Sample Poems by Bob Watts

The Idea of Landscape

There will be no trees there,
no split-barked sycamore
ascending, spirit and flesh
caught in rough metaphor,

no flare of sweet gum leaves
as the refining fire
for light stropped keen
on steep October air,

no branch of shumard oak
in leafless underline
to the silhouettes of crows
against the sky,

nothing higher than ourselves
not made by us to throw
the shadow of a veil
between the barest earth

and unencumbered blue
scrubbed to emptiness
by the long wind through
the hair unnumbered on our heads.

The Light at Hinkson Creek

One final fall of sun slips past the ridge
behind my shoulder, coats the upper limbs
of a creek-side sycamore in gold too rich
for February, then settles on a stream
dead still, the clumps of foam scattered across
the water hung like fruit on mirrored trees.
The light seems somehow brighter brought to rest,
entangled in the far bank’s canopy—
the earthbound branches leafless, mottled gray
and silver-white, the rough bark’s loosening curls
inverted in immaculate relief,
and shimmering at my fingertips, so close
I have to reach for it, the twice-bent gleam
that passes in the swirl my reaching makes.

 A Poly-Grecian Urn: Wal-Mart, Easter Weekend, 1998

I.

Half-ravished by the first light touch of sun
  on winter-languid skin, and air’s slow stir—
ardent, close—across bare limbs, we’ve come
  for potting soil, for silver-bladed trowels,
for the brightest daubs of color we can bear
away, pre-blossomed in black plastic flats
 of vinca, dianthus, pansies. Months too late
 to raise the tulips’ complex pulse, we praise
   instead the ready-made, until it takes
   the squat shape of this bastard child of Keats.

II.

Maybe we’ve come to this—all that remains,
  the pointless simulacrum of a choice:
white or green, it’s plastic either way,
  machine-stamped in the hollow shape of loss.
Or is this too much to make of a cardboard nest
 of two-part urns, bowls and bases packed
  as snug as bullets in a magazine,
 arranged for sale in monochromatic stacks,
the scraps of half-truth and cheap beauty rent
  to pieces by this dying century?

 III.
 
The two of us are young enough to dream
 we’ll make it out alive, somehow escape
the burden of our genes and history
 to start again, unstained. From the rotting corpse
of a lion he’d killed, Samson took honey, ate,
 and found it sweet, but then slew thirty men
because of it. Like him, we crave the taste
  of something drawn from death, but can’t be sure
  if fingers drip with syrup or with gore.
 Or both. Nothing we touch is innocent.

IV.

A block away, pale-bellied leaves, wind-wheeled,
  invoke the storm, but just beyond the gate,
my neighbor’s yard’s a fuchsia-tinted peace
  of statuary petals, as if the air
were stunned to silence, stillness, by the brute
 beauty of a redbud’s blooms. I go inside,
  come back to limbs still shaking, stripped of leaf
 and blossom, and sidewalks scrawled in a green hand
just clear enough for me to read the truth,
   that beauty couldn’t even save itself.

V.

I fill the urn with pansies, purple, white,
  and pink, but nothing lives past the first rain,
when water pools around a sodden welt
  of storm-pressed flowers. The planter doesn’t drain;
its certitude drowns everything I put
 in it. I dump the slop of store-bought loam
  and flaccid stems, then cut thin slits to bleed
  the water out, and try again, a need
 to keep something alive, if nothing more
than these doomed blossoms in a plastic pot.

Soracte

Look at Soracte, its bright weight
of snow. Look at the trees. They can’t
bear more, bent close to breaking.  The steep
streams stop, ice-bound.

So turn away, build up the fire,
uncork the ’98 Merlot
and let it breathe. The world will take
    care of itself.

Time turning to tomorrow will
silence the storm; the white-peaked waves
will fall still, the sea-wind beating
    through the cypresses

and bare-limbed ash will lie, the branches
tremble to rest. Let them. And spend
each new day’s windfall while it’s green.
    Night calls you now

to lend your whisper to love’s swelling
chorus—a giggle caught beneath
a quilt, a rising breath, a soft
    cry from a dark

backseat, a boy, his fingers fumbling
with his belt, a girl, lifting her hips
the barest inch to let him—help him?—
    ease her jeans down.