Spring 2018, Volume 24

Poetry by Christopher Buckley

Evening Walk

Stars soon over the bay . . .
everything I will ever have,
glimmering traces
upon which we’ve hung
all our theories. . . .

Even the sea
that holds their light
grudgingly gives it back,
even the fish washed up
on shore, their eyes filled
with it.
            Nothing more
to do but walk along
whistling “My Blue Heaven,”
one of my father’s ‘40s tunes
washing unconsciously
around in my brain
for as long as I’ve wondered
about every molecule
under the sky?
                    I go on
sorting through the nuts
and bolts of matter,
just waiting to dissolve
like rust, like sea salt
through my pores
and start perhaps,
somewhere all over again . . .
nothing but time
to stop me thinking.
                            Space,
they say now, is not eternal,
there’s an edge to things—
even if it’s expanding
there’s a curtain beyond which,
beyond which. . . .
                         Last clouds
for instance—so much laundry
on the horizon line, rinsed
of any suggestion—I feel empty
just looking at them, as though
I’d known the bottom line
about hope all along.

 

 

 

BIO: Christopher Buckley’s Star Journal: Selected Poems was published by the Univ. of Pittsburgh Press in 2016. Spanish Notebook was published by Shabda Press in 2017.