Sample Poems by Allen Hoey
The Winter of Little Snow
I.
A seeming miracle!—several saplings
already budding in the woods behind the house.
And, as I bent the branch to let my son see,
I noticed a moth, plain, a ragged pearl, then
another and another. Mid-February,
yet I found myself saying, “See these buds?—
they mean spring is coming.” Yesterday
morning’s robin could not be a lie,
nor the straggling rafts already returning north,
yet the whole confusion of weathers
threatens the possibility of frost
rendering spring barren. I released the branch
and, before he trundled on, pointed out the green
underlay of moss through the mottled grass.
II.
Despite the scarcity of snow, birds cluster the feeder.
The ground has not been frozen more than two weeks
all winter; what snow falls seems to melt
before it touches ground. And, although I understand
a certain paucity of seed is built into the system,
I find on walks through the adjacent field and woodlot
much untouched forage. These birds could illustrate
a principle of greed: why work when what comes
easiest is most at hand. And this feeder might signify
ways we corrupt self-sufficiency. Will these birds,
the daily congress of sparrows, chickadees, and blue jays,
the pair of cardinals and glossy hordes of starlings,
be joined as the weather warms by the plenitude
of summer species? Given the many feeders,
the tons of seed strewn, how long before birds
lose the knack of culling seed wild?
III.
We found a cat, car-struck and tossed up
on a sewer the far side
of the sidewalk. “It’s dead,” I told him,
and he leaned close, though careful,
as with the mole last summer the dog
killed, not to touch it. Its fur
matted, sockets clean, although it was
otherwise intact, fully
recognizable. His eyes widened
then narrowed. Widened. And he
did not, for a moment, say a word.
Today, in the woods, he said
he wanted to live with the cat, he
wanted to fix it. “It can’t
be fixed; like the mole, it’s completely
broken.” A normal snowfall
would have hidden it, by spring reduced
the thing to a formless heap.
“Some things can’t be fixed,” I told him. Nor
even, often, kept concealed.
IV.
“What’s that?” Springs—an old mattress tossed
and rusting, rotting innards strewn
and rotting. Green, brown, and clear bottles,
broken and intact, some arranged on a root
against a washed-out bank; red plastic
shotgun casing, brass casings from .22s,
yellow belt from a rain slicker
knotted in a sapling, industrial orange tubing,
cans rusting, aluminum cans which will not rust, which will
adorn this woodlot, though fading in sunlight
to dull silver-grey, longer than his life.
Come spring, taller grasses, blossoming
wildflowers, and full-leafed saplings will conceal
perhaps the worst; eyes, now plodding through
dull, snowless clearings, the stripped
regiment of hardwoods, will tend more surely
upward, drawn by sun-brightened greens:
how much snow matters! The fields in sunlight
sharp as quartz, delicate stalks of Queen Anne’s lace
contrasting, and the silvered trees, the
anonymous sheer sparkle.
V.
Six o’clock, March sixth: I’ve sat
since three watching night evaporate,
the birds start—with the first grey
hint of light—at the feeder, the grass
come green as April before
full dawn. Yesterday’s shower melted
the last grey trace of snow
in the underbrush. Sixty degrees.
Spring should not come this early,
this easy. Fall’s debris—seed pods,
leaves, twigs—lies nearly intact,
not enough snow or even rain to
start to rot it. Grass never
really browned; turned a little yellow
in November, lay under
a few brief snows, and now it brightens.
Four weeks to Easter; it seems
the Lord’s been only drowsing, a pale
resurrection to waken
from a nap. No cold hell, no pain: spring
seems unearned. The sleep should be
deeper, at least, waking a greater
struggle. “Nature loves to hide,”
Heraclitus writes, but hide-and-seek
is best when difficult, when
the search lasts all day, and we wonder,
come dusk, when finally someone
will call, “Olly-olly-all’s-home-free!”
—as if that simple chant might
release again the game to begin.
Rose Moon
She told him she’d had his child
after the boy was born, the same time
she told him she was married. Not that they were
ever that kind of item—she just wanted him
to know—though she still recalled
the night it happened, talking about
Gurdjieffian octaves, and her
in her twenty-eighth year, and the
unfathomable ways whatever’s meant to be
chooses us to let it be. The full moon broke
deep red over Rose Mountain. A blood moon—no,
a rose moon over Rose Mountain.
Then they were naked. She can’t quite
remember how it happened, confusing that night
and the night she told her husband
she was pregnant and he offered to father
the child he couldn’t give her. To father.
Both men’s hands were soft the way a farmer’s hands,
strong and callused, were soft when they stroked
milk from an udder. Cupping her breasts and sliding
down her arms raw from working the community farm.
Small hands. Almost lost when she stopped them
caressing her thighs and lifted them in hers
to kiss each knuckle. And his beard
—this was clear—not her husband’s
weathered cheek. When he came
not fireworks but a surprisingly sudden
sense of swelling, as if the tiny
displacement of cells dividing
pressed outward. And she said nothing.
As he grew, the boy startled her sometimes
the way a gesture—patting his hair in place—
mimicked his father…confusing word:
which was father, giver of the single cutting
or the man who pruned and coaxed it
to a vital rose? Spit and image
of a man he’d met a dozen times, spent
a single afternoon with at an amusement park,
against her husband’s easing him, voice
soft and slow, when the boy’s eyes narrowed in anger,
tears spraying like rain off a shaking dog,
or the way the blue veins at his temples
throbbed when he was nabbed by thought,
and, even as a youngster, how his small hands
caressed, moments of unexpected
tenderness, knuckles down her cheek and around
her chin. The way, no matter how
thoroughly you cultivate a field, thistles
burst up in bean rows. Those times
shocked her with an intensity
of satisfaction, how the boy was a multiple
exposure of them all, but no part
blurred, an impossible accident
come true. “It’s just that moon,” she’d say,
laughing, loving him the more
—could it be?—and the other still,
and her husband none the less,
“that old rose moon that’s left its mark.”
First Winter
November. He undressed for the last time and folded
his uniform away. Sam Browne, fatigue cap, the painful
shine of his single bar, awarded just a month before
he found himself returned, purple heart and service ribbons,
all stowed in the footlocker he hauled to its attic grave
beside the trunk that held the cornet he’d refused to play
since his father died. From the dormer window
he surveyed the street, the disarray of hedges and flagstone
heaved by years of frost and thaw and the damned
invasive roots of sycamores that challenged even the cellar walls
from their curbside posts. Their leaves had fallen now
and a thin knot of smoke whispered into the hereafter
from a barrel in the retired dentist’s yard across the way.
There he went, staggering another armload up the drive.
Next door the blind woman’s daughter, not much
older than himself but already the dowdy scent of the spinster
clung to her like perfume on a pillow after his wife’s
left the bed. At a party he met a friend
just back from the Pacific. Talk of bowling scores wove
between episodes from boot camp, drunken sprees in leave ports,
and a solid month of Brussels sprouts, three meals a day.
Couple of us next week end, the friend offered, see if
five years handling a rifle pays off in a buck. Nice to get
some return. He stood rigid, beer uncomfortably cocked
halfway to his choked-off laugh. Nights his wife
lay with him, they tried to make a child—a girl, he almost
wished aloud: let it be a girl, a blessing as his back arched
before he rolled off like a spent casing. She stayed,
legs clenched, ten minutes, fifteen, then, because he rocked
the bed the way the ship rocked him crossing the Atlantic
before they found out, days short of Panama,
the Japs had given up, rose and padded to her guest room bed
and let him pitch gladly into sleep.
Between Seasons
Too early for ironweed or asters,
lilacs have browned on their stems
and irises withered. Even the peonies,
only last week so full and bright
it seemed the air much less their stalks
could not support the blooms, have dropped
their petals in the treacherous afternoon sun.
One morning, after a night of roof-wracking rain,
sun will coax the pummeled stalks
erect and ease the calyxes open: day lilies
suddenly everywhere, each blossom
cupping sun a day only, day after day,
and storm-blue chicory clustering
roadsides just the day before barren.
In winter, only the window flowers,
pane burgeoning ice-white blossoms and ferns,
or sometimes a cardinal, glimpsed through
the crystalline inflorescence, ghost
petal of last year’s rose skimming across the glaze
or, crimson flourishing a black blaze,
first poppy of the blinding summer ahead.