Stanzaic Stylings

What Comes Next “This is the Hour of Lead –  Remembered, if outlived" Like a freezing person  recollects the cold –  I feel the hour of lead,  that formal feeling  come on --  the way she said it would –  the careful phone call  the messages, arrangements,  flowers and all –  my ceremonious nerves and my questioning heart as stiff as mechanical feet go about their business the wooden way of outliving this new pain and, of course, this feeling  that follows me like a shadow.  

 Neighbor At his funeral, we filled a whole pew. “The neighbors,” I heard someone say. Family and other friends made a modest crowd in a church that size at that hour, an hour just a few weeks ago he would have been out working on his lawn picking up this or that raking, sweeping, making  his yard, his world a bit better than he found it. We, neighbors knew him that way, a nod, a wave a joke about whatever he or we were doing sometimes a longer visit little more, in that way he was there making our neighborhood, his world better than  when he found it.

  A Good Day I can picture him there waiting in the wings ready, always ready to step center stage His grace and his wit worthy of attention worthy of applause and standing ovations two, three curtain calls reviewers hurrying off framing his performance comparing him well to even the best of them the smiling winners who got to say their say who got to sing their song I picture him there, quietly adjusting his appearance without a mirror, all he has  is his imagination and his ability to picture himself waiting in the wings imagining himself, ready to step center stage.

Spies were absent from what we learned in school, our lessons scrubbed clean, the straight line of history was best and easier to remember, but we learned about them later in endless novels and films; the CIA, MI6, and the KGB live out  their lives as much on the page and screen as  they probably do in real life, live their shadow  lives in the safe houses of our imaginations, do their elaborate schemes following a well-made plot, staged for cinematic effect, with music to  set the mood, with witty dialogue and meaningful facial expressions, one of the several James Bonds surviving the chase and all the convenient women; spies’ absence from schoolbooks left them free to be themselves, to be chief players, our alter-egos at work, imagining guns blazing, enemies thwarted as we move on to our next adventure, a beautiful woman on our arm and just the right thing to say.

Leftovers Now, we’re only two, so we misjudge things, too many, too much; families grow smaller, but recipes lag a step or two behind, never adjust; refrigerators  fill, various sizes of plastic containers, sandwich bags, freezer bags, original jars we can close, pretend they reseal, line up, get stacked one meal on another, crowding till they squeeze space, demand command our attention; what were we thinking, saving things we would never use  and, after a while, we can’t even recall, odd smelling moldy green things, things that liquefied over time, grew white hair as they aged surrounded by other anonymous things, surrounded by the cold reality – we make too much, haven’t learned our lesson, to divide, to measure anew, revise the count, to plan better around quiet meals, our limited needs now, now that we’re only two and should know  by now what leftovers are all about.  

                      War Story   I have a black and white winter picture of my father and grandfather standing in front of our house on Willard Street.   They are at the mouth of the driveway and have been shoveling, but stop to rest and look at the camera for a moment.   I can almost hear my mother saying, let me get a picture. They aren’t smiling. The snow is deep. The snow, even from here, looks heavy.   They aren’t dressed for the job. They are indoor people caught unprepared for this, the weight of the weather, the need to smile.   It must have been a lull between storms, the need to get to the store, and the lack of anyone more fitted to the task at hand.   It is the 1940s. This is men’s essential work summarized in shades of gray, one moment captured in what must have been hours.   It is the 1940s. They look tired and older than the...

Literally, My Neck I travel here and there at break neck speeds stick my neck out when I must, and happily recall when I could neck for hours on end, but at times my neck can also become something quite literal, literally that stem between my torso and head, the vertebrae I’ve seen posed painfully in x-rays, that DMZ I’ve counted on for years the link I need to help me nod and turn my head when someone who turns heads goes by, hold my head up despite the circumstances, bow it when I feel humbled, I’ve clothed it in neckties and scarves, necklaces and chains, stretched it, hid it, know I could hang by it, can stretch it too far a guillotine awaits, my executioner tests his blade sends this preview, this literal pain in the neck that doesn’t go away, impervious to pills and ready to follow me through my neck of the woods. J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have ap...

Snow The man we made-up -- dressed and groomed -- is gone now. The man we grew -- added to, subtracted from -- is gone now. The man we built -- talked to, laughed with -- is gone now.  The man we created -- wished for, planned on -- is gone now. Perhaps, we'll find his hat or gloves sometime and hear his voice fading just out of reach. But the man we knew would be gone one day is gone now. J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in  Social Justice Poetry,   Tuck Magazine, Yellow Chair Review ,  Synchronized Chaos , and  Haikuniverse .

Identify This Man I’ve seen him some place before, the guy the TV news showed wheel a thousand inch flat screen out of Walmart without paying, I’ve seen him somewhere; I’ve seen so many faces and places, crowds full, lobbies and terminals, waiting in line for this or that, ball games and fair grounds, town squares, main streets, side streets, out a window, they all walk by eventually; new faces join the old more familiar faces, people I went to school with, people I passed on the highway home; I have grouped them, typed them, added new features to the old ones; I’ve seen him some place before like a face recognition program, I scan and lock in on him, seen him before wheeling a smaller set out of the same Walmart five years ago, one wheel on the cart wobbled just so and he threw down the cigarette he was smoking when he saw me scan him in, he knew I’d know him next time, this time, I know him, the type, his features, he blends with the others, becomes a...

Train Wreck 9/29/16 Train wrecks, like this one, are apropos of nothing. If we could only prepare for them And have them occur when we are in condition to cope with their seeming abruptness, The surprise of them, have them occur when we can plan our schedule around them, Call off meetings and appointments, set aside other plans, other considerations. Have them occur when our emergency folks are primed and standing by, hospitals ready For the “walking wounded” and the others, operating rooms ready, ICUs and morgues. They are apropos of nothing, or perhaps they are apropos of everything we live with. Our morning is traveling on, on track, our day is set with routine, the expected, and Then they interrupt the regular program with a bulletin and then our day becomes yet Another train wreck, like the others we have lived through, or didn’t. J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems hav...

  Without a Prayer “All we can do now is wait,” they say, but there was a time when they would have said, “All we can do now is pray,” but today we have devalued prayer and thus are left with just waiting, that void, that wasteland we fill with possible scenarios, those imagined outcomes we are full of, always ready to play out, pray out – the doctor coming in to say it all went well, or he says the opposite and things come tumbling down, or finally your child is pulling in the driveway with stories of why they are late, didn’t call, or the police pull in and grief is written all over the moment –  our imaginings play out all the variations, the good outcome, the bad; we fill in the blanks in our lives with stories we hope for, with stories we dread, with something that somehow seems like a prayer. J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermo n t and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in  Social Justice Poetry, ...

 Speech The problem with public speaking is the public part, That group there to observe, listen, absorb your words; You know them well, have played that part many times, You feel their discomfort with their passive role; at first They feel a moment of empathy, imagine themselves Alone up there about to speak, then they move on to Discover the nature of the speaker, you this time, and They watch for nervous gestures, any break in your voice, Before they begin to weigh what you have to say; you Know their part, and now at the lectern, podium, pulpit On stage you begin your part, the one you watched often Enough that you can play both parts out in your head, Speaker and the spoken to; you adjust the mike and then Search their faces, search the silence you need to fill and Begin; the things that sounded so good in your head mock You, form an echo, play out in a voice you don’t know, The voice of the stranger you have become, the words Bounce around, lose focus; the other you sits in t...