Many thanks to those who read my poems.
falling
the roof smells of wet decay
clumping oak leaves overstuff
the gutter forcing a waterfall
the shingles’ cast-off flow unhindered
a foliage reunion
gathers acorns twigs
falling ochre and tawny wings
i dig into their muck
dump sludge renew the sluice
til next summer slips into fall
future autumns will refill the reopened grave
the air is colder than i remember
of sun-abandoned days
that swirl azure swatches through
grainy gray skies like a centrifuge
i could grasp that sky
with chilled hands, knotting it
to my breast before i slide away
praise the descending day
breathe once more before
i pray to the flaming spirit
of autumn’s fall or i could
brandish blasphemies as the spirit
spins away then i relax
into gravity’s fist
the abandoned son of an angry god
© Gary English 2024
Originally published in Two-Thirds North Issue 2025
————
The Actress Polina Strepetova
-- Inspired by a portrait of Pelageya Strepetova (dimunitive Polina) by Nikolai Yarshenko that hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow
Twenty-three months ago,
after being buried in black and white
on page 133 of an obscure book
of Russian paintings, you paused,
stage left, and began your wordless soliloquy —
unimpressed with your audience of one,
buried in olive-drab and khaki
in room 205 of a peeling-paint army barracks
amid the live colours of South Korea;
its cerulean and carmine,
golden yellow and chartreuse
unseen in the grey world your artist chose.
When you passed across the pressed-page theater,
your petite drooping shoulders betrayed you:
this portrait was no performance,
and I felt a foreigner.
I didn’t speak the language at the time:
I did not understand
the tragic angle of your chin,
loose lay of your merging fingers,
their rough, labored womb poured
against your peasant dress
like a January night sky in Rybinsk —
Even these were Russian.
When Nikolai Yaroshenko painted you
(with minor conceit a century ago)
did he foresee the glossy pages
that would bring you to my attention.
Could he have known that a war-monger GI,
bred on Budweiser and Playboy,
would spend five hundred American dollars
and two years learning Russian
just to pose these questions
to this shadow of your likeness —
Which is as close as I will ever come
to Moscow.
© Gary P English 2024
Originally published by Ekphrastic Review, October 28, 2024
————
Stones: In the Wake of Breaking Up
You hear the call of stones,
the ecto-mist of their spirits —
pterodactyl fossils crying crystals,
nature’s small talk releasing the day.
You hear their life, just as you heard mine,
their breath escapes at your approach.
I walk at midnight trying to hear what you hear
in stones washed on the beach in waves:
not the wail of loneliness,
not the call of god.
Salt scrubs clean the stones that invite me. Waves
hammer their thunderous song;
A few insomniac terns yip their alarm.
Down the beach, lovers murmur their passion
in sync with the tide. I hear all this.
But in the moonstone shimmer beside you,
I hear your silence more clearly. A few miles off
in the Gulf, even at midnight I can see wind
hurtle clouds toward shore. I stop and pray
to the coming storm
of stones.
© Gary English 2024
Originally published in Two-Thirds North Issue 2025
————
Stillborn 1907
-- Inspired by a photograph of a woman jumping from the eighth floor of a hotel in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1942.
https://witwisdom.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/the-1942-genesee-hotel-suicide/
I met you only once:
in September ’42
at Buffalo’s Genesee Hotel,
where rooms were a dollar.
A dime could buy coffee
in the diner downstairs.
Thirty-five summers brought you there,
through Depression, divorce,
nine months of war.
Your bleached rumpled hair rippled
in the 30-mile wind.
Your right arm, flimsy paperweight,
fought to restrain your blue cotton dress
from slapping your face,
your mask of determined terror.
Your legs, unstable enablers, shuddered
outside the window of your eighth-floor room.
Your left hand fluttered –
a quiver
of your despondent intentions.
No words could
dissuade the step.
That fall, you fell your eighty feet:
No explanation
for the erasure of your existence.
There’s a photographer in Albany
who still can’t believe he shot that frame,
ten feet above your death.
— Gary P English 2024
Originally published in Ekphrastic Review, September 28, 2024
————
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