Jared Carter Poems

It takes a long, smooth stroke practiced carefully
over many years and made with one steady motion.

You do not really cut glass, you score its length
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If you were fortunate enough to live
on a planet circling a sun-like star
in the Large Magellanic Cloud -
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One of life's simplest moments: the approaching of the first few drops of a summer rain. That it was coming, all along, and had been predicted since mid-morning, by neighbors pointing to the dark western sky, and by the agitation of robins, and the unusual silence of cicadas - all that was conceded, and understood, while the rain itself would be welcomed, for it would cool the trees and the houses and the grass, and nourish the creatures of the earth in its invisible and lasting way.

Certainly it was expected, and yet as I sat there reading, being drawn into a faraway world, I had entirely forgotten the roof and the porch, and the parched streets, and even the increased tempo of the wind blowing through the trees - and suddenly there it was, that sound, those drops scattering, nothing overwhelming, just the announcement, the presence, of rain come at last.
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In a cold empty room, down
in the basement, the janitor
had rigged up an old buffer
from the shoe factory - it was
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This one flowers late, grows crooked, overwhelms
with its beauty - a thousand pyramidal blossoms
standing along its branches, turned toward the sun.
Each white-lobed corolla scalloped and ruffled,
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Now by the light of the quarter moon
I can make out the shape of the ‘possum
come waddling out of the toolshed
through strange pools of light and dark
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Now have I come again, after
these many years -
Still loyal, but with the laughter
and all the tears
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to the memory of Max Ellison, at the 45th parallel

1
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Only that when we walked there for the last time
beside the gambrel-roofed barn, before it came down,
the grass was knee high, and a pair of blue jays
darted back and forth in the mulberry trees,
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This was the old woman who ate canned dog food
This the red wagon she pulled through the alleys
This the pack of stray dogs that went with her
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