Jon Wolston's Poetry Archive

A purloined mother-of-pearl shell
from Robben Island
cradles my orange earplugs
at the bedside.

How lame I feel
in the shadow of Nelson Mandela,
how inconsequential.
Have I hit as many rocks?
A few fossils in Nova Scotia
was about it last year.

I curated them mercilessly
in the Windy City
down by the waterline
but doubted anyone would buy
a coal-black leaf
from the Mississippian period.

I’d forgotten you see
that Mandela lives,
forgotten until one night
he answered my silent cry
and handed me his medal.

One day my parents left me alone in a butcher shop in Belgium. My uncle was buried outside the village in one of those cemeteries with zillions of headstones sticking out of the ground like white dominos ready to fall over. He got killed in the Battle for the Bridge at Remagen, but i only learned where that was years later. So i survived after all you see. The Debiolles were hosting my family because they had looked after Uncle Kenny’s grave ever since the Liberation of Europe. Even an eight-year-old knew his father had helped to save the Free World back then.
There was only one bathroom, so Monsieur Debiolle peed in the garden when he thought nobody was looking and i couldn’t wait to tell my friends when i got home that Belgians were just like us. Yeah, i made it back to New Hampshire alright. i still wonder why it bothered me so much to be left alone in that butcher shop. My dad was driving my mom crazy that day. He wouldn’t stop asking her to translate the joke about the butcher who backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.

Last night I dreamed the Gipper
was giving me advice
on how to charm the Democrats
and melt their lofty ice.

I’ve forgotten all the details
of exactly what he said–
it was something about friendship
and letting them eat bread.

I’ve had enough of head wounds.
God keeps on slicing me open,
when I’m not looking.

I blame it on the dusk
or silly Troy
or one glass of wine
and I curse like Aeneas.

If God hadn’t knelt down that way
so gently beside me
I would have died by now
a little less open.

I like J.D.
Salinger’s pine trees–
white like he is,
so white
he looks like winter,
old man winter
with bark for skin,
enduring Dachau’s sins
all these years
with his love of innocents,
still standing with boughs so protective
weighted by snow
still standing
over piles of broken limbs in the early spring.

I dreamed I lay down on the sidewalk
and everybody joined me.

“Curb your enthusiasm”
I wish I’d thought to say.

Brick sidewalks curl up
like a python underfoot,
pasted with red leaves.

Shiva is so smooth.
His black Bengali carvings shine,
millennia later.

My soul lay squirming,
too chagrinned
to look my way or speak.
Your light’s too harsh,
my soul declaimed,
for playing hide and seek.

This comes as a surprise to me,
these parts of you, I said.
You all can play
now that you’re here.
I’ll turn away my head.

There’s more to come,
my soul pronounced,
as if I didn’t know–
as if I didn’t have a heart,
as if my pulse were slow.

I know I said
I loved you well
when you were just a lad.
The ages come, the ages go,
you take your time, be sad.