Nothing Gold
The first night having a beer felt like not really drinking, I read
a poem by Ruth Fainlight in Ploughshares on the color
yellow: a meditation, litany, sampler, primer, blazon;
and it was a good poem, I wanted to remember it instead of
the email from my student who had just been diagnosed
with multiple sclerosis, or the email from my student
whose recovery from her second car-crash was slow,
or the email from my student I never received because they
were not alive, and when I went to mark the poem’s page,
I meant to choose a red Post-It flag, because the journal’s
cover was red, a monotype by a painter named Squeak Carnwath
of two small black chairs, angled together, empty,
floating on a floor or an ocean of red,
but the poem was yellow, and when I looked down I saw
I had pasted a yellow flag on the page
by the lines about picking daffodils with a friend
whom the guest editor, Neil Astley, in the journal’s introduction, said
was Sylvia Plath, and the poem ends
with King Croesus, who, according to scholar Joshua Mark,
“was a cautionary tale among the Greeks on not tempting
the gods’ wrath by thinking of oneself as the happiest
person on earth”--
Some Life
Lemmy made it to seventy,
Bowie only to sixty-nine.
Mozart died at thirty-five.
My landlord’s father lives upstairs.
He is one-hundred and going strong.
There are eighteen stairs.
My mother lives two miles away
and six months between Bowie
and Lemmy. She is drawing
four years toward her own father’s
death. When she dies,
she’ll be buried (according to
tradition) six feet deep.
I am six feet three inches tall;
therefore, I am three inches taller
than her death. In this poem,
there are twenty-six letters,
five standard pieces of punctuation,
and nine numerals (not counting naught),
picked apart like rodent bones
from an owl pellet,
then strung back together,
sacrum to skull.
This is the shape
of a line at one end.
“Be Merciful Great Duke”
My life is covered in mold:
literally, I mean, in closets and drawers,
under the bed, along the inner lips
of hardback books and photo frames,
clefts and seams,
carried over, despite besom and bleach,
from two apartments and three years ago,
a place behind a bigger place,
shadowed backyard shack by the sea
where salt-fog slunk in each night and stuck
like licked cotton candy,
where the floor had no foundation below,
walls bred rats, windows cracked
their narrow knuckles when the wind was up
to let in the damp,
and mold grew like a rough draft,
all junked lines and hesitations,
tattoos, concealer, malignancies…
They say it gets into your lungs, eventually,
the fur and rot,
but worse is how dark hides in the mind.
Two apartments and three years later,
I still can’t scrape my
skull clean…
After the Storm
The beach road is ripe with kelp.
Clouds hang from the rusty hooks
of pine and oak on the mountaintop,
soggy towels. The air is nude.
It does not want to dress again
in tired light and dust. Out
on a small rock in the bay’s heart,
an egret stands giving a sermon
no one hears on fish and faith.
It feels good to be washed this raw.
Kent Leatham’s poems and translations have appeared in dozens of journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Softblow, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He received an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Pacific Lutheran University. He was born and raised around the Monterey Peninsula.
The first night having a beer felt like not really drinking, I read
a poem by Ruth Fainlight in Ploughshares on the color
yellow: a meditation, litany, sampler, primer, blazon;
and it was a good poem, I wanted to remember it instead of
the email from my student who had just been diagnosed
with multiple sclerosis, or the email from my student
whose recovery from her second car-crash was slow,
or the email from my student I never received because they
were not alive, and when I went to mark the poem’s page,
I meant to choose a red Post-It flag, because the journal’s
cover was red, a monotype by a painter named Squeak Carnwath
of two small black chairs, angled together, empty,
floating on a floor or an ocean of red,
but the poem was yellow, and when I looked down I saw
I had pasted a yellow flag on the page
by the lines about picking daffodils with a friend
whom the guest editor, Neil Astley, in the journal’s introduction, said
was Sylvia Plath, and the poem ends
with King Croesus, who, according to scholar Joshua Mark,
“was a cautionary tale among the Greeks on not tempting
the gods’ wrath by thinking of oneself as the happiest
person on earth”--
Some Life
Lemmy made it to seventy,
Bowie only to sixty-nine.
Mozart died at thirty-five.
My landlord’s father lives upstairs.
He is one-hundred and going strong.
There are eighteen stairs.
My mother lives two miles away
and six months between Bowie
and Lemmy. She is drawing
four years toward her own father’s
death. When she dies,
she’ll be buried (according to
tradition) six feet deep.
I am six feet three inches tall;
therefore, I am three inches taller
than her death. In this poem,
there are twenty-six letters,
five standard pieces of punctuation,
and nine numerals (not counting naught),
picked apart like rodent bones
from an owl pellet,
then strung back together,
sacrum to skull.
This is the shape
of a line at one end.
“Be Merciful Great Duke”
My life is covered in mold:
literally, I mean, in closets and drawers,
under the bed, along the inner lips
of hardback books and photo frames,
clefts and seams,
carried over, despite besom and bleach,
from two apartments and three years ago,
a place behind a bigger place,
shadowed backyard shack by the sea
where salt-fog slunk in each night and stuck
like licked cotton candy,
where the floor had no foundation below,
walls bred rats, windows cracked
their narrow knuckles when the wind was up
to let in the damp,
and mold grew like a rough draft,
all junked lines and hesitations,
tattoos, concealer, malignancies…
They say it gets into your lungs, eventually,
the fur and rot,
but worse is how dark hides in the mind.
Two apartments and three years later,
I still can’t scrape my
skull clean…
After the Storm
The beach road is ripe with kelp.
Clouds hang from the rusty hooks
of pine and oak on the mountaintop,
soggy towels. The air is nude.
It does not want to dress again
in tired light and dust. Out
on a small rock in the bay’s heart,
an egret stands giving a sermon
no one hears on fish and faith.
It feels good to be washed this raw.
Kent Leatham’s poems and translations have appeared in dozens of journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Softblow, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He received an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Pacific Lutheran University. He was born and raised around the Monterey Peninsula.