friend

              or some dearly held hope,

          our minds for a moment stumble

          like a blind woman on a heath

          for some path or guiding rope.

 

          Reason, it seems, supposes reason

          of some undefined though paternal mind

          moves a hand to hold or hurt

          according to some grander plan,

          though we can see no reason.

 

            A blind and heathen world

           that entertains no questions,

           black and sees no sun;

           more clearly this has spawned us

           than that other sentient one.

 

            Yet we need an explanation

            some all redeeming plan;

            things do not happen for no reason,

            ask any hopeful man;

            the stars do not burn at night

            just for laws of science.

                

 

               But that’s the twist

               we all fall in,

               that man and world are thought

               or so we’re taught

               and come to see ourselves;

               there’s reason in an atom,

               wisdom in a band of elves..

 

               Oh how our minds to turn

               to find some kind, consoling plan

               and in the search

               do hide the only truth

                      that man’s alone with man.

 

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