Sample Poems by Gary J. Whitehead
A Used Book
—for Neil
When I open its pages my dog stirs
from his repose on the couch beside me
to sniff at the spine and trim. His gray ears
lift to listen, and I hear what he hears:
traffic horns, a teapot’s whistle, the purrs
of the reader’s cats on her old settee.
What was she doing reading such heady
stuff so early on a Saturday—sun
not yet risen, her lover still asleep?
The book, I guess, her company to keep,
and the cats, while the light kept its steady
course across her floor. Paris or London,
I imagine, though it was probably
San Francisco, a streetcar passing by
and fog rinsing the morning air. A gray
day then, much like any other. It may
be that she, too, drawn irresistibly
to its place on a shelf in a nearby
shop, blew the dust and bought it second-hand.
And perhaps her cats roused when she opened
its cover, catching the vague scent of dog,
and she got no further than the prologue
before she was off to some other land
where a man held a page against the wind.
Plums
I like to slice them along the seam,
blade balanced on the fulcrum of pit
—that density, like bone, inside the flesh—
and roll until it’s cut clean through.
Then the twist as if uncapping a jar,
and I’m holding hemispheres:
the center of one an oval cup, the other
an egg I pluck from its sweet nest.
But always before I eat each smooth half
comes the urge to put it all back together.
Full of Blood, and Irrelevant
If memory had fingers, it would wring
from me each forgettable day we shared.
The double-date drive to Plum Island
in the pouring rain, windows fogged
like shower glass. I’d listen now to your
every laugh. That Sunday morning,
March, repairing a botched crossword
while our clothes rolled in the laundromat’s
mechanical song. What shirt were you
wearing? How long was your hair then?
A year in retrospect is a checked list
written in disappearing ink and clutched
in a tight fist. Pick up shampoo. Take out
trash. Replace washer in kitchen sink.
How many hours did we pass together?
Given the chance to do it over, would we
do it the same way? And if memory
did have fingers and those fingers formed
a fist, would our times shine out,
red as rubies, full of blood, and irrelevant?
Mouse in the House
For two nights now it’s wakened me from dreams
with a sound like paper being torn, reams
of it, a scratching that’s gone on for hours.
Blind in the dark, I think of my father’s
letters, the ones composed but never sent.
They were addressed to his sister, my aunt,
a woman I never met but whose voice,
slurry and calling from some noisy place,
introduced itself one New Year’s eve, late,
before my mother came and silenced it
with a click. She was one of many things
we never spoke of. But when the phone rang
at odd hours, I’d wonder if it was her.
That voice had resurrected the picture
in the silver frame, my parents’ wedding
day: on the church steps the woman throwing
rice, blond and beautiful, showing no trace
at all of malice in her youthful face.
Now the awful sound, waking me again
like a secret, calls to mind the poison
I left out, and my mother on their bed
tearing a box of letters into shreds.
Tumbleweeds
Rolling nests of the prairie,
prickered and denuded and dead,
clutching at clumps, skipping across
asphalt, whole shrubs ripped out
and flung, and clinging together
like herds racing over acres.
I’d only ever seen them
in Spaghetti Westerns tumbling
quaintly across the painted backdrop—
props blown by big fans and collecting
off-camera against some studio wall.
But here, in Nebraska, they roll
for miles unless a fence catches them.
All day they crunched beneath
my wheels like the delicate skeletons
of small animals. One clutched the grille
and flapped there like a giant bird.
And I felt I could join them, easily,
as stripped as I am, as thin as I’ve become,
as determined as I am to roll onward.
But even as I dodged them, speeding up
or slowing down, I found myself
feeling satisfied when one met me head-on,
the tread turning branches to chafe.
I relished the champ of their blanched
bodies as my machine ground them to dust,
here where chance seemed perfectly arrayed
and where, once, the deer and antelope played.
A Cold House
I wake now to a house as cold
as your side of our double bed.
Across the threshold, in the dark
hall, the thermostat sparks
a blue star, and downstairs
the boiler thumps like a heart
revived. Hot water shrieks
through pipes till registers tick
like clocks toward a time bearable
and close. I dress in wool
and fleece, keep hands in pockets.
On the couch, our dog looks out
the bay window, his breath
on the glass making a bouquet,
gray flowers which bloom and fade.
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