Amen

and it’s over
except nothing’s ever really finished.
Things stop, to be sure, like an unanswered
telephone, or the neighbor’s barking dog—
ordinary things that lose intensity
the longer they last. Even people
like my grandmother, her two husbands,
the way she used to get up from the table
as if surfacing from a slow-motion dream.
And the Cadillac with fins my father owned,
long ago dragged off—still
enormous in my mind, holding its wax
like moonshine.

Things stop,
and the idea of touching what’s left
scares me: the idea I had about beauty
pressed like a flower in the crevice
of some dull book, or the Mercury dime
I placed on a railroad track, thinking
I’d come back to a puddle of quicksilver;
a candle at church guttered by its own heat,
a few sparks pale as fireflies. All my past
hanging like an apple grown fat on its seed,
the worm turning where it’s sweet.

Remembering Where We Live

I have returned to this house so often
I forget it’s not where I live,
just where I sleep
with the lights turned off.

I sweep new snow off the porch
but remember it falling
so thick in the woods
the bare trees shivered white.

Animal tracks like a dotted a line
disappear into the bushes
and I remember seeking shelter
in the company of living things

so different from me
all I could do was sit quietly.
From the deep pocket of this moment
I broadcast a handful of stars

that settle into their predictable niches.
Old friends, old light.

Against the Hills

the sun leans
like the bubble
in a carpenter’s level.

Moonlight makes its way
into the plane.
Trees stretch to their limits.

From a fence post
an owl takes flight
like a pair of parentheses

and when the earth pauses
one, two, maybe three beats
the day gives way.

In the evening, when the light clears from the sky, I sit at my desk and rummage through my memory for the events that illuminate that day, bringing them forward, placing them carefully on the page, as if to hold them again, as if to fix them in a place where I can always return.

David Feela lives a more contemplative life after retiring from a 30-year teaching career. Three books have been published: a prize-winning chapbook, Thought Experiments, a full length poetry collection, The Home Atlas, and a book of essays, How Delicate These Arches, which was chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. He lives in Cortez, Colorado, and continues to freelance as a columnist for the Durango Telegraph and the Four Corners Free Press. Unsolicited Press will release his new poetry chapbook, Little Acres, in April, 2019.

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