“Love” and Other Poems
Love*
If you forget your friends, even if you forget them all
And insult poets—
God forgives that. But hold out some hope
For lovers and their strange minds.
Because, honestly, is there life anywhere else
Now that fake Virtue rules everything?
Whatever we believed in wandered off, whistling
Like a god, and left us here.
Still, however barren the year proves,
Almost at the right time,
A greenness—the fresh grass—sprouts up,
And sometimes a bird sings
While the woods slowly expand and streams move—
At midday, the breeze is already warm—
Then finally the right moment comes
For a sign of the better times
We still believe in, where something that’s enough in itself,
Pure and clear, out of a shining, copper
Ground, can grow—Love,
Incomprehensible, a gift from God.
Some rift in reality lets this one plant
Scatter its seeds from heaven, and it’s kept
Alive by invisible nectars and the effortlessness
That radiates out of work’s core.
Let it spread into a whole field, a thinking, feeling stretch
Of full-flowered world. And the words we share in love
Will be the language there—here—even now,
Where we carry like the sound of laughter.
Love Language
New company started it. Only
in the afternoons when he
had us, he explained why he
were with him. He wasn’t
flaunting, but living openly, and mom’s
thinness—we should ask her—had
nothing to do with him. So we did.
Looking back, it’s clear what
she wanted to say.
Determinant
as these things seemed while we
watched their hair and skin shine
through the divide, they were more
like cinderblocks than gophers.
Whether we built pools or bank
branches—should we want to
undermine it? Overcoming
recreating and overcoming each
time, we had the rest of our lives.
Underpass
Coming over it for once, seeing it from above,
coming to this spot and seeing Route 20 bend.
13’8” plus the unknown height of the train carriage, plus my own
height—I had already been fighting the cabin light to see.
I was close. The closed Tae Kwon Do house,
the island between these three roads, the yield sign, flagpole,
billboards,
the landscaped embankments—
it’s nameless. We’re coming to it, a turquoise trapezoid
cut through the hill. I took you here, not specifically.
We passed, blinking, through both of them… Anyway,
I went countless, with you and others, to get to the lake.
The lake is proof. And a train rips into sight
just before we dip beneath its quarter mile of cars. Simultaneity.
Simultaneity. Then the bridge erases a second of rain.
A Ghost
And so it came to pass, not long after, that it nailed rain.
Both kinds, human and divine.
Living on rice and living on beans and rice,
I can reach into another life.
* A loose translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Die Liebe.”
Jake Fournier is an EMT-Basic living and working in Albuquerque, NM. He researches abolitionist poetry and ethnopoetics in the American West, and he sometimes teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry has appeared recently in Annulet, Lana Turner, and The Yale Review.