Tim Suermondt


A TOWN

The buildings arrayed
in dueling facades of medieval,

renaissance and neo—a town
de Sica would have loved.

People share the tight-fitting streets
with compact cars and tiny trucks

that slither back and forth
from the plaza, where a marching

band is parading to commemorate 
a conflict’s end or maybe

its beginning—a lone veteran salutes.
On a balcony touched by grime

and beauty both over the years
a man in a gray suit and a woman

in a summer dress wave,
how dignified and happy their arms

and hands move, the sea air
wafting between us like perfume.



INCHING TOWARD LOVELINESS

                      Keats wanted to write great poetry
                      and I am in the orchard all day.    
                                             —Linda Gregg

I’d like hanging out in an orchard,
though all day might be excessive.
Truth be told, I’m much more at home
on a city’s street, even a mean street,
the kind I never shied from. As for Keats, 
he did write some great poems and all
I’ll say about mine is that I did the best
I could, believing each one was bringing
me closer to a sense of the sublime, almost,
if not yet akin to the loveliness of a peach
orchard, a pizza pie at any establishment
named Luigi’s, a squadron of birds flying
smartly in the sun between the skyscrapers.



REGRET IS UNIVERSAL

When I was young I didn’t know where
I wanted to get to.
Currently, many years later, I know where
I’d like to be
and pretty certain I won’t make it there.

Who had it better?

Painters are at work in the hallway
and I swap stories
with them at lunch, even talk some Spanish.
I loved Matamoros
so long ago, every hacienda sorry I didn’t stay.



REPRIEVE 

After weeks of engaged concern
this day is free of obligations,
large or small. It’s as if the world
has said “Take twenty-four hours

off. I must admit you’ve earned it.”
Yet not wanting to be an absolute
sloth I walk through the city,
stopping at a café, a bookstore, a park

where the flowers keep blooming
non-stop in the sweet heat of early 
summer. At night I’ll be in my make
shift study, writing about this day,

occasionally looking at the sky and its
dearth of stars, brightened by the lights
of the construction site as a reminder:
we all have the next day waiting in worry.

Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems A Doughnut And The Great Beauty Of The World will be coming out early in 2023 from MadHat Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Otoliths, Smartish Pace, The Fortnightly Review, Poet Lore, and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

 
 

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