Featured Poet: February 2009 Vol. 1 #4
James Crews
James holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Best New Poets 2006 and other journals. He was the recipient of the 2008 Gertrude Press Chapbook Award for Bending the Knot and another chapbook, One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes, based on the life and work of artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, is due out this year from Parallel Press. He currently teaches English and Writing at Eastern Oregon University and enjoys tracking the deer that nightly invade his backyard.
Foreshadowing
I don’t mind winter because I know
what follows. There are laws.
—Belle Waring
Snow clouds fill the sky
like a power you never knew
you had. The man next to you
on this rush hour bus
has stuffed plastic bags
into the holes of his coat
& huddles close to look out
your window as if the sunset
might burst for once with the red
of alpenglow, as if these piles
of snow were only beginnings
of mountains trying to rise up.
But you know the cold and ice
will give up these plains again
as a robe gives up the body
underneath. Color always
returns, if slowly, to the earth
like the self you thought
you already were all winter.
(Originally appeared in Best New Poets 2006)
Revision
What hubris to believe you could save
this moment or that & tuck it away
for the day the warbler’s morning call
outside the honeymoon cabin that summer
grows finally too garbled to recall, or when
the familiar sound of her bathwater running
now flows backward into the faucet
as if neither she nor it ever even existed.
Go ahead, try to preserve this setting.
Let memory choreograph that dance of past
selves & place you on the collapsing porch
where, after making love, you breathed in
evergreen, where the exhale of your smoke
mixed with the white of retreating mist,
then drifted heavy & gray as a nimbus cloud
into the bright patch of sunlight.
Keep your arm wrapped tight around
the small of nostalgia’s back. Lean in,
whisper, Don’t ever leave me, fearful into its ear
& some morning a neighbor with a hose
watering her garden & a single sparrow
calling at your window will both take you back
to the cabin—water filling the tub again,
her body slipping in. & this time when you
come inside & look at her as she
closes her eyes in the bath & does not
notice you, leave her alone. Let her hum
the private song whose words you’ll never know.
Say nothing to disturb this scene—never yours
to begin with—& leave the past in your mind.
Leave her heart for this moment intact
if only to prove, looking back now, you can.
(Originally appeared in Fourteen Hills)