Sample Poems by Anthony Lombardy
Atlanta, 1962
The trolleys still threw sparks on Peachtree Street.
Our swimming hole was just nearby, but hidden.
We padded home at nightfall eagerly,
when air that winged us news of frying chicken
blew our skin dry and made my beagle sneeze.
Some days a solemn horseman passed us by
to the hollow clopping of his racking mare.
Although we’d turn to watch him, as boys might,
he didn’t seem to notice that we stared:
Old Bale, whose grown-up children passed for white.
At his place on the edge of colored town
we blonde boys lurked beside the makeshift barn.
He answered gently when we hung around,
asking to ride, certain we’d take no harm,
but he seemed nervous when he pulled us down.
His features are not easy to describe,
his gaze always averted, just a little,
though I recall how he withdrew inside
his door when his well-dressed son had come for dinner:
how dark his face seemed then, how blue his eyes!
Hurricane
The spectacle of wind and surging tides
has lent some interest to the evening news:
the flooded streets, the gutted doublewides,
and stranded cows mooing for camera crews.
Acknowledged, our excitement seems insane
to friends who’d rather not believe the story
that we were sad to see that hurricane
downgraded to a lesser category.
What person smiles to see the wind blow faster,
our prudence humbled with our human skill?
Forgive us that we idly wished disaster
on strangers whom we never could wish ill,
that as they cowered, and the darkness rained,
their suffering left us mildly entertained.
Moss
It would be tiring to examine the differences
between the trees, the uncatalogued swooping of the vines,
exhausting, in fact, to attend to their idiosyncracies
and be swept this way and that by their likenesses.
Better to take them simply as trees, all brown
and gray on a warm afternoon in the middle of winter.
And when I’m thinking of what I want to think of
when I die, it isn’t trees or vines but, maybe, a body’s
length of moss on the twisted trunk of an uprooted oak,
or moss that’s covering rocks or roots
exposed on moist ground or cupping
with small hurdles a brown stream.
It’s the moss that suggests the unreality
of a framed and concentrated image,
these full time woods that are glanced at so rarely
that never turn off or pixelize their weird,
incommensurable presences, though they flicker,
surely, a little, when we blink, like the ceiling
monitor at the convenience store.
Even when a groggy storm cuffs the hillside
and everybody looks at the uprooted oak
and decries the incalculable loss,
it is restful to anticipate
the furry textile that will simplify
the complicated shadows of its bark.
For All You Know
Beg someone to believe you always lie.
He won’t believe, and may well start to love
You for your candor and for all you know.
If we advise him to seek the shadows of
Another sadness, he will not want to go.
For even lies, well told, can satisfy.
From incompatible premises we pry
Desired conclusions, and the longings overflow.
And yet we know that we are lying now.
We’re flattered that he’s so quick to disbelieve
That all our wisdom is in knowing how
To let self-referential truths deceive,
We’re touched that what is darkness, paradox,
He thinks he sees, and he alone unlocks.