Read More: A brief Q&A with J.P. White
Driving My Friend to St. Paul and Back at Night
I.
All of my friends are older than I am,
From six to thirteen years
Which doesn’t sound like that much,
But given my age,
if those numbers are rungs on a ladder
They are nearly at the roof.
My oldest friend said I need to find some younger friends
So I’ll have someone to drive me around.
I told him I was driving him to the end.
He said, you don’t know that.
II.
The manatees in Florida are dying off because the water is too cold.
The eagles in British Columbia are starving after eating too much lead.
The monk seals are swallowing plastic litter
And so their already limited numbers are shrinking fast.
I don’t want to live in a world
Where there is no need to look up into the sky
And down into blue water.
III
In a few words, what is going on here?
Always there is loneliness and there is longing.
You see this most clearly in the faces of children
Walking home from school just before summer break.
And there is always hope
That nothing we love here will ever change,
But of course change is the only glove we pick up
And take home looking for its match.
I drive my oldest friend to see his daughter in St. Paul,
Then I drive him back.
We talk the entire time.
It felt like we gave our souls a little more food for their travels.
One Long Love Letter
I love the ripening papayas always out of reach,
the iguanas that would be dragons,
the threat of a crocodile in the mangrove,
even the old bald gent who should not be wearing a speedo,
And his young wife on a beach towel featuring a pink seacow.
What if the world is one long love letter to us,
And everything that happens here
Is intended to make us feel the scribble and flow?
Love me. Love me not.
Love me again.
How could you use me for your own pleasure?
Love has always flirted with hate, right?
Now, even more complications in the marginalia.
No one can go slamming out of the door.
There is nowhere else to go.
No text or email will suffice.
No easy answer will win back the hand of the lovely.
No single apology is enough.
You and I have to stay here and work something out.
Whatever Things are of Good Report
My mother told me that Paul
Wrote his most joyful letter from prison.
I asked her when I was ten how was that possible.
She said she didn’t know.
I said he must have had help.
Many years later after she was gone
I read somewhere that one of his guards
Might have held a torch for him
So he could have enough light to write.
Or maybe one of Paul’s friends bribed the guard
To look the other way.
Finally, none of that matters.
The point is this:
Bare-assed captivity is where Paul lives
With Roman peril all around.
My mother knew of this plight long before the end,
but she talked only of good report.
I would get mad at her for settling back
Into the pure and lovely.
I would tell I am being killed all day long
And God had pulled the plug on the human story
And none of us stood a chance.
I would be holding the phone away from my ear
Or crafting a plea.
I would be thinking she had somehow failed me
And the best she could do
from her favorite chair was hold up a torch to my darkness.
Here for Now
There is no explaining Miami.
The double wide Cuban cigar case in the gelato store.
The nippled bikini mannikins.
The ghost ships hanging offshore like barracudas
In a mist of hallucination.
Much has been written about the old time movie stars,
The one we still miss,
Who camped out here in the art deco hotels
In between marriages.
Rita, Marlene, Marilyn, Joan, Clark Cable,
The list goes on. Less has been noted
About the tamanu trees that colonnade so many streets.
The bark of this tree has been compared
To the scales of an ancient dragon.
The nuts of this tree contain a green oil
That will heal just about any wound of the skin.
You can find more tamanu nuts there
than you could ever carry.
When I picked one up,
I heard the faint rattle of the nut over the salsa in the street
And I felt like I could go on
With that tree and its green leaves and its thick scales beside me.
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J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in many places including The Nation, The New Republic, The Gettysburg Review, Agni Review, Catamaran, APR, Salamander, Catamaran, North American Review, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Water-Stone, The New York Times, Willow Springs, Crazyhorse, Peripheries, and Poetry (Chicago). His sixth book of poems, A Tree Becomes a Room, was winner of the White Pine Poetry prize selected by Denusha Lemeris. His second novel, The Last Tale of Norah Bow, ill be published in 2024 by Regal House Publishing. He is the editor-at-large for Plant-Human Quarterly.
Read More: A brief Q&A with J.P. White