Poetry by Alan Shapiro
Alan Shapiro’s recent books are Dress Rehearsal for the Truth: essays on poetry, identity and belonging (2024); By and By, (2023), and Proceed to Check Out (2022). His new book of poems, Diver, will be published in 2026 by Unbound Editions.
Festival
In the first days, her “pre-morbid” body
was still as beautiful as ever,
made by the new idea
of what would happen to it soon
more vividly alive
to all of us, even to her
as she puzzled through the how, the what now,
the what next of it, as if the talking
were a kind of doing, her voice brave,
manic, terrified, the terror
almost thrilling in its freshness,
like a rogue wave that had suddenly
broken through
and swept away all the old
proprieties, restraints, impediments
that kept her, until then,
ill at ease with being listened to, or doted on,
what now she reveled in
as if it were her due, proof
or revelation, as we listened, nodded, cried or laughed,
and lavished on her ever-shifting moods
confetti-showers
of affection that turned those first days
into a kind of nonstop
once in a lifetime
festival of fretful tenderness
entirely for her, for her alone
so she might feel as if she’d never been so loved,
had so much to be grateful for.
Then, of course, we all flew home.
I didn’t see her till months later,
at what I couldn’t help but think of
as the after party, the after Christmas doldrums
of the last days, which weren’t,
as I might have thought,
when nobody was there, but when
nobody had become the same as anybody,
in a room whose smallness made the flowers
in it brighter, fresher, a violent freshness
she was now the still center of.
“Hi,” she said, “hi, thanks for coming,”
toneless, phlegmy, robotically polite,
even while she looked up as from the deep
sea bottom of the metal bed,
her body now a bloated, water-warped
freakish simulation
of somebody who saw right through
my shock, my dismay, my squeamishness,
and didn’t care.
August Third, 2025
The creek has shriveled to a dry indecency,
as if it’s wakened naked from a dream
of being naked, most of its rocky bed
exposed, blushing gray boulders
and black stones between which what’s left
of the current slows to standing pools.
The starkest sign of life now is the reek
of a dead something hidden in the reeds
where flies swarm rejoicing, maybe, wondering how
any other living thing could bear not to be a fly
speck of such a festive murmuration.
~~~~~~
After heavy rain, even from the house,
you can hear it roaring, receding only now and then
in the onrush of a car only to roar back louder
when the car passes, in a kind of doppler tug of war
between what comes and goes, and what runs on so
constantly it’s easy to forget it’s running by at all.
At night especially, I hear it through the thickest wall,
up through each and every floor board, roaring softly
yet distinctly even through my sleep as if the house
were no longer a house but a boat, a raft, something
to float by with, and then not even that.
~~~~~~
Thirty years ago today my sister died.
Some two years later ditto my brother.
In between the dyings I got divorced.
At the time a now ex-friend sagely called it
“a bad patch” in an otherwise “walk in the park.”
Then there were WMDs, Shock and Awe,
And Katrina, and I remarried,
and my dad died, and then my mom,
another divorce, a recession,
a plague, an insurrection and,
triumph of hope, another marriage.
~~~~~~
You could say fourth time’s the charm
except two of my three dogs have just now bolted
into the understory at the sound of rustling,
and lunging after them I stumble
on a tree root and fall. And when I cry out
they scurry back and sit before me,
Job’s comforters, staring, tongues lolling,
as I struggle to stand, and once assured
their one and only giver of treats
is A OK, they’re off again. And again
I follow after, but slower now.
~~~~~~
So slow that the third dog, Carly,
half blind, half deaf, can now
almost keep up with me, pausing
after every trembling step
as if it’s brought her to the same
cliff’s edge where she has to wait
until the ground extends itself
enough in front of her for her to risk
another step and still another
toward what with every step now
leaves her farther back behind.
~~~~~~
The creek is called Roaring Brook.
But you could call this drought-struck
version of it a babbling brook
and you would not be wrong.
It babbles like my mother did
nonsensically at the end to no one.
Or maybe not nonsensically,
maybe she was speaking the pre-
Babel Ur tongue God smashed
into all the mother tongues
we’ve had to use to miscommunicate
our mothering to one another ever since.
~~~~~~
You can measure the colossal height of the tower
in Breughel’s picture by how miniscule
the bustling town and harbor at its base are,
the crowds are multitudes of white dots,
swarming around and over the brickwork
weathered at the lower levels to a dirty beige
while the bricks that form the innards of the still
unfinished levels at the top where no one is
are bright red, blood red, like the circulatory system
in an anatomy book whose cellophane flip-pages flip
from outer to inner to show us all it is we are.
~~~~~~
So many boulders and exposed tree roots and dead trees
toppled over onto trees bent over the path so that you have to duck
awkwardly beneath what any second could give way and crush you.
Last summer after a big rain, I stopped here for a moment,
I don’t know why—bird call in nearby brush? or sudden glitter
on rushing water?—when a great pine fell over
in slow motion and thudded softly in the duff
to block the path. Why had I stopped just then?
Could this have been a providential moment
in the history of my people, as if I had a people,
and someone had just mistaken me for Saul, or Paul?
~~~~~~
Who could bear five seconds in the company
of a saint or Tzaddic, someone who believes
handing the housekeys over to the thief
will make him too embarrassed to steal?
A goodness junky, who mainlines misery
in a chronic state of having to forgive
your every flaw and, worse, excuse it,
even love you for it, happiest, most
at peace with a stomach bug
in an overcrowded holding cell with just
a single unflushed toilet and no stall?
~~~~~~
Somebody put a naked Barbie in a tree hollow,
head resting on a moss pillow, a patch of moss
instead of fig leaf covering her crotch,
deserted maybe after Ken, son of Adam,
had his way with her, her plastic hand held up
to hail or halt the passerby, to seek redress
for her disgrace, or say don’t bother, you’re way too late.
Beside her on a boulder is a cairn of stones
(made by the same precocious child? or childlike adult?)
bent slightly like a hooded hobbit of a monk who still believes
he’ll get to her before what’s already happened happens.
~~~~~~
In one of your many studies of the bathers
you catch a girl in mid leap from a boulder
while below her the rippling white sheet
of a splash a boy is splashing is captured
at its highest point. The quick brushed
browns and yellows that compose
the figures are as watery as the splotches
of the blue gray and gray green gradations
of brook, stone, tree, figure and ground
forever exchanging places caught at that ecstatic
instant of dissolving into while emerging from.
~~~~~~
Roaring Brook evaporates, yet babbles on and on,
as we do, walking beside it, talking and talking
about work, or family, the dogs, the illnesses,
the sorry news and the great good luck
of this eleventh hour being here with you.
If only Zeno had been right about time and motion,
the infinite divisibility of the infinitely small
and Achilles never caught the tortoise, and the arrow
never hit its target, and every instant of the weakening
evaporating babble were fixed in itself, unmoving,
as hand in hand we make our solitary way.