“Learners”, “Happen”, “Vessel”, and “Pocket Poems for a Pair of Jeans”
By Frederick Wilbur
Learners
for Heather
Sunday afternoon, my daughter,
just fifteen and proud
of an officially clean permit,
drives ovals around the school parking lot.
I explain that mastering the stick shift
is like mapping sentences
to grasp the rules of grammar.
Watch out for the light pole,
I warn in the obnoxious voice of a father—
The clutch, the clutch, I instruct.
We venture up the divided artery
of our rural county to find a backroad,
one that has a dozen roller coaster miles.
We arrive at the highway again just north of town.
She stops, looks both ways,
but the car jerks forward,
stalls
just as a tractor-trailer roars by,
so close the shock smacks the car,
mocks our sense of caution.
Any other time I would chastise her,
but even now I cringe
to learn how failure can often save us.
Happen
What kind of word is it, anyway—
dust happens, love happens—
a synonym for miracle, perhaps,
or a password of angels?
We struggle with the literal
like a progressive disease
a fist-manufactured black eye.
We depend on the leap from one word
to the next like jumping through fires
in a frenzy that prevents us
from floating above them without harm.
Words can be empty like calories or apologies.
Their dresses of nuance, like happened-upon-memories,
fail to reveal the nakedness underneath.
Happenstance is not the same as fate
though we’d throw both into a wishing well;
the only thing to trust is dust.
Vessel
We bought a painted bowl
from the hand of Florence
as a practical souvenir—
all lemons, leaves, and blues.
The size is the thirst of cupped
hands that we have gotten
used to— its habit of round
eternity that always renews.
Joyous memories of our days
in Italy disguise an uneasiness
of promise as we notice—
by spring’s revealing light—
the finest of cracks signaling
sadness in sherds, breaking
our inertia. Our true friendship
continues, survives despite
the burden of things. It is not
the gift of comfort we give
ourselves that matters,
but the wholeness we may lose.
Pocket Poems for a Pair of Jeans
The old poet who thinks
he is young
remembers
the young poet
who used to be wise.
*
Full sail, verdant, the tree is vulnerable,
will thrash about, capsize in a mean sheer;
while the vultures’ own tree, twigless, is as stable
as the known, a gnomen around which stars steer.
*
The landscape painter
must first master
the implication of clouds.
*
Belief is the fool’s gold of Desire.
*
Question marks
are hooks anchoring
answers
that otherwise
would drift
without
the courage
of conviction.
*
A curved wing-feather
of crow, molted
from the straight flight,
rests on the gray stump
of concentric seasons:
a spiritual co-incidence
perhaps:
lint of epiphany, a false blessing.
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah. He is co-editor of poetry for Streetlight Magazine.
