Jesse Wolfe (3 poems)
Quotidian Throne
His dream was to stride through corridors of years
secure, unscarred by pain,
ultimately alone.
He knew how to acquire admirers:
he excelled at school and basketball,
he’d lived on both coasts and abroad,
had three languages at hand,
and, like chameleons of sea or land,
could blend,
magician-swift,
into gray or tropical atmospheres.
Now he’d been married several years.
His wife understood that when he escaped
into his caves of books
and drawers of journals tethered
to his adolescence
(his competent, peripheral parents,
a pact he seemed to have struck with himself
to embody a prototype that he’d designed),
he entered a serener place,
one more austere and purified
than she, with her explicit fears,
the honesty carved in her words and face,
should linger in.
They’d have a child or two.
He knew she knew
he’d maintain a bank of love for them:
he’d toss back his head to laugh and smile,
cradle them against his chest,
and warm them with his self-regenerating happiness.
Perhaps they both sensed, asleep side by side,
that if any doubts or candid questions
could guide their family’s glittering journey
like a compass rose on a climate map,
they would be hers alone to provide.
Perhaps they knew that long tracts in his mind
would remain—not enshrouded
behind an eminent barricade—
but somehow, although enticing, near,
seemingly unchanging and unchanged
and inaccessible.
As he sensed peace in this accomplishment,
she could be reassured:
the harbor will always be calm,
closed off to tourists and impervious to storms.
His dream was not to be known, surveyed,
but to usher his loved ones toward themselves,
teasing whatever secrets free
they cared—or dared—to share.
In his presence they could dance,
with his blessing they would grow and sing.
His dream was to be calm, kind, trustworthy,
and resplendent like a king.
Weather Report
The mother, heavy in the final weeks
of pregnancy, her dream and terror, wonders:
if I bring my child to the sea
when he is old enough to sense absences
vaster than he or I can fill,
will he see the only gods—chance and the wind—
who sand our faces into dogged grimaces?
As it rises in parabolas and pounds
shoreline cliffs, will he infer moods
akin to mine—cruel, insatiable—
or will he see a blue intelligence
with thoughts like his, or passion like my own?
Momentum
—on a coastal train between cities,
facing backward. That always sickens
my stomach. Nor did I want to look
toward faces of forward-facing passengers
who did not want to look at me.
One tapped his phone. Another’s eyes were closed.
From the way wrinkles spread from her nose
to the corners of her lips, she seemed at peace.
I could picture them a couple.
I wrenched my neck away
from the rolling ocean, toward hills
lent, by distance, the illusion
of being almost still. Strangely,
I thought of our first frantic months,
as though this could cancel where momentum
had carried us. Flurries of emails,
the plan to rendezvous at LAX.
On our first nature walk we discovered
an empty lake in Mojave.
It seemed as still as the hills around it,
and—for a moment—so were we,
like wild deer. Its surface: suffused
with the afternoon. Our best time together.
Thinking of it on the train filled me
with illusory peace. When it paused
on the platform, he would be there,
as little as there remained to say.
“How have you been?” “Were you waiting long?”
Then it would continue north.
Jesse Wolfe is a professor of English at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge UP, 2011) and the recipient of an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wolfe is the winner of the Hill-Müller Poetry and August Derleth Poetry Contests, and his work has been published in New Millennium Writings, Penumbra, Red River Review, River Poets Journal, Henniker Review, Shanti, and elsewhere.