SUMMER
Dozing in the sun
the falling tide burying
my feet in cool sand,
I saw the face of Death,
young, skeptical, trace of sneer.
WINTER
When I closed my eyes
the clip appeared, thick with brass,
slid into the gun.
Each night before I would sleep
I covered the same stranger.
SUMMER
At 139,
the backlit spruce becoming
a blurry spike fence
our red hood gobbling pavement
silence of adrenaline.
STRAYHORN
Flinching, Billy spins towards
the sudden fierce light
above the camera.
Lurching upward from his chair,
through the grainy shadows
of tonight's partygoers,
he raises his arms to mock-grab
the Johnny-come-lately whose
blinding shaft has sought him out.
Bill's face is smiling now,
but as his hand with the cigarette
burns white in tighter close-up,
the frame goes black.
Just as with Duke and Mercer,
the spotlight quickly turns away
on the dark wheel of his life.
DREAMING NUMBERS
A field of numbers,
Arabic and black on Chinese white,
moves silently past me, left to right,
inviting me to focus down
and search its ranks of numerals
for certain strings that just might weave
epiphanies in purple code;
but, already,
from far beneath the surface
of any possible sequence or series,
I begin to feel the absolute solace
of irreducable enigma,
triumphantly random.
GRANDMOTHER STORIES
Of course, my grandfathers had stories, too,
but men's plots are always the same:
a difficult hunt for something,
ending in sudden success,
so often achieved by a shot.
My grandmothers seldom carried weapons--
although one lost an eye
to a Colorado ranch hand loading shells,
her wound becoming the conclusion
to a man's story gone wrong.
But the women were the true spellbinders,
offering open-ended mystery
rather than short, dead-end dramas.
Although my grandmothers had traveled
with their husbands in the same
slow ships and lumbering carriages,
they, unlike the men,
were not impatient for speed or destination.
They savored the gradual revelation of deeper pattern,
ignoring the immediate fascination
in the sharp-cut tracks of a recent buck
or a hand that chanced to open at three-of-a-kind.
Unimpressed by smaller game,
my grandmothers opened their vision
to large, interweaving stories of uncommon people:
of lively cousins in brilliant dresses
who would never leave their houses;
of great uncles whose fastest horses
could never help them outrun madness;
of the admiral who took his Irish setters into battle,
instructing his orderlies to stuff their ears with cotton;
of lives that were continually becoming a longer, thicker narrative
that, even now, might be incorporating my own.
Farnham Blair, born in Washington, D.C., graduate of Yale University in English Literature and Art History, was a Research Assistant at the Smithsonian Institution, received a Master of Arts degree in English from Georgetown University. He has published The Blue Line: Essays on Landscape and Narrative; Immanent Green and The Movie Queen, poems; and Art Notes: Essays and Observations, and Peripheral Visions: Memoirs of a Washington Childhood, through Puckerbrush Press, and fiction, reviews and poetry in the Puckerbrush Review. To read more of Franham Blair's work, visit his website.