What We Know: my best poems, 1972-2022 by Robert Arthur Reeves
Paperback book, 2023
$15 paperback
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Sample Poems from “What We Know”
One Bird
A pigeon alone on school cement
as I walk to my office hour & then threehour class:
close to the footpath but
on Saturday, not likely to be bothered by many:
doesn’t run aside as I pass, watches me but
not bobbing & cooing in fear. No fear evident.
& no constellation of others I have to wind among.
A solitary. I’m ill, at what should be the end
of a cold that won’t leave. I have a couple
(only) symptoms of pneumonia, & it’s January
so my head darts to Lee, who died of it this month
eight years ago: & to death & leaving
the loved, & there’s a factoid somewhere
says pigeons mate for life
& this one being by itself
means it’s a widow or widower
who’s decided to put itself relentless in a human area
& not fly, & wait for the cats. Or (I think)
maybe it just can’t fly. I turn it my alien
bicameral face, tell it hi, call it some pet name,
passing so near I’m amazed again
how calm it is.
Cut
to four hours later on my way home,
I see it again, walk by just as narrow: same
behavior, same lack of fear, same absence of others:
but this one’s blocks away from school,
one street away from mine, can’t possibly be the same bird.
I can’t tell pigeons apart. Lee could.
He kept them for a year or two, around college time,
had a coop in his back yard, a score of birds
all indistinguishable, all named. I
say “Hello again,” continue on.
For the next twentyfour hours wild winds sweep over my heart.
2012
Fisherman
We went through the tunnel, dressed for work.
The latex creaked.
At the end of the tunnel was the water, the deep fog, the near and distant morning trying to climb, trying to breathe.
In front of us the land fell away, the fish did the opposite of waiting.
We were the ones waiting, to be able to see the boat.
Sour coffee in my mouth, gone cool in my belly.
The kitchen had a black window, which at the same time had a hovering light.
My daughter moved with a glancing walk, articulate, the way they do.
Rolling the top of the bag, her hands scurried and slept.
Her mother being gone was still a tunnel that dropped straight down, we were wary of tripping into.
The knock at the door made a safer we.
They are the ones, in this life, supposed to listen in chairs beside full tables, beside last embers, every hair on the arms and legs listening, fingers involved in some glum repetitive business.
They are the ones whose marriages end in appointed wailing, in funerals missing a coffin.
My days being void of her instead made me feel I’d done wrong by not drowning.
The sun peeled off the fog, the boy and I pushed out the boat, scuffing a bit more grit into the water.
It was a sky, now, that burned your eyes closed.
I heard the light lap of the calm, and that was wrong too.
Whose market stall was I furnishing? Whose people was I feeding?
What ocean was I making less and less?
She walked alongside me and I showed her the air at the rim of the earth blending with the water.
She merely nodded, eyelids deep and down, at the idea of a future blended like that.
Wind came and crossed her face with her hair.
We were young and knew what we were doing, knew who we were when we did it.
Did I not mention the gulls? They were always after anything dead, anything weak, but their voices said otherwise, said they were playing, they loved the cold in their feathers.
2019
Beatrice
She was probably like other girls,
Dante’s ten thousand stanzas notwithstanding.
She probably did spot the sickly boy in the street
but it wouldn’t have occurred to her she caused the sickly.
When she smiled at him,
that was manners,
when she gave him the cold front,
she had her period that day.
More than anything she thought about clothes,
giggled at the idea of bodyparts
with her nastier girlfriends.
She went to church,
but to study the fine women’s intricate hairdos,
not because any kind of paradise
was her real home.
To such a wisp
theology’d just be scary.
And so would poetry. And rightly.
She knew how she was supposed to act
when the sun came out, when the snow came down,
and how she liked to act.
She married, as far as we know,
obeying her parents,
and she died, we do know this,
still teenaged,
obeying her God.
A Christian child
but a child.
Love kept outside of her probably,
respecting her play,
her silence.
She never found out her silence had been broken
these seven hundred years.
2006