Poetry

Jared Smith

An Evening In September

My dog has been waiting outside for me
for half an hour before I grab a brandy and go to join him
to watch the Big Dipper set into its forever place
and listen to the crickets of September making love,
and yet he huddles up against me and I press his side to my leg
wondering in all this space why we cannot name each star
or why I cannot name the animals that scent the wind
as he does as we expand ourselves into the cosmos.
His molecules and mine becoming one where words fail
and our protons interacting on a subatomic scale
where emotion and understanding of the animal takes place.
We have a peace in this, an understanding beyond genus
and life to life across eternity is as peaceful as life allows.

Reflecting on Dali and the Surreal

Even in Dali’s four dimensional sculpture
of enlarged Jesus hanging on a cross over Mary
there is not a hair on his chest or belly nothing
but that which covers the face, nor is there any
painting or depiction I can recall that does, and
as a man who felt the world through his moustache
like a catfish feeling for dimension off the bottom
and who had hair all over himself I wonder as I, like
Dali, think of all of time which drips off everything
glance down along my arm to my hairy wristwatch
why there was so little hair on the rest of him and
as I get somewhat older there gets to be less on me
and what might have happened if Jesus got a bit older
or if I had not made it to the age of sixteen or so myself
which was when I began to let my beard grow out.

It is four in the morning
and the smallest bird can wake the world.