Samara by Joseph Harker

Where did we

learn about gravity?

The playground--

but not from

Newton's apocryphal apple

plummeting to earth.

Our source was

September maple

gone slow gold,

the sunlight

preening the paper wings of

its whirligig seeds.

And since then,

the verb to fall is

less fearsome.

We learned it

as slow rotation; we don't

believe in impact.


Joseph Harker, USA

Pelham Parkway on a Tuesday Night by Joseph Harker

March 28, 2011: an adolescent female Egyptian cobra escapes from the Bronx Zoo.

You might see her sliding along, painfully thin and supple,

keeping to where the ceramic wall adheres to the cement platform

in the semi-darkness. You might see her lift her head to look up

and down the tracks, sighing and flicking her forked tongue while

she waits: for this is her jailbreak, her Great Escape to see (at last!)

the sarcophagi at the Met and the cold monkeybar trees of Central Park,

to go to Times Square, and Broadway to finally see Aida, after waiting

so long. She's anxious to catch the downtown 5, and she asks you

(you, who are sitting terrified on the bench, afraid even to blink)

if you have the time, in that silky and slightly disaffected whisper.

A hint of an accent; an unspoken dare to be impolite. You check

your watch and tell her, and she just nods, wiggles her hood.

You might see her perk up as the telltale rumble quivers the girders.

You might see her sway her neck forward and suddenly

snap at something to her right, and you might catch a glimpse of

tail disappearing between her chapped lips, her throat curiously

swollen. And you think, well, that's one way to keep the rats down:

but you still creep onto a different car and hope she's not offended.

Joseph Harker, USA

秋老虎 (A Tiger in Autumn) by Joseph Harker

This holy electricity was in the air today, rummaged between
the cars flashing down Sixth Avenue and the long fingers of buildings
jutting up from the earth. Even in the city’s encrusted heart,
autumn is the kaleidoscope season. The whole world rolled over,

held up to the sun to let all its pieces jangle and clatter
in riots of color: never a sky that deserved the adjective blue,
market stalls lined with apples and pumpkins like some
secret painter set off a vegetable grenade. Everything deciding

to throw one last party. No paleness to it like with the afterbirth
of spring, no drowning haze like the maturity of summer.
Now is when we feel the tumbling of days, see the sun move
ever more frantically up the staircase heavens, feel ourselves

tumbling round our wheel of fortune. The year knows its time is
almost up. At the start the peeking of green and purple is a relief,
but here (in the empty spaces, in the parks and medians and
rooftop verandas) the whole bodies of trees, stones, air,

they allow themselves to burn out with glory. Leaves that turn
have already begun to die: and before they crumble, they
celebrate, stand our hair on end with their beauty, coming down
on our heads, we, who learn so much, who learn so little.

Joseph Harker, USA

Close Calls by Joseph Harker

This planet's going to hell: either wrapped up
in a suffocating shroud of coalsmoke
or boxed away between six thick planks of sin,
maybe starved of liquid capital
or drowned with disease: one way or another.
The End Times are a moveable feast that is always
next year.
Though,
given all the times we played chicken on the racetrack
with atoms and nuclei, the bottles of plague
just waiting to be shattered and re-debuted,
comet fragments blowing out boreal candles on a
Siberian birthday cake (rather than smashing into
Berlin or Beijing), it's a wonder
we haven't been burnt to a memorial cinder
already.
We could
keep worrying about either side of the present, but
imagine how foolish we'd feel if we almost
lived our lives, and missed it, just by
this
much.














Joseph Harker,

Morning in the Churchyard by Joseph Harker

The sea, turned upside down and hung over the city from
four posts, is beginning to drip. It rolls over itself, grey and
inverted, and breathes into the belltowers. The sky's language
is this suggestion of copper music. One big tongue of metal

clacking against its flared lips, one tall throat of marble
rattling with air. The first slants of rain stick to low angles,
coming in so shallow that they skip the surface of street
and sidewalk. Falling trigonometry and the calculus of

rogue oceans slamming themselves fragment by fragment
into earth. One church door is half-open. The wood is growing
dark with water. There is a surprised tree, its leaves caught
mid-flutter, each one laughing at its shameless green.




Joseph Harker

Crazy Crow by Joseph Harker

what would possess him
to make a stage of the driveway
for his encrypted hopskip in
three-eight time–


some urgent fire is
smoldering under those
ruffled India ink shoulders


for perhaps he mourns
the loss of a secret magic
with words that are almost
forgotten language–


the depths of his eye
in turn reflect the beholder’s
like two mirrors face-to-face




Joseph Harker

…Until It’s Gone by Joseph Harker

After we’d dug down deep beneath the surface
of Alaskan untamed wilderness
or the heartbreaking cerulean of the Gulf
and harmattan-swept sands of Arabia,
sucking up our fill of light, sweet crude,

when the gas fields of Persia and Siberia
ran dry, and the plants fell quiet,
and the coal mines were empty shafts of granite
full of dust and the smell of men,
and the rivers whose water we stole
for the Kazakh steppe and the Sonoran sprawl
dried up behind the dams,

one day, when the fluorescent bulbs flickered out,
and the engines refused to fire,
when our computers switched off,
and the sprinklers slowed to a trickle,

we stood up as one

and we walked outside into the humid air,
blinking against the sudden sunlight,
saw the struggling trees and intrepid squirrels,
heard the interrogatives of sparrows
(instead of the whirr of central air
or the roar of SUVs in the street),

and as one, unsure what to do next,
for the first time in a long while,
we looked up into that sapphire sky
and saw just how big it really is.


Joseph Harker, USA