Sample Poems by George Looney
How It All Is
Voices from the street are gone
before I can respond.
The drunk who yelled what he thought
was love to a woman
who called the police to haul him off.
Or the madness of this wind shivering
clouds between buildings
and over grass in a city park
where children run laughing through fog
as though it were there for them,
not fallen over everything to become
an image in a poem
with no clear idea except how human it all is.
A woman practices the cello
across the courtyard. Sometimes
at night I watch her feed her cat.
It’s a comfort to know something,
at least, is well cared for.
The man whose voice taught me
what it’s like to love
so much the world has to be a witness,
I want him to come back and be
let in, despite being
drunk, hope a bruised woman.
How predictable this sore world can be.
Always take as much of it in
as you can, my friend, to love.
The Hurt World Worth Having
The old couple upstairs needs things
sedate, their bodies
scarred by past disturbances.
Anything could stop their hearts,
even my son crying
to be fed. Their bodies
fragile, they’ve lost touch
with the grammar
of human company. They watch
the news, only the weather
real, the rest
a barrage of sentences
for others. They remember
weather can erase
things. Survivors live with
scars. Where my wife was opened
to lift our son out,
the requisite scar remains.
Outside, everything not tied down
is moving. No telling
where this wind will stop.
It might break across the graveyard
at the end of this street
and wake the dead who return
to fit into the familiar
wounds and love
the pain they know will be
temporary. A town broken
by weather is
on the news. Rescuers get sick
over bodies caught off guard
by wind, and loss
drifts off the rubble left behind
by what’s already playing Bach
on my windows. I want
to keep this wind from the bodies
I love. My wife’s scar
catches stray light
in the dark, glows. Grief
can scar flesh with memory,
but this isn’t sorrow.
When we open our bodies
to deny loss, our scars
remind us
what we weather in order
to translate the loss
flesh inherits
into a livable calm.
Of Light and Moisture
Gulls cross in flight. I’d love to
dive up and break the surface
of this air. Everything’s wet,
erosion something we live with.
After showering, I dry
your body with tenderness and cloth
that responds to the needs of
our flesh. Gulls cry at
being left to circle above pain and relief,
angels breaking through the sky
from the other side. How close
they come to touching. This
light bruises the places we live
and our bodies. Of light,
moisture, and a census of birds,
I’d forge a history of loss. The world
refuses to have anything
to do with grief, though gulls
harangue the sky, harridan ghosts
whose voices echo the urge
of our grounded bodies to rise.
Breaking the Surface
Loss, just the threat of it, drives us
to a nearby town with a bar
open another hour. In the parking lot,
the fins of old cars remind me
of monsters I believe
still break the calm of certain bodies
of water. Over gin we discuss
Lacan’s Other, its relation
to children pulled from the Ohio
Wright elegized. Both of us believe
the Other’s who we speak of
when we speak of things breaking
the surface, that the Other is
our disgust of ourselves
taking form. We rage against
how it creates legends. We’d like to
drop depth charges, leave it
for dead. All we can do is keep watch
and note the risings. Come this far
for gin, we hope to make it back
without loss. In Scotland, people gather
at Loch Ness with cameras to
capture what they believe in.
We believe what rises from any murk
is what we let loose. That it returns
to remind us words are born of loss
and to take us home when the last bar
open anywhere closes and the gin and talk
come to nothing—the way back
a dark state route where lovers pull off
and park in fields. All the way home
we know what’s happening,
fins breaking the surface of winter wheat.
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