Steve Abbott ~ Poet & Writer
Poems
Stardust in Franklin Park
If there is, somewhere on an invisible tether,
a world other than this spinning rock,
the unimagined inverse of whatever we think
we know, it will hum a tune that defines
where and how early-afternoon wind whirls
the fluid leaves of Stardust, shaped as only
a saxophone can, into a soccer ball’s dart
past a goalie’s hands into the whoops of the winners,
multicolored in April jerseys and scattered
in the grass like marbles on blacktop, where the slap
of sneakers offers a percussive prelude to
the chain-link chink of basketball dropping, all net,
at the end of an arc created by a lean body rising
for a jump shot that draws its own orbit in a universe
where the shooter will become a lawyer and a less guilty
boy will be shot, though neither can imagine this now,
and the notes created by the golden horn rebound
off the greenhouse glass, its crystalline shimmer
a vertical lake in the park’s expanse, ripples
broken by the suggestion of primordial plants
in the rain forest room, separated from the cool day
and its multiple scenarios by the essence of clarity—
our inability to see where it all begins, how it ends.
From Why Not Be Here Now?
11thour Press, 2016
Copyright © 2016 Steve Abbott
Vespers
I understand so little I rejoice
In simple things—the shushing brush of cars
On Hudson Street, or purple thistles splashed
Amid the broken glass that sprinkles stars
Along the alley fence. The unturned dirt
Releases humid dreams where ferns will sprout,
Unfurling lacy flags of green against
The latticed edge of porch’s peeling paint.
I like the way the wood feels when I sit
Alone on weathered steps of pine, the talk
Of footsteps calling quiet ghosts to rise
From sidewalks wishful for a slash of chalk.
The smallest of these details leaves me where
I started—in my noticing, a prayer.
From Why Not Be Here Now?
11thour Press, 2016
Copyright © 2016 Steve Abbott
The Torturer’s Daughter
When he gets home, he’s taken off the gloves. Inside
them is a softness her hair releases in his hands, and after
her bath he slowly combs the strands matted to her neck.
The smooth strokes are whispers into another place, into
the face of a blindfolded form strapped to a chair, jaundiced
light refusing to brighten the chill smeared on the walls.
He bounces her on his knee and sings an old folk song,
a mountain tune she hums quietly to herself, twisting
her doll into a dance. His fingers clench and relax
as the melody brings into focus the room where
they call a scream the song, a spasm of shrieks
the chorus, where splintered arias invoke passive gods
with weeping that fills the gaps between questions.
Slipping from his lap, the girl takes the comb, tugs it
through the yarn hair, still learning pressure and
release, how to measure each pass of plastic teeth
so the doll isn’t torn beyond repair. She cradles
the cloth form as he tucks her in bed and whispers
love until she’s so still he can’t tell if she’s breathing.
In the morning, after potatoes and eggs, he kisses
her, opening the door to a yellow courtyard and
what he does to hold their shared world in place.
From A Green Line Between Green Fields
Kattywompus Press, 2018
Copyright © 2018 Steve Abbott
Photo by Maguerite Molk
Title Pending Translation
graffiti near the Railway Museum
It is the language of desperation, not unusual in
this environment, and common where boundaries
harden and worlds of forge and order collide with
voicelessness, its frustration and compressed fury.
This is not mere speech but a canvas
of snarls where something diminished emerges
into light on underpasses, box cars, aging
warehouses, your grandmother’s garage.
Sometimes the words are inflated, letters
puffed up like balloons in a summer circus.
There’s a timelessness to this instinct,
a history of hands scratching and painting
alleys, the untended walls of tunnel and city.
These soundless syllables may not even be words.
This is not a statement in the native tongue.
It rises in the hiss of spray and the solitary
stains that punctuate fingertips, a chemical
mist of pigment that settles into sign, symbol.
Imagine its nameless speakers weeping
their wishful swipes at immortality.
This is the dialect of night. It defies
translation and vernacular assumptions.
It wants to make its mark, something more
than a red or black swish accented by a jagged
slice of haste. We may never understand
the swoop and stroke of colors that fill this cave
wall of despair, a sunset raging against the dark.
Note how already silent weeds and scrub trees
are erasing from every surface the futile gestures
trying to that prove someone is, or was, here.
From A Language the Image Speaks: Poems in response to visual art
11thour Press, 2019
Copyright © 2019 Steve Abbott
Poste Lake
It was where he went to listen.
He’d cross the distance between rails,
consider the unerring perspective of tracks.
How, either way, the world narrowed.
Small houses beyond the lake were
unframed watercolors hung in a room
with no ceiling but the shifting sky.
Their angles and shadows were voices
rising and falling, a type of conjecture
summoning another form of life.
When he settled at the shore, the deep
grass shook him until he was still.
He didn’t know he was being emptied,
filled with a solitude that spoke.
The language of the place was not yet his—
waterfowl he could not name, seams
of light wavering on the other side,
how much he could hear even when
locomotives passed and another life
approached without rumble or headlight.
From the shade he began swimming
up through the story of an inland sea
that left millions of years in stones
along the tracks, shells of small creatures
a page of footprints his fingers traced.
These were small pieces of the long time
everything requires, and it was his place
for a time, where he absorbed what it took
to be unmoving, then to rise and walk
into the clamor of hard streets beyond
rail bed’s gravel and tie, parallel lines
shifting with the crunch of each step.
From A Green Line Between Green Fields
Kattywompus Press, 2018
Copyright © 2018 Steve Abbott
All poems Copyright © Steve Abbott.
Permission to reprint or use in any form must be obtained in writing from author.