John Kucera


Early-Morning Program

Do you see how the universe does the math, 
Bringing every collision in your life
Back to the garage for repair,
Re-fendering it to a semblance
Of order, keeping you going,
Burnished once more?
Three hours now after your call the
Rain sweeps through these streets,
Close on the heels of the wind,
Car tires swishing over it like sea sound
Washing in and out off
Shore, rushing like air through lips to
Lungs, pushed out again from
The diaphragm, the heart keeping time.
High in my fourth-floor office of the
Board of Education I lie on this orientalist’s carpet
Hoping my back will bend again to straight, while birds move
Past every window opened along this corridor, windward, a column
Themselves, streaming. The Greek Orthodox Church
Bells peal through for the funeral
Mass starting at 10 across from here street level.
The hour I went long ago for groceries with
My grandmother, sometimes earlier,
I in my twenties, she 76 or better and still driving
That old blue Buick with the Virgin firmly on the dashboard, 
The radio eking out “rain this morning
Clearing later” as the wipers kept
On sighing, the program switching
Back, now a classical piece featuring a trumpet solo, not unlike
The piece you played in high school, the piece I heard this morning
Even as the rain came through along the hallway there then, here
Now back into your heart and mine.
This time softer. This time fuller.
This time new.



Metronome

Thoughts of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s, 
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still, the chimes don’t ring. 
One day you look out the 
window, green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee and evening’s 
slow return. Steam from a pot of soup 
rises, mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled upon love, running out of time.



Spectrum

Climb inside this stone to find a forest,
a respite of calm order from earth’s chaos.
Here the trees are limbless and liminal,
boundless as they build their boundaries.
The particular oxides that quartz takes
into its predictable geometry
color every copse of six-sided trunks.
Having never seen light, they are greedy.
They break and bend the sun’s strongest rays.
The whole of the spectrum. You can see it
as if seeing an egg pour from its shell
or a forest in the first month of fall.
Why would a stone hide its gifts? Modesty?
Perhaps something in a stone wants mystery.

What mystery could this stone want? Empty
at center, unaware of its destiny,
never having heard a red wolf’s howl,
or the way a wren breaks out in a scold
at a climbing snake or a hawk’s silhouette.
Despite all this, nothing in the stone strays.
Nothing wanders from some swamp or reedy
marsh. What is here is here. Only a slow flux,
a fresh breeze that has just found these trees,
these crystals pyramid-capped like monks
of an older order. Their diaries
kept safe in caves, held shut by iron nails,
are now open, after centuries, to us.
Just the sight, the touch of them, and we feel blessed.

John Kucera was educated at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in New Reader Magazine, The Sandy River Review, Connections Magazine and Friends Journal. He lives in Arizona, where he writes and teaches.

 
 

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