HOW A POEM IS FORMED

How a Poem is Formed

A growing mesh of letters magnetized,

Attracting each other like fertility,

Ferociously eager to forge some form,

Delirious to squat like rain-soaked clouds

Positioned for relief. Matter settled.

Yet, more often, words are drawn like well water;

“Dragged” is the more precise explanation.

Before carving, a paralyzed hovering,

A cleansing of colons and semicolons,

Commas and apostrophes and ampersands,

The avoidable, the utility.

Then there are the darlings. How romantic

The darlings! How sweet the sound! How sweet the

Sweat! The scent of a woman who is loved.

A cold full-lung breath. There it is. There it is.

And just before the expelling relief,

A skinning, the cutting of the crust, the

Slitting of the throat. A gush. When first found, you

Would chase it to the gates of insanity.

Bojeski, alias James
for Thomas James

Once dubbed a “pale Plath,” your hue

is a red rose pink in a sun

that discerns whom it shall deepen

and the ones whose colors will reduce.

If we could separate your ribs,

what would be found in between,

or what, if we would examine your mind,

shot free from its brain, would it whisper

now? Did you know that your synapses

can’t be stop-watched like a listless bullet

from a .45 subject to glacial pace?

A bolt of lightning can slap a bullet,

but the bullet has no hope of countering.

Did you know then what you know now,

that while you died instantly,

there was time for new and clear thought,

for regret, to atone, for one more line?

Sad Guitar

The old guitar is salvaged from a Spanish

garret, warped and worn, its nylon strings slack,

each a throwback to the war. It holds no

markings, no carved initials, declares nothing,

its fragility a sentence to sorrow.

No hearty thrum or strum from pick or thumb,

the flagrant aging succumbs, becomes a child,

delicate, to be held with tender restraint.

The oily frets retain identity.

The luthier still recalls catgut strings

affixed from the intestines of cows or sheep.

She is transported back to the phrasing

of the nobleman Segovia, the

Cavatina, the flamenco, and decides

that for the guitar to play, it must stay sad,

so she transfers the mood to the brittle wood,

which influences the scordatura.

No One Knew Until

No one knew what happened that Hamptons Day.

The sky was clear of cloud and wing till gray

Billows puffed out of an imaginary

Chimney, its flue a rogue vomitory.

Then, in patches, birds overtook the sky,

Closer still, then closer till the human eye

Could clearly see what the nose already knew:

That smoke floats from an imaginary flue.

The birds were filling trees like ash on a pyre,

Unaware that where there is smoke, there is fire.

In short measure, the pleasure of their safe

Shelter would turn; each flame would burn, leap, strafe,

Dance, summit, plummet, flick its ugly tongue,

Till each bird would risk a lung to fly among

The smoke and choke, some falling like parachutes,

Splashing down to become ash on ashen roots.

Far from the village elms, the shade trees planted

Long ago so travelers were granted

Respite from the heat, withered, overrun,

As if by ten thousand winters at once, spun

Like flame tornadoes till the fire’s funnel froze

At the pavement of a four-lane highway, rose,

Then fell once more before it chose the least

Sensible track, two lanes heading west, two east.

Nothing to eat there, and still its wrath ate

A path in a frenzy with fresh elms as bait,

And it arched over Sunrise, not satisfied

Till everything green on the other side died.

No one knew how it started or how it spread.

No one knew until a young boy wet his bed.

The Summer of Fourteen

for Alan Cseh

It was three weeks after your fourteenth birthday;

I was four months away from turning fourteen.

What else was there to do but breathe baseball? What

did we know about clichés? To us, baseball

was what Baseball said it was: Cracker Jack,

peanuts, hot dogs, ice cold Coca-Cola.

Sometimes, clichés are clichés because they’re true.

Fourteen. The drinking age was eighteen then.

We chanted like thirsty voters: four more years!

Then all the clichés would be in our grasp

and everything Baseball said about baseball

would come to pass, galvanizing us even more.

You had a good year: unbeaten on the mat,

exempt from all your finals, and on the field

only Boomer could rival you as the best.

I reveled in your invincibility.

You were both an East Islip Redman and

a Cleveland Indian. What did we know

about political correctness then?

The day was exactly like the day before,

except that it wasn’t, and here my heart weeps.

I didn’t know then that it was you who hit

the foul ball into the street—Redmen Road?—

while playing pepper. True to your character,

you were the one who volunteered to retrieve

it. Could something like that be preordained?

It seemed impossible to me that it could

happen with the timing of a perfect swing.

In our last conversation, we joked about

you taking my math final for me. Please,

oh God, help me understand the math in this.

If a car travels at…and a boy runs at…

what’s the impending point of intersection?

It was perfect, devastatingly perfect.

All of us boys lost our childhoods that day.

Though I was still alive, it was a life

I didn’t recognize anymore. And so,

to honor you, my friend, let us talk baseball:

The way you walked on the field, it was clear

your mother’s water broke on the diamond.

To you, it was home. I was a visitor.

I remember your backhand on balls away,

the snatch, the turn of your hips, your foot finding
first, the throw, the smile, the finger or fingers
announcing one outs or two. I recall
the swing, how your arms seemed to get longer
when you sent a low-and-outside pitch to
the opposite field, the dust that was honored
to scatter as you scampered to first, hustling
out of respect. I can still see the high fly
and you underneath it, your arms fanning
to tell the others that this was your ball,
and then you would place your arms at your sides
until the last second before snagging it.
Mostly, though, it is your smile I remember.
Every boy who wears a baseball uniform
is you, but how many will live forever?
I raise my beer—our beer—to only one:
you, immortalized in your fourteenth summer.

Thomas Locicero’s poems have appeared in literary journals on all seven continents and in more than 25 countries, including The Satirist, Roanoke Review, Antarctica Journal, Kestrel, Hobart, Tipton Poetry Journal, Taj Mahal Review, Eunoia Review, among others. He lives in Broken Arrow, OK. https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/thomas_locicero