John Struloeff's Blog

Here is the boy
kicking a worn hackeysack
in a field,

his shirt off
to feel the sun on his skin,
to show the world

his chest and
narrow waist, his legs
and back still feeling

strong,
when physics happened,
as suddenly as a torn

cartilage.
His quest to understand
how two bodies

might come together, how
one life might discover
its inner gravity,

was ignited the way a sun
is born, with radiant heat
and light,

propelling him up
and away from his small world
into a dark and complicated

universe.

The clouds had been there
for months. Even our faces
were gray with the storm of it,
the wind tugging our jackets
as we huddled on the pier,
invisible rain pricking our hands.
I don't know how it happened
that I ended up with the remains
of my father in my arms,
the weight of a musk melon
in a double-sealed box.
My brother and four sisters
each held a white rose,
while my mother, so small,
leaning unsteadily as if the wind
would tumble her into the river,
held two red roses, unwilling
to cast them onto the waves.
How could I have known that I
would be the one to tear open
the box that day, to let the ashes of
so many years be carried
away from us? If it wasn't
a sign that in that moment
a rainbow appeared across
the vast river, then it is still
the simple truth of what happened,
the terrible beauty of it.

He waits until dark to fire it up -- suddenly,
like a big dog barking awake to an intruder --
then sits at the end of his cement drive,
revving the engine and smoking a cigarette
down to its filter. You all have seen him there.
Looks like an ex con, but who knows. Lawn
withered, shades closed. Sometimes a woman
with bleached hair parks a sedan out front
and rushes to his door, knocking urgently.
On the rare days when you spot him, shirtless
by his mailbox in the sun, you passing the row
of houses on you...

He waits until dark to fire it up.
Sits at the end of his short drive,
revving the engine and looking around.
You all know who he is. Looking like an ex con,
his grass neglected, dried and burned, shades
drawn. On the rare days when you spot him
shirtless by his mailbox in the sun,
as you pass along the long row of quiet houses
on your street, he stands tall, giving you
the hard stare, showing the full-breasted tattoo
on his arm, arrogant, aggressive,
but silent. Until the sun sets.
This is when he lets ...

Once new
with fresh water
and fluttering
gray birds,
it stands
at the garden's
edge, stained
with old bird
droppings, dried
bowl stuck
with brown leaves
brittle as parchment.
What else
would we expect
now that the
gardener has died?

The rocks emerge from the fog,
shouldered giants slumped
in the surf. Gray waves
smother them, foam
and seethe at their ears,
as if winter and the pestering sea
was their lost war, roiling
across their eternally buried knees.

The light would be so blinding
he wouldn't remember the drive,

the insistent veering of traffic
like spawning salmon,

he wouldn't remember the lunch
he had packed or the warm tea

in his stomach, he wouldn't remember
the dark house he had left,

its ticking living room clock,
its sleeping, beautiful breaths,

he wouldn't remember the years
in his seat like layers of silt

that had crusted to old bone
and tasted now of antacids --

he would remember nothing
but the piercing light, the rising

shadow of a mountain,
the near silent wake of his car

as it swept the dawn's air
into a perfect mirror of night.

so delicate
in her cotton dress
standing in the sun

the light so bright
you see through her
to the thin bones in her arms

hair moving in the wind,
dress pulling away
from her transparent life

this little body turning
slow as ice forming on a lake
so sad how firm she has already become

so cold
her eyes crystal blue
the muted light of a glacier

after Donald Hall


Deep in a ravine in western Oregon
the old Caterpillar lodges between two firs
thick as ancient pillars. In nineteen eighty-eight
the solitary logger – a one-man crew –
steered it here, muscles clenched for the descent.
In the cab, the yellow hardhat tilts forward over the face
as if the young man were sleeping, only the teeth
and brown bone of his jaw exposed, his heavy gray
shirt and black pants deflated. The arms hang,
fingers like dried reeds pointing to the earth.

Or say the rid...

Twenty years ago
my father described a picture
he'd taken in Korea, the forests burning,
the crackling of gunfire
like branches popping in the wind.
He did not want to forget
the day so many friends had died.
But he had forgotten
the film, left it to burn
in the pocket of his uniform
in a fire meant to kill lice and disease.
Now he sees things he can't describe,
no picture to show, or explain.

Thirty years after Korea,
he liked to split wood for days alone,
and he would try to answer
questions of a ten year-...