Poems by J.R. Solonche

 

THE VET IN MY CLASS

He sat in the last row, his back
against the cinderblock wall.
He needed to see everything.
He needed to hear everything.
He chewed the plastic cap of his pen.
He was a chain smoker.
His fingers were yellow.
He wrote essays about Hemingway and dogs.
He listened with his whole body,
immobile, like a man standing guard at night,
knowing that the room is safe,
knowing that the textbook is wrong,
knowing that history is not made of dates
but of nineteen-year-old boys
who leave their future in the sand near Fallujah
and come back to sit in the back row,
needing to see everything,
needing to hear everything,
needing to start over.

 

VIETNAM WAR MEMORIAL

You were never there, in country,
but you come here to this long
chevron of black granite,
cut deep into the green grass
like a wedge holding open a heavy door.
The granite is too polite.
It polished away the mud of the Mekong.
It wiped the red dust from the boots.
But it’s all right.
You do not look at the stone.
You look through it.
There are fifty-eight thousand names here,
carved into the polished surface,
arranged by the date they died,
not by alphabet,
so that friends who fell together
remain together in the dark.
A woman taps a piece of paper
with a black crayon.
The name James emerges from the rock
like a ghost stepping through a mirror.
You lean close to read a year,
nineteen-sixty-five, the year you were called up
but failed the physical,
so didn’t go,
and there you are,
standing behind the names,
your own face floating in the granite,
grey and quiet, among the dead,
wondering why the living
are the ones who look like shadows.
You didn’t go,
but you come here because you could have gone,
because they went.

 

GREEN TEA

A quiet leaf in a quiet cup,
it doesn’t boast of fields or
the rough hands that picked
it. It doesn’t long for the fire
that darkens its black cousins.
It asks only for water, hot but
not angry, plus a little time
to remember the color it used
to be. It steeps, surrendering
only the essence of a morning
in a place I will never visit.
The steam rises, becomes part
of the air I’m already breathing.
I do not speak. To speak would
be to stir the water, to break
the surface where the sky is
briefly caught. I lift. I sip.
My throat grows warm.
The world outside the glass
goes on being the world
but smaller and farther off.

 

SAPPHO

We speak of the fragments as if
something is broken.
But look at the page.
A noun here. A pronoun there.
A verb suspended in twenty centuries
of silence.
It is like looking at the night sky
where the stars are far apart,
and the darkness between
them is doing all the work.
We do not need the rest of the sentence
to know she was cold,
or that the moon had gone down,
or that she lay alone.
The white space is the music
we were never meant to hear anyway.

 

THE SHOE

There is a shoe by the road.
A sneaker, blue and white,
lying in the gravel like a dead
bird. It is missing its mate.
It is missing its foot. It looks
very lonely there, as if it’s
waiting for a bus. Of course,
I wonder about it. Of course,
anyone would wonder about it.
Did someone jump out of a car?
Did someone lose it in a fight?
Did a dog carry it off and then
drop it? The rain has washed it.
The sun has faded it. The ants
are exploring the inside, checking
the size, seeing if it fits. I wonder
about the other shoe. Is it in a closet
somewhere? Is it in a garbage can?
Does it miss its brother? We think
objects have no feelings. I’m not so
sure. A single shoe by the road
has a very sad face. I walk past it.
I leave it there. It belongs there.
It belongs to the grass, to the ants.
It’s a monument to a step someone
took and then forgot to take again.