In any other language by Robert Hammond
Weather Report
Life in a fogbank isn’t so wrong.
Picture stray fingerlike tendrils
caressing the wisps of your hair,
weaving the nest of a possible damp,
gentle bird. Life in the gray and
unfocused, rendered vague shades
of art-school cinematography,
leaves every edge soft, unfamiliar
with snipping stark forms in
the atmosphere. Our shapes
in mid-distance could nearly
be one, floating victorious, almost-
felt overlap. We can steer clear of
the sodium bolt of the lighthouse,
that same sudden beam that
it’s always been, poised like a spear
above dark, sodden flanks, like
an answer. Can I get an “Amen”?
Please don’t ask while the usual clouds
make lovely soufflés in the interim.
We are the nestling spoons dreaming
of plumbing the ramekins. Each soul
moist motes drifting, smiling bedraggled
in one vast scene without edges, no
need for simplicity when one can squint
across shifting expanses, spot a familiar
tangle of vectors and faces. Imagine
playing Twister to the lifespan
of unstirred creamer in coffee,
the Brownian wafting: you’d have to
become a contortionist. Better to be
the silhouette, the flicker of hope
in a land without flatlines. Better
to raise a cup within welling fog
and half-recalled fulminant echoes,
not quite yet a bright crack in the dark.
About the author:
John F. Buckley lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His publications include various poems, two chapbooks, the collection Sky Sandwiches, and with Martin Ott, Poets’ Guide to America and Yankee Broadcast Network. His website is johnfbuckley.net. He’s the fiction editor for the journal Third Wednesday.
In the artist’s words:
Robert Hammond. My work draws in the early work of the American abstract expressionists early work from the late nineteen thirties. I’m also influenced by the art of indigenous cultures.