five poems
by Frank Haberle
PUPPET MAN
Come, children, the man standing on a box
In the center of the bridge yelled to us,
In Shakespeare. Let us shut up this box
And put away these puppets, for our play
Has been played. I was squeezing my way
Across the bridge. I looked up at the man—
Quickly, as he was staring at my head bobbing
Above the mill like a lost buoy. He wore
A jester hat with bells, I remember,
And mascara smudged his cheeks,
Like he’d been crying. Freaking nutters,
A small man next to me said to his wife.
Freaking nut job. Puppets! A body of bodies
Jostled across the span. Fireworks-tracers-
Flipped into the sky above the canal.
I felt the puppet man glaring at me,
Following me up the narrow alley.
I didn’t have to look, I knew that something
Changed when the fireworks started.
I made it back to the train station where
Hungry Pete was waiting, sitting on my backpack,
Smoking our last smoke.
What took you so long, he asked?
Puppetman, I answered,
Looking back over my shoulder.
The Stars
You know, I do remember looking up at the stars of that place
And how, frightened by the swaying waters all around me,
I was also calmed, in a strange way, by their certainty;
And there was that time I got out of a car on a lone strip of highway
And the tips of the pine trees all pointed up there,
In the same direction, to a glowing moonless sky. Stars!
Or that night I was too drunk to know where I was
But I fixated on one bright star spin though it might
To steer me home and, wonder, I found my way there...
…coated in mud, cut by branches, stink of tequila,
You had locked the door and I slept out there on your lawn
In the cold but by god, the stars, the stars;
And there I remembered a boy taken among boys far into Maine
And sleeping on a wood floor by a howling woodstove
Looking up a crack of window at a boiling cauldron of stars.
Loading Dock
Good things, yeah, it’s like
Good things start happening to me,
He mutters to me, or to the box,
The box he pulls down from a groaning pallet,
but I do not deserve the good things,
And as soon as I say it the bad things start coming
And that I can reason with, that I deserve…
So long, I think, as I don’t think about deserving.
That would be self pity and I don’t want that.
There are things I can’t change. Then there are things
I bring onto myself, and those I can change.
I can change those, man. Do you hear me?
Do you hear what I’m saying?
Those things I can change?
God-dammit I’m thinking these boxes are heavy
Hundreds stacked deep in the cavernous cavern
I pull one away and it floats in my arms
Freed from its responsibility
To bear its own weight. Yeah man, I say
I could put this box on the floor and push it
But then the bottom gives way and we’re all out of work.
Yeah man, I repeat. I know what you’re meaning.
But do you know what I hate? Maybe hate’s
Too strong a word but you know, you know-
I hate it when some of these guys think that good things
Will happen because they deserve it. Think about that, man.
Just think about that for a second. Yeah cool, of course,
I say, but you think you can give me a hand with these boxes?
There’s a lot of boxes, man. I need a hand.
But, this guy. He sat down on a box and lit a smoke
And stared out through the crack between truck and dock
At the stars spinning bright up against the orchard light.
No, he said, staring out there now, I’m finished.
I am quit. I am done. Great, thank you, I said,
Pulling all the boxes to the floor now,
Pushing them three-deep to the dark abyss.
Union Station
Snow was swirling horizontal
Throwing itself against the outsized windows
Union Station in Denver at dawn.
The new security guard didn’t
Get the message from the last one
That I wasn’t a bum, just stranded,
Just got off the train at 3 and the buses
All down like polar bears, nose down,
Waiting it out. The first guard most kindly
Swung open the bolted doors when I was
Standing out there in the howl, train departed,
Pounding the glass, he smiled a splash
Of big silver teeth and said ‘hell, ain’t it,’
But he let me in and said ‘I suppose you can set
Over there on that bench til morning I guess’
And I did, on a big wooden log that a cowboy
Or an oilman once sat on, staring up in the dark
Into a cavernous dome with pilgrims and Indians
Almost but not quite shaking hands up there
In that dome, I knew not why, I had no one to ask,
The cold burning outside, the frozen smoke
Of a menthol I bummed off the conductor
On that train, now hurtling across the plains,
Plowing its own path through the snows,
This old place rocking and whistling in the dark,
Until the new guard sent me back out,
Myself a train, pushing through snow and wind,
While dawn’s light gathered in the ledges behind me.
INTERRUPTED
Sweet holy birdland,
Will you look at that,
Cries out little brother
From the back of the tiny boat,
Pointing up the lone mast
Where a bird, a mighty thing, perches,
Suddenly, the likes of which
We’ve never seen, and it flups its wings
And stares down at we two brothers, you know,
Trying to tell us something, to warn us
To go back, to go back, to go back where we came
And we d0 you know, we turn that tiller
And running faster as a foul wind tiles the sea
All around us and a great muck of clouds
Ripples down from the ledge of slate clouds beyond
While the great bird measures its course and takes flight
Flapping those mighty wings and disappearing
Into the thick, racing against the great howl, mighty rage,
Tiller burning and ropes cutting into our soft hands,
How we fight to get back to harbor, the ready,
The familiar; two little boys pushing off in a boat.
Photo of Frank Haberle
BIO: Frank Haberle is the author of two books: Shufflers (Flexible Press, Minneapolis, September 2021), a story of transients moving through minimum-wage jobs in the 1980s; and Downlanders (Flexible Press, November 2023), following five lost souls into a fictional wilderness. Frank’s short stories have won awards from Pen Parentis, Beautiful Loser Magazine, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Letter Prize and the Rose Warner Prize for Fiction. Frank lives in Brooklyn, New York and works at New Settlement in The Bronx. Website: www.frankhaberle.com