September Frost
You walked out one September.
I could smell brine on the air
though hundreds of miles from the sea.
When I called you
a man answered.
Does she know you? he asked
slamming down the phone.
I put down my old phone
softly in its cradle.
You returned one September.
We felt a new passion
agreeing we needed each other.
You showed me a poem you had written,
I couldn’t understand a word
it was so garbled.
This is how I think now, you said.
I could hear the beat
of a marching band on the air.
.
Wide Open Spaces
This country is too wide
I can’t write poems about it,
the sky stretches over my head
with no horizon
to pin it down,
my poems grow into gigantic O’s.
When winds come
they are so powerful and howling,
as they whirl round the few misshapen bushes
round the cracking houses
round me trying to edge
across open spaces,
until I feel like
a piece of rattling paper.
Even the people are too big
I hear their large feet coming
I stare at what seems tiny heads
way up there on shoulders,
they resemble the distant gray mountains
but the flat spaces between
them and me are huge.
I can only write poems in
the cellar by lamplight
where I hear nearly nothing
using a tiny notebook
writing a tiny poem.
© Ray Greenblatt
Ray Greenblatt is an editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal and teaches a “Joy of Poetry” course at Temple University. His newest book of poetry is From an Old Hotel on the Irish Coast (Parnilis Media, 2023). Heh has written book reviews for the Dylan Thomas Society, John Updike Society, and Joseph Conrad Today.
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