Read More: A brief Q&A with Robert Bensen
Before You Know It
I’d cross the river wide, wading the long way home.
A handful, they said I was. Was I? I gave in
to the water’s tease, to the push and pull
of its slow gray swirl that drew me deeper,
into the river’s churn. I was four. Four what?
No one saw me, or the hole I fell in.
It was just the size I could be forever and ever.
My father had nothing but magic up his sleeves
that could reach through murk to a soggy boy.
What hand beckoned him to my hide-and-seek place?
They whacked the water out and the daylights in,
though I clamped my eyes against an angry sky.
Earth pulled me back, gave me back
my limbs their little weight, so I kicked to no avail.
No fly away, fly away home hymn here,
I’d been going, I was only half-way there.
Put me back, I barked. Put me back, put me back.
Whose voice was that in my throat?
Delirious, they said, so sure I meant Bring. Bring me back.
They hauled me out and drained me and stood me up and dried me off,
so back to school and clarinet lessons and baseball and graduation after graduation
after graduation, marriage and a new life before I knew it.
All the while I didn’t peek, one by one
they disappeared into holes in the earth.
I never thought to thank them. Gone. All gone.
That’s so funny! Knock-knock. Who’s there? Ready or not?
Maybe that explains why the dead keep showing up,
giving that know-it-all grin, standing around in their finery,
rinsed clean and shined up, watching me from their cool distance.
We have much in common.
We have much to talk about.
Rain Forest, St. Lucia
for Mary Lynn
We entered the rainforest’s dream of itself,
a pelt of limbs and leaves stitched and crossed,
a thicket island-wide aswarm with whispers
from a thousand years, though one day,
one dapple of a day we passed in a flicker.
The deeper in, the more gargantuan the wood,
the more diminished we, through mired,
slip-coated rocks staggered along the path
mined with slick, ankle-wrenching roots.
The machete parted tangles like a curtain.
Now and again we’d glimpse the ascent before us.
Giant ferns spread their fronds burst after burst,
and dry, segmented trunks raised their serrated crowns.
The selvedge of ancient flows along the ridge
of a ripe volcano lapped and folded around a valley
there seemed no bottom to, but for the chorus
of waters far below in the ruptured earth. […]
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What Lightning Spoke
Out of nowhere, lightning and what lightning spoke:
spike and decay. Echo.
It curtained the road, a tree of light hung from the root.
The boy I was, was walking with his sack of newsprint blurring in the rain.
The lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming,
its rivers and rivulets flooding me with one idea:
in plain air, power makes infinite ways. […]
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Robert Bensen’s seventh book of poems is What Lightning Spoke: New & Selected Poems (Bright Hill Press, 2022). His poems, essays, editions, and studies have been widely published and earned awards and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, Newberry Library, NYSCA, Illinois Arts Council, Harvard University, NY State Fair, Eric Hoffer Foundation, and elsewhere. After retiring as Professor Emeritus and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (1978-2017), he founded and currently directs the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop for Bright Hill Literary Center. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois.
“Rain Forest” and “What Lightning Spoke” originally appeared with Bright Hill Press. “Before You Know It” originally appeared in AGNI.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Robert Bensen