Sol Poetry

Jerry Harp

Agreement on the Equinox

Regrets come up, mushrooms after rain,
but I’m thinking you knew that already.
It’s all about gathering, about another way
through the mist and rocks I once called home.
Kneeling in the grass, I whispered my infractions to

the approaching darkness, grillwork,
and a torn cloth. Candlelit processions
went by in the street with chants, banners,
and old protest songs. In accordance with my penance,
I joined in, but my words kept falling behind

with my steps. All the same, I followed all over
the city, breaking off near the river
to walk along the rhythm of reflected moonlight.
I’m on my way to a place of handstitched vellum
and bold illustrations leaping one page to

the next, bright deer and yearlings leaping.
They rest beyond a leather door,
where quiet drifts, cigarette smoke left over
from decades ago when scholars of the old school
inhabited the place, transcribing

eternal verities. Remaining are mop-up operations,
far better than a lack of occupation.
Concrete stairs wind up and up to a window
overlooking a courtyard where twenty-somethings
throw Frisbees, leap, and bask in the sun.

The Logic of Bipolar

Love is on vacation this month,
not due back until the ninth.
Meanwhile, my aspirations undergo a bout
of spring fever—it’s the season,
but I’m sitting this one out
a month or two, at least until
the lilacs and the bleeding hearts wilt
and I can scrounge myself a new raison
d’etre from the trash.
My dear, let’s take a walk
from streetlight to light
and, hands in pockets, hash
out a plan for the coming weeks.

It’s an original fitness, this way
we have of grappling with our language till
it strays into a realm defying comprehension,
a bedroom lined with velvet degradation
that becomes the air we breathe and wither in,
and even the bed where we lie curled
in our confusion wafts a hint of decay,
and the sunlight creeps, a shriveled thing,
across the carpet, signifying nothing,
but advancing its petty story across the room
and out the window where the dark consumes
it, defying its refulgent purposes.

Here’s where the narrative stops, a brick
in my throat, an anaphylactic
shock to the system that is the air, the room,
the language that we move and crumble in.

Anywhere, Indiana

The young man, yesterday a boy, ranges
barefoot across the grass. A glistening
runner, he’s boisterous, bellowing, and kind,
and when the ball comes whirling his way

without wobble or tilt, nothing deflects,
but rather, his golden arms in sunlight cradle
the ball into a final rotation and stride,
and then the long stroll back, the shadeless field

triumphant enough to bring a mother to tears,
and she does, does weep, watching from the edge
of the trees, watching boys, young men, her son
among them, running back and forth, the only

sound the impromptu plays they call. If only
I could bring to language what the wellsprings are
of this mother’s tears, my dear friend’s tears.
Time, weather, and seasons always intervene

to ripen into conquest, but that’s commonplace.
I think it’s something else brings this weeping
into being, a growing force, an energy.
It’s in the sun, the grass, that long, long stride.