4 poems
The Parents Did Not Make the Dirt
All unmetered talk
of weather goes
small in proportion
to weather, and we,
all talk, go too.
Every day feels like turning
forty, trying to keep
still, not to go,
like the Alapaha River,
to ground.
Above, the power
on off,
it’s noctcaelador,
fiending for acknowledgement
or a slight, anything,
from the parent,
any parent. What else
do you grow
in your garden?
What you see
in someone else’s.
My Silent Partners
When I permit myself a dwelling
in spring, the air
phase-shifts
elsewhere, the bird
(I have names
for a few now)
makes invisible
choices, and I don’t need
to make shit up
to get a poem going,
and cannot. That’s not
a poem, it’s a going,
and why would you
bury your goods away
for so long? Maybe
so that when they find them
stockpiled beside the swag
of other defunct regimes
and having the consistency,
like my own feelings
at times, of flour
blended with cold
butter or snow
refrozen after a thaw,
they’ll really, and at last, be
worth something.
Isn’t that what “dehumanizes”
you? When everyone assumes
you’re obsessed
with money
because of what you are
and not
because of who we are?
Bodies that Appear to Be in Mirrors
As much as I admire
the ruined city from above,
it’s there, smiling,
our vanity,
to delight in the works
of our kind.
But it is beautiful,
you would say, probably
from the exit row.
Of course
the objects of our vanity
are beautiful.
He Has Tuned His Lyre Specially for Kings
Lacking in life,
have I been lacking
in death?
These are the tears
we shed for the loss
of our eyes.
What hope
could there possibly be
in boredom?
That those
dismantling you
will move on
to other things.
I’m so sick
of your distinctions:
it wasn’t gas,
it was an incendiary
bomb; it wasn’t
a child, he was
fifteen. We think
you’re missing
the point:
we make do
with insufficiency
throughout. Look
at our faces. Take
a good look
at our goodbyes.
And still, there have been
times, and will be again,
when the only way
was rescue,
and rescue came.
Benjamin Paloff's books include the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, New American Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others, and he is the guest editor of the Fall 2019 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. Twice a fellow of the NEA, he lives in Michigan.