Poems by Jack Galmitz

 

Coincidentia Oppositorum

I.

I was the executioner.
I placed my head on the block of wood.
I asked myself if I wanted to say anything
before the sentence was carried out.
I said no.
The rest went dark.

II.

I was in the crowd. I came to watch.
There was great excitement all about.
Everyone was anxious to see the head lopped off
and fall into the waiting basket.
You do not get to see such things every day.
Most days are just drudgery.

III.

I was once a priest.
Now, I am an excommunicant.
I watched with disgust this lurid display.
I thought of how much pain we caused each other
and ourselves. I, who had once used
cattails to renounce lasciviousness.
I saw it thrive in the crowd today
at this spectacle.

IV.

I was the wife of the condemned.
It was my duty to come.
He was not a bad man.
He seldom drank and only beat me now and then.
He provided food for the table
and a roof over my head.
I said my prayers at the end.

V.

And I was the sun
and could not turn away
from the square and all
that transpired there.
I lit the scaffold and the chopping block
and the rumps of the horses
and the sweaty faces of the people.
I was witness to it all,
even to events in the darkest corners.

VI.

I never left the house, so the sun could not see me.
Even indoors, I wore a veil to cover myself.
No one was allowed to come near me.
I was shunned as someone unholy.
I was the executioner’s wife and I knew
what I was getting into when I married him.
I spit when I think of the towns people-
hypocrites, all of them.

 

A Note To The Reader

If you are expecting the sublime, I suggest
you look to the sky. Or look as far
as your eye can see wherever you might be.
The horizon is the eye’s heaven.
I am not going to build a supernal architecture here.
I am not going to build a tabernacle for a god.
Why? Because I have no spare room that is why.
And I am not going to share my room with a god.
That kind of thing does not suit me.

No battered cliffs hewn by sanded winds
or tidal swells; no dogs running ahead
through sedge and thistle and heather browned;
no whistle that cannot be heard by a man
will be found here. The clouds of summer
massively built that patrol the shoreline
resist being made into signs and sound.
Let them be a memory, then, another timeline.

What you can expect is something as simple
as a rocking chair and a bay window and a man
who sits most of the day and looks out at a tree
he planted when he was young and able,
when he was strong enough to mow the lawn
and sweep the leaves of fall
and shovel the path of snow
to his door for the mailman on his rounds.

The tree has reached maturity. It offers little
In the way of shade, but that is not why it was planted.
It contains the way of the world in one form
and when the sun shakes light like green glass drops
from its leaves, for the man it is everything hoped for.