five poems

by Jeff Hardin

SEEDS SWEPT UP AND CARRIED ALONG

I don’t know you, Yves Bonnefoy,

but I, too, wish to know my true name.

My thoughts—imperfect—are sometimes

mire, often stone, other times speechless

as time requires. If you and I came ashore

at the same time, I would smooth away

sand, I would watch for storm clouds,

I would speak to God on your behalf,

though I do that for everyone. I’m never

sure what living wants me to remember,

but today the crowns of trees are like

an earth-exhalation, an exaltation, and I

add my own. Am I a seed swept up, carried

along? My thoughts are inadequate translations

just as the moment—apropos—becomes so

because we cannot imagine another. Still,

we trust, as poets, that we’ll be healed

of what we do not finish, of what we

do not come to know. I am one page

and you another, and side by side, we’re

taken up, enfolded inside a slip of time.

I do not know you, Yves Bonnefoy,

but words desire an intimate voice.

Sorrow’s shadow lengthens some vowels.

What more should we expect, transfigured

as we are by trying to speak the light.

POET IN OLD AGE

His fellow poets seldom understood

his joy in daily ritual nor why

it mattered to him that he not believe

in notoriety. The work redeemed him.

Now on the outskirts of a story which few,

if any, wish to read these days, he thinks

his final years will be his best. He can’t

do anything for anyone’s career.

He tends a garden—gladioli, mum—

and watches finches sail their frenzy toward

a dogwood’s lowest limb. A metaphor

too easily applied? He nods, then smiles

contentedly. Not everything needs words

to prove itself. And neither does the mind.

THEOPHANY

There were years—two decades almost—

when I aimed a lens at everything, everyone,

the cascading stream of a magnolia bloom,

a clear-cut hillside with nothing but stumps,

my daughter twirling absentmindedly before

a field of mustard seed, my son kicking

creek shallows, the spray suspended in his

glee, but my father was nowhere to be

found. Those were the years he banished

me, so all the ways his features aged, hair

graying, muscles relaxing, I could not,

did not, watch emerge, as if decades of

days of creation had been omitted from

the text. My life, it must be said, has been

defined by separation, first a mother lost

in drink, me and my siblings, for a time,

wards of the state, my father gone a month

on towboats, two months, another marriage,

then another, a sister and brother adopted

elsewhere, one returned who bounced from

home to home, the other across a state line,

found again in my early twenties. Always

another face with years between, when their

life, my life, had carried on as if the absence

weren’t there. Is that why I take photos of

others walking away, my wife looking out

toward a river, my children on sidewalks

ahead of me? In my father’s final years,

he returned, familiar in his mannerisms,

how he’d nod and adjust his cap, how he

turned to look out windows, leaned against

a counter to catch his breath. The last time

I caught his image, he looked straight into

the lens, a hint of a smile, his eyes clear,

undisturbed, even tender, full of grace,

in no hurry to be anywhere but where he

waited so that I could look full on—without

fear, without shame or need to hide myself,

without reprisal of any kind, nothing lost—

and not at some shadow passing through.

TAKING UP THE CAUSE OF INNOCENCE

Our efforts at redemption have all been squandered.

Best to stay silent, to let the sea take what it takes.

If one morning finds us, then maybe another will.

Wasn’t it a child’s mind that asked if we could stand

atop a lily pad? Maybe God weighs our every future,

lets this one follow its logic, lets this one slip away.

How deceived we must be. How reckless, dismissive.

With all we’ve done—dungeons, gas ovens, our

justifications—we still use the word unimaginable.

A man on a stage weeps to hear his words, standing

so starkly inside their embrace. One senses everyone

leaning closer toward abiding with his lack of self.

Which life was the innocent one we might have lived?

An idea is like a kingfisher gliding above the creek,

then out of view, always now there by not being there. 

RAPTURE

We speculate but, in the end, know little

for certain. Along a sidewalk, on an errand,

but just as likely we scour a foreign city

whose narrow alleys turn and twist so that

we may or may not reach our destination.

How truthful the stories of our origins?

How embracing or dangerous the next

face we meet? Words so many base their

actions upon are translated—often from

earlier translations. Where does power

reside? In an army’s might or in a bee’s

hum from bloom to bloom? A greatness

leaves us—a piercing mind, taking up

rapture as if a leaf to study from every

angle—beneath some stars dying out,

others being born, all while light ascends

a maple’s roots, and two friends writing

letters get closer to a day when neither

sends nor receives, neither known by

anyone ever onward, though now they

take such care to say the words just right.            

Photo of Jeff Hardin

BIO: Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize); Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize); and No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize), among others. The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Image, Swing, Bennington Review, The Laurel Review, and Southern Poetry Review have published his poems. Two collections, Coming into an Inheritance and A Right Devotion, are forthcoming. He teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN.