Sample Poems by Len Krisak
Overheard
Below the landing, where they did their best
To trammel words that might escape the room,
On one they never dreamt they might arrest,
Such sentences were passed as sealed his doom.
Stock-still he stood, in what had been, till then,
A guileless and an innocent descent.
He heard their words, and wondered why (since when
Was clear). Clearly they'd said just what they meant.
But what they thought—well, was it such a shock?
He thought of laughing each cold judgment off;
Of coming down to where they were to block
Escape. He contemplated one small cough
To serve them for a cue. What did he do?
Just what you would have done had it been you.
Drapes
From off a bolt athwart the double bed
They roll a length of billowed linen, walk
It to the foot, then fold it to the head.
She matches, measures, pins, and with some chalk
Lays down the line. But oh, to keep cloth taut!
Wrestling, they tug and tape and re-align
What never quite comes square the way it ought.
Three times they luff and double up the fine
White yards so like a sail. Three times they measure
It thrice, cut once, until they're sure at last
That they are right and now have earned the leisure
To rest. She furls the fabric, makes it fast,
Feeling no dire need that she re-pleat
The stuff that makes him see a winding sheet.
Ubi Sunt?
It was a snap once, but by now, a browning edge
Of deckles has outfoxed him—after fifty years.
To match its treads up with the Buster Browns he wears,
This three-wheeled toy now locks him in, one pedal swung
To twelve o'clock, one six. And if we were to judge
It by his stub of shrinking shadow, high noon nears.
Who ever would have thought that he was once so young?
But surely what you hold here is the living proof
That at the age of three those grubby rubber grips
Were throttled for a Brownie, and that plastic strips
Of streamers limply hung there from the tips. His curls
Are simply unbelievable, each wispy puff
And ringlet coyly waiting out a lover's snips
As if these locks were marked as Mother's Little Girl's.
And still above his (yes, "tow"-) head, that star is there
That stands in for a halo; frosty sits the crown
Its light confers—a backlit nimbus all his own
Within a world that someone framed once. Wearing white
That way, he lets his numen radiate the air
That is no longer there for those of us who've grown
Away. His sometime fists, forever clenching tight
Those handlebars, will always wrench you with their force.
What could he have been thinking of, this boy who stares
With such intent, unflinching lashes up? And where's
The amateur who aimed directly into sun?
Where is she now who posed him straddling in that fierce
Grey mask, those glinting gimlet eyes that pierce? Who cares
That they once shot that day in 1951?
What of the Night?
How precious little did I even sense
The burden of our safety that he bore
Who rattled first the back and then front door?
What could I know of harm thought so immense
And bodiless? It was an inside job,
Guarding the one house he was watchman of,
Trying first one and then another knob,
That we might sleep securely locked in love.
Now as I mimic what I watched him do,
Testing our bolts each night, just to be sure,
Do I drift off the least bit more secure
Than fifty years ago? Can that be true?
Then when he's townsman of the stillest town,
Who will I be to set his burden down?