Sample Poems by Judith Bowles

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Untitled Poem

Not finding the grave of my parents
I came down the road of misshapen trees whose
roots, strangled, shoved up in a mass and a heave.
Earth there is parched and speaks, with an effort, of days
filled with birds, of the many shades of memorial green.
I am getting rid of some clothes that clutter my mind
with their endless stripes and misshapen sleeves.
Two bags-full hope that this riddance makes room
for some grammar to settle, finally, and offer the handhold,
the intricate balance that aerial footing requires.
Not finding my untitled poem this morning was like the mass
and the heave of the earth, parched but still speaking,
and it told me so.

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Correspondences

An allee of soft pines my father planted
on one of the multiple hills in southern Ohio,
to frame his shooting range, hid him
behind the cabin he called Possum Run.
A place, he said, would add years to his life.

The trees gathered sparrows busy
being together, their flitting a song in itself.
They rose in an urgent communion,
a breath taken up and released,
when the shot cracked the air.

It was sound being seen, this rush and rise,
an explosion in air of a hundred hearts
beating together and moving together
like a story being told by a chorus
about one lonely man.
My Father Explains

A blind man came for dinner
to our house. My father described
the plate that sat before him
as if it were a clock.

Chicken would be at 3, potatoes
at 6, peas at 9. The man shut his eyes
and smiled at a lesson so clearly stated
that you would almost have to

be blind to imagine.
I wondered when the man
shut his eyes was he picturing
my father blind

to give himself company
in the world where he lived.
I shut my eyes and so did my brother
and we tried to eat without seeing.

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Echo Chamber

Wood paneled my father's study,
a sturdy oak table with heavy turned legs,
books like unclimbable mountains squeezed on shelves,
or wide open on its own slanted table, all

three-thousand, three-hundred and fifty
papery thin pages of Webster's International.
Leaded glass windows erased trees to shadowy
shapes; faded to blonde, the head and arms of the brown

leather chair. And on a small table to the side of the chair,
his Dictaphone, cone on a cord in my hand, I sat cushioned
and ready to nearly sing with Annabelle Lee. She was a child
and I was a child. These were words I was ready to own

at the press of a little red button. It seemed purely me
over and over, sound swelling and cadenced beyond
my own ken, my senses leaping in a newfound expanse.
A tiny needle like a doll's sewing machine

etched grooves into the cylinder where my voice
skidded and settled, and another button,
black, brought it up out of the cone like an echo chamber.
From this dazzle of possibility

came small, watery unstirred words,
heavy urgent breaths, and perhaps most woeful of all,
a monotonous sing-song version that lost me
to Anabelle Lee.

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My Father Mowing the Lawn

My house was on a hill.
The front yard sloped down to the road.
The back yard was flat.

As a child I thought things
had always been as they were.
Would always be as they were.

Even the trees.
The catalpa by the driveway in the front yard.
Its giant memorial leaves.

The privet hedge at the side of the house.
It was a monument too
That outlined forever the turn up the hill.

The basement, the coal bin, the rec room,
the shuffle board court out back.
All impervious to change.

My father's habits rose like the sun every day,
he set out for the hospital, dressed and shined
and became who I was told he was.

The catalpa grew and its huge flowers turned
into leathery pods. My father never came home to us
the way I saw men in movies coming home from work

their jackets hooked over their shoulder,
their collars loosened, open, ready to laugh.
I wondered if it made a man unimportant

to like his family. Occasionally
my father mowed the front lawn. The push mower
rhythm was set by the turn of the wheels,

a hesitant moment then a quick whirring rush
except when it jammed from a stick.
Something was on display when this impeccable

man mowed the lawn shirtless, his mat of chest hair
lay against his skin like barbed wire,
his underwear hung out from his shorts.

The lawn was well kept. He never looked up.
We never quite learned how to talk to each other.
All of us lonely we weren't sure for whom.

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Atlantis-A Question

I left jam on the page while I read in the A's
how Atlantis sank in the sea

then tried with a wet cloth to wipe it off. The paper
dissolved and tore

in my frantic attempt to set time backwards
before my unknowing finger

had brushed the place where Atlantis followed
Atlantic Standard Time.

Now I'll always remember the name
of the island that sank

the way that my kneecaps surrounded by bathwater
sat like two crowns

before they got slowly drowned while I watched
and wrote words

in the tiny bubbles lining my legs. The way water
inched up was a lesson I loved

to learn every time. And what was Atlantis to me
anyway, where everything went under

and never came up? Like a funeral where they say
gone but not forgotten.

What good was remembering
if they always stayed dead?