Poetry by Jeff Hardin
Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Southern Review, Hudson Review, Potomac Review, Louisiana Literature, Cutleaf, and others. Two collections, Coming into an Inheritance and A Right Devotion, are forthcoming. He lives and teaches in TN.
Good Boy
What I’d done was left shop class, 9th grade,
to go to the bathroom—an emergency—
but soon after, while I sat there, the teacher
came to find me. Stalls back then lacked
privacy doors and, besides, the whole point
of being that age was to suffer humiliation.
The nonchalance with which he strolled up
(I could hear him taking his time), then
leaned against the facing, staring in at me—
he wanted an explanation for my absence.
Later, when I returned, he gathered everyone,
had them shut off band saws and lathes,
said to lay aside sandpaper, rulers, glue,
and while everyone looked on, he sliced
a paddle’s whistling sound three times
against my backside, each time harder
than the first. Then, with the drawn-out
patience of a graffiti artist, he chalked
a circle on the floor where, the next week,
I stood while others worked on projects,
which now I would not complete in time.
The grade would stand, and that was that.
Someone with my same initials stole my
belt buckle—walnut, the size of my palm—
from a closet lined with shelves where we
left things to dry after applying varnish.
When I asked him to return it, he smiled
and called me racist, then shouldered me
against a locker, continuing down the hall.
For years, he wore my buckle, slowing
to bump my desk corner, taunting me
to look at its oval, its perfect shade, but
I only stared ahead. I never looked him
in the eye again, which made him all
the madder. The same with the teacher.
I finished out the year and didn’t speak
a word. The grade I didn’t receive I’ve
weighed again, again, decade upon decade,
coat after coat. A good boy, I’ve stayed
in my place, not left this circle. I close my
eyes: I smooth a dark wood’s deepening hue.
Another Day Than This One
I have a decision to make. The man who
owned the land I live on now stopped last
year when a storm left standing just the trunk
of our massive beech. He wondered if I’d
mind if he brought a chainsaw. That’s how
he said it: would you mind? He wanted to
salvage carved initials belonging to his son,
who died one early morning two decades back.
The tree, he knew, would have to come down.
Later that night, I thought of his son falling
asleep, leaving the road. I wept for a father’s
anguish, wanting to safeguard initials carved
in a dying tree. And now, too, the man has
died. He had not brought his chainsaw yet,
the trunk still standing, the initials still visible.
I have a decision to make. Spring is almost
upon us, forsythia hinting yellows, redbuds
in a week or two. I go out walking along
the dips and rises of acres once belonging
to someone else, but always I circle back to
the beech. The trunk goes up ten feet, maybe
twelve, two enormous veerings that used
to be there now absence revealing sky. I have
a decision to make. Another day than this one
I hope to find the man I am who will do what
must be done and find a way to go on living
with himself, the absence of others in a world
where fathers talk to fathers of sons arriving
home, because that’s what happens in our
language, no other words to hold between us.
Out In the County
I could be wrong, but having met a friend
on a road near his house—he driving east,
I driving west—I’m almost certain he saw
me, too, but then, as happens, hesitated,
unsure he saw who he thought he saw or,
better yet, whether to commit. After all,
in another mile, he’ll be pulling into his
driveway, and he has tasks, chores, enough
to keep him busy, and what if I take his
acknowledgment as invitation, then turn
around and follow? A split second: a history,
a future, dissertations of questions about
the nature of friendship, hope of community,
the market economy, leisure time, reflection,
the need for solitude, infringements upon it.
This far out in the county, people’s lives
ask little, demand less. It’s hard to describe
the doctrines because they seldom overlap.
Each is on a journey, singular, inevitable,
halfway toward a life if not exactly the one
imagined and hoped for then one enormous
in ways too subtle for most to discern, which
is why I kept driving along the river, adding
to my thoughts the moment by moment
amendments of fence gate, barn loft, beech
hollowed out by its own lost years. I took
my time, free of everything, of everyone,
a no one from nowhere happily unknown,
passing through as if a wind dying down
between furrows fallow for years to come.
Backstory
My father called me on my fortieth birthday,
after seventeen years of not speaking to me.
I made my entire adult life in his absence,
no voice of counsel, no aid to fall back on.
The backstory is long, includes divorce;
my refusal to choose between them, room
in my mind for everyone; having long ago
been abandoned, unable to let go of those
who let go of me; years of singing hymns).
That day he said go, I asked if he was sure.
I was giving him time to change his mind.
He turned his face toward the couch, away
from the last few items I held. I see myself
opening the door, stepping out into the world.
I wasn’t angry. I didn’t weep. Was I stunned?
It was just what it was, so I got on with it.
When I was a boy, my father would twist
my toes to wake me, tickle my feet. It was,
I see now, his form of affection. Maybe
that moment and every moment are part of
a backstory to a narrative no one alive will
live to see in its fullness. Maybe doors are
not really there, were never there, neither
opened nor shut. When I hug my children,
adults now, almost the age I was then, I do
so full-on, from every rejection I’ve known,
as if rushing through our bodies, carrying us
headlong into eternity. I know that’s too much
to make clear with an embrace, but I might
as well get started saying what I mean so
there’s no confusion. I know I’ve failed in
holding them fiercely enough. How wide I
still reach from this side of time, knowing,
having known, there’s much to get on with,
and I’ll do it myself if no one will join me.
A Voice Inside My Own
Who was I becoming along a nowhere creek
whose solitude became a voice inside my own?
I know how saying that sounds, but lately I’ve
gone to saying this flow I hear inside me—
calm but wistful, resolute, following the only
way that comes into view. The thing is: I don’t
have to go anywhere but to a place I already
am—here, within this moment granting time;
and I can hear how far the woods went south
toward Alabama and bunched down hollows
and pinched up hilltops; and anyone that’s got
a calm inside them, too, knows how lonesome
a dove sounds from somewhere deep up along
a ridgeline scanned all morning for no reason
but the joy of thinking on where a sound like
that might come from. Some things like dove
I’ve lived with all my life, and how water flows
along to where the silence seems a stretch of quiet
quieter than how the mind attempts to still down
to its nothingness. Nothing much interests me
except listening to what’s beyond my knowing,
and there’s no way to know how far before
a thought comes into itself. It has a stream it
enters, and always then in its becoming hears
the center of itself, what it truly is, and I know
how saying that sounds, but saying it is how I
hear it becoming the voice it always was becoming,
entering my saying it, becoming this listening I am.
Recitation
I know a place in the woods
where the ground flows away downhill,
where I sat, as if in church,
and let my thoughts, like a stream,
pour out of me; and I watched them go
and believed myself healed, cleansed.
An owl somewhere upwind let me
know it knew my presence was present,
and that was enough for me—more
than some receive—and I contented myself
with knowing a glimpse, if that,
would be all I would get. I know a place
where leaves recite the ripples over rocks
then come into a calm afterwards,
and the times my heart has done
the same would fill a book—
and I would hate to get too preachy,
but I see no harm in saying we’d
all be less inclined to speak the ways
we do if we watched leaves drift
downstream. Plus, I’ll go ahead
and ask: what should one recite when
anything the eye takes in—a twig,
a hawk’s feather, the green of moss—
is worth saying again and again,
turning over in the mind turning over
to become a newness, a refreshing?
I’ve touched each leaf of a holly tree
standing in its own clearing space
—a being unto itself, the face of mystery—
and I know a ridge that might as well
be an overlook inside me, for I go there
to be there when the voice I am
is not a holy place; and certain hollows
mean as much to me as psalms,
and maybe they are psalms,
some of ascent and some of descent,
and my own voice follows their lead,
saying them one day and then another;
and all these years I’ve never left
the woods, my whole life a sanctuary,
and I guess all things flow onward—
that’s what the wind meant
when I heard it in the far trees
and when I felt it come over me
and when it stayed with me a while,
abidingly, I have to say, and then
went along the mayapple lobes
and lifted one or two just to show me
a white bloom, one more brightness
I might have overlooked, but now hold.
A Presence of Mind
I haven’t returned in thirty years,
and now I doubt I will. I used to know
those streets, Sutton and Harbert Drive,
Pinhook and Beech. Summer afternoons
I’d gather apples from our orchard
or sit a while beneath mimosa limbs.
Whatever the future was, I didn’t
sense its weight or hold its presence
in mind. I ran my hand along moss
and felt a coolness there. I’d never
seen a seagull or mountain, never
read The Prelude or heard a Bach
concerto. And what of it? The mind
I had was all I thought existed.
Come fall, I raked leaves in piles,
kept their burning edges checked.
I ate muscadines and spit the seeds.
I sat on porches with elderly souls
and listened when they told me
of the Beckham Hollow, bean rows,
crossing creeks to visit graveyards
from a century past. The future
wasn’t theirs to worry over, nor
did they bother with explanations
that made me think what I knew
would not be enough to carry me
wherever I might take myself.
I went, not knowing where a mind
could find its way toward. I never
imagined this soul I have become
who wonders how and why he found
a favor undeserved. I didn’t know
a breeze could bring blessing, that
joy could be philosophy. I guess,
as Wordsworth said, it is enough
that I am free. It’s doubtful any
other place but where I am will be
my habitation. The future matters
little, or not at all, or only as much
as I remember how it feels to
eavesdrop on another’s mind
remembering swirls of creek water,
her hand against slate rock, someone
calling her back and her rising wet,
never not far from where she was going.
The Graves of My People
The graves of my people rest on a hill
above a valley where a creek named
for them follows its own time deeper
out of view. Gipson, Charlie, Elizabeth,
farther back into a century I could all
but imagine, kneeling before their names
as a boy. Their headstones hidden behind
a church seldom used. So many prayers
I’ve heard from pews, within fellowship
halls, in hospital waiting rooms, beside
graves. Pleading, gratitude, anguish,
joy. The voices of those who’ve gone
before me, their timbre like my own—
the bitten-off long i, the soft e drawn
out in tenderness, lingering, the way
my aunt Janice said my name as if it
had two syllables. Jannie, her father,
my grandfather, called her, rhyming
with Granny, his own heart given fully
to anyone, kin or not, in a voice always
on the verge of laughter, even mid-tale.
Mt. Carmel—where the graves of my
people gave themselves to their reunion.
Where I trace my fingers along names
I never met but know in stories told
to me. Faces in faded oval photographs.
Farmers. Ordinary folk. The rich-poor
who left little behind but what they
gave another in need. “If one of us goes
down, we’ll all just go down together,”
my grandfather used to say, gleefully,
clapping his hands together like a child,
excited to have nothing more than one
more day to hear the story of our time
together, all of us present, those who
came before and those coming after,
everyone gathered and held up in words,
songs, psalms, prayers, each name lifted
on vowels, joined to the others, Samuel,
Martin, Amanda, McCasland, Love.