2 Poems by John Timpane

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Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress

Elizabeth and the Tramps

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The dandelions always grew, even in 1930;

They ran the fields to the fence where all the boards had fallen,

And if, arrayed in clothes and dirt, they cut across the grass lot

The tramps could beat the watchful men who lay for them with rifles.

If they could make her back door, they could beg for dimes and nickels,

A chicken wing, or three square yards on Grandma’s floor for sleeping.

Her yeses earned her word among the sons of the Depression

Who traipsed to her in random flocks and seldom lost her mercy,

Found succor for their freight car mouths, bandages for the broken,

A shoe that almost fit a foot, and small talk if they wanted.

Night, train time, called the tramps away. A couple stayed on longer

Then struck out aimless through the dandelions that grew always.

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Bach’s Great Theme

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is God arising from trouble. Beginnings welcome

you; a folk song you know

or wish you knew gives way

to hurdles, threats, twinges, changes wrung

out of memory (watery light box);

you climb walls of thorns to

reach the wasteland, sun in your

eyes; valleys fill with mist, milk,

carillons; lighthouses necklace the coast; the

drunken river of song urges backward;

bass and melody leapfrog; branches whip

across your face; mainspring time relaxes.

Does the Orchestral Suite No. 3

in D Major, second movement, move, or

do you? Moving to be living,

to know, to hear, bear this

chord, those scraps of theme around

corners like spies of the spirit?

Haunts, rehaunts. New fields render alien

the childhood path. Have you been

led? Or is being here, the end, wrung,reset

remapped, equal to hearing what you already

hear?

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John Timpane is the Books and Fine Arts Editor/Writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philly.com. His work has appeared in Sequoia, The Fox Chase Review, Apiary, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Review of Books, The Rathalla Review, Per Contra, Vocabula Review, and elsewhere. Among his books is a chapbook, Burning Bush (Judith Fitzgerald/Cranberry Tree, 2010).

 

 

 

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