Tom Wayman

“THE PARTY

And at last the police are at the front door,
summoned by a neighbor because of the noise,
two large cops asking Peter,
who had signed the rental agreement, to end the party.
Our peace can’t be disturbed, one of the officers states.
But when we receive a complaint we act on it.
The police on the front stoop wear as their shoulder patch
an artist’s palette, since the town likes to think of itself as
an art colony, and indeed, Pacific Coast Highway
two blocks inland, which serves as the main north-south street,
is lined with commercial galleries featuring
paintings of the surf by moonlight
—like this night, but without anybody on the sand
and with a bigger moon. And now Dennis,
as at every party once the police
arrive at the door, moves through the dancers,
the drinkers, the talkers, to confront the uniforms and
guns, to object, he says, to their attempt to stop
people harmlessly enjoying themselves, and to argue
it isn’t even 1 a.m. Then Stuart, as usual,
pushes his way to the discussion happening at the door
and in his drunken manner tries to
justify to the cops Dennis’ attitude, believing he can
explain things better to authority, which of course
annoys Dennis, and soon those two
are disputing with each other, tonight exasperating Peter,
whose sole aim is to get the officers to leave
before they are provoked enough to demand to enter
to check ID or something, and maybe smell the pot
and somebody ends up arrested
with word getting back to the landlord
and having the lease or whatever Peter had signed
cancelled, and all staying here evicted.
The Stones, or Janis, are on the stereo now,
as the police stand firm like time, like
death—You have to shut it down—as the dancing inside
continues, the dancers forgetting for a moment a low mark
on a quiz, or their draft status, or a paper due Monday,
or how to end the war in Asia, or some of their poems
rejected by a magazine, or the situation
in Watts or of Chavez’s farmworkers,
or that they wish they had asked Erin rather than Joan
to dance.

That dancing, that music,
the party, even after the cops leave
with their warning Don’t make us come back
continues, the dancing has lasted for
years, decades, across a new century, through the fear of
nuclear obliteration, the great fires, fierce rain,
Main Beach and Forest Avenue flooded,
war after war, love after love, that dancing
goes on, the dancing, the party, the night,
the dancing”
― Tom Wayman

“HEXAGON

Snowflakes descend purposefully
or wistfully
but, surrounded by their tiny peers,
each is confident they together will soon
hide the meadows, driveways, roofs,
fences, the stripped gardens.

A speck of dust or pollen
lofted to the top of the sky
encountered a water drop
that in the celestial cold
adhered and froze, forming an ice crystal
which, now weightier than

the air it floated on,
began to waft downwards,
adding water particles as it traveled,
six spikes or arms creating
a filigree all its own as it passed through
differing temperatures and amounts of

dampness. Its delicate white
intricacy, though, contains an inner space
also unique. One offers a forest of snowy evergreens
where, as afternoon light dims,
a man wearing a homespun hooded garment
and bent under a sack thrown over a shoulder

plods along a footpath
winding uphill between firs and pines.
With each step, his breath appears like smoke
until he and his burden are lost from view,
and a chill wind sways the thin twigs of bushes
emerging from drifts beside the track.

In that flake is preserved
an era in which the body endures and welcomes
the simple opposites: icy cold against face skin
and eventually a fire’s warmth, sodden feet and, at last,
these dried once more, while the eye
registers an omnipresent starkness

—white fields, white roads, white trees—
which, like a minor key, can please the mind.
Here is the past returned to Earth
by the water that changes form
but does not die. In this vision, each frozen tuft
among the millions that lower to the ground

is a memento mori that affirms:
No life is useless
or pointless, since each in its turn
advances the future. Yet all are swiftly forgotten
in the beauty of the falling
snow.”
― Tom Wayman