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The Day the Meteor Comes
Poems by John Valentine
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Excerpts
Shaving My Father
~ In hospital, 1969
Only a few years shaving myself,
I am shaving my father now
in the pale evening light
of his room. Eyes half-closed,
he leans this way and that
as the razor glides up and down
the ragged slopes of his face.
Nothing passes between us
but the pleasure of the blade,
round and round like a thresher
in a field of autumn hay where the sun
has long gone down. His jaw is like
an old crag, a scatter of stubble
and maw. The steel settles smoothly
on his skin. The last stalks are
cut. A hot towel, a bit
of bracer, and he holds my hand now,
longer it seems than he’s ever held it before.
Too Much Nirvana
Truly how terrible is the tyranny of the pleasant.
~ Stephen Dobyns
Too many sweet epiphanies
of the sudden suchness
of things.
That emerald stickpin
of a dragonfly
trembling at the tip
of your car’s antenna—
is that all there is?
Once in a fingerless moon
take a break from
enlightenment,
go down to the bar,
belly up to mahogany smiles.
Have some peanuts and pals.
Isn’t your waitress
like the wind blowing you
a kiss?
Those ham sandwiches
are nothing less than
temptation on the hoof.
Wild Turkey, a cigarette,
and Hank Williams
is like a threnody lilting in the air.
Everything eases in the afternoon light.
You settle in sin, the arms of a beer—
bad karma, you know,
but even the Compassionate One,
they say,
had an off day
every now and then in the rain.
Belief
Isn’t it like a tourist who fails to produce
his passport at the border
and cannot cross into the sure land
of certainty?
Poseur, a man with no support,
no gravitas,
who rushes to the edge of the world
with every exuberance of expectation,
seeing everything everywhere
in everything else,
the final face of a figure in a puzzle
that isn’t really there,
a shadow, a shift in the wind
that’s only that and nothing more.
The epistemologist’s tow-headed
stepchild.
But oh how often belief
oversteps the darkness,
and the stars seem crystalline, more
mysterious for the leap, somehow
nearer,
while knowledge itself curls up
in the House of the Known
like an old fact whose best days
are always just behind it,
just within reach of its confident grasp.
Purchase The Day the Meteor Comes here.
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