3 Poems, by Luke Powers
Ghost
This house isn't haunted
It's not old enough
Vintage suburban open
Floor plan twostory brick
A pair of stairwells
Ghosts might haunt
One that even curves
But nothing paranormal--
There's only one ghost I know
And he doesn't live here
Died six years ago--
Has it been six years?
But I can feel him sometimes
When I'm in the car alone
Undulating with the road
Past the horse farms
Houses hidden by the trees
"So beautiful," he would say
The trees, the houses,
It was hard to know
From a man not given
To aesthetic considerations
In his condition
He could not drive
His vocabulary narrowed
But not his point of view
I ride these same roads now
Not entirely alone
And say aloud, for him,
For me, so beautiful--
_______________________
The Perseids
The Perseids will be
Visible tonight
If your sky is
As clear as mine--
They'll look like
The sparklers
We played with
As kids running in
Zigzag streaks
Across the backyard
Each one of us
A comet---
If your sky
Is as clear as mine
You'll hear children's
Voices curling to
The Doppler effect
As each one shoots
Toward outer darkness--
If your
Sky is as clear
As mine
You may even see
That fleeting face
Halflit with mischief
And sulfur
As I see yours
Aged nine or ten
When like the sons
And daughters of
Father Perseus we
Too were immortal
In the slow myth of
The summer night
_______________________
World Book
The World Book Encyclopedia
Was the mainstay of
Our family library
Given a place of prominence
On those handmade
Cherry cabinets in the den
With cream and olive
Almost leather covers
It was "Knowledge"
As determined by
editors and authorities
And sold to us by
A licensed distributor
Dad loved to sit
On the beanbag chair
And peruse, say,
The "D" volume
Or the first book of "S"
The way a pioneer ancestor
Might have thumbed
Through Second Samuel
Or Ecclesiastes
Barely sentient of
The clamor and drama
Of "Gunsmoke" or
"All in the Family"
Dad carefully lifted
The pages like a
Buddhist monk in
In fierce meditation
Getting lost in the
Amazon of information--
Stated in neoclassical
Restraint: sentences as
Regular as Greek columns,
Paragraphs as solid
As the Parthenon,
No filigree of footnotes
And extraneous illustration.
These volumes were
To be read--they were
Grooved through with
A Britannical aplomb
That everything in the world
That is
Could be explained in
The World Book Encyclopedia
And that, as much as
Jesus,
God the Father and his Ghost,
Sunday school, even his
Beloved green and red hymnals,
Was a profound comfort.
art by Mayme