Reconnaissance
Two Poems by John Sibley Williams
Like Something Meant to be Looked Back On, Fondly
Foxtail and magnolia. Faulkner dividing his dead between brother and sister, carpenter and priest. Orchard-mess of early spring thawing thistly and red. Earth again soft enough to swallow us whole. The plan was simple: wait and hope to see. Wait among books and apparitions until light breaks through them. Find a way of speaking of stars without losing their dazzle. Our voices can’t be caught in the walls between farms forever. Like bones. There are wars for this sort of thing. Wars as a boy I watched from one side. To pass the season, I’m reading infinite narratives of the same simple story. Almost seeing winter clearly. As around me earth begins to open its arms to oak. Shovels and moonlight. Broad, white bulbs. Unfolding; mercy and indifference.
Reconnaissance
This is the nightmare. Severe sea. Cottony whitecaps like shocks of winter trees tugging trawlers shoreward from an acrylic distance. What you close your eyes to each night, never there at dawn. Wind-bent cypress. What seem like stars streaking the airport sky, so celestial, god-faced, before lowering their wheels. Childhood seen through a child’s eyes.
Then waking from this beauty, translating to canvas, for a moment unlosing the world you once pressed motherly to your chest, then like a good mother, released. Here it comes again:
reeds soldier through the foreground. From the cliffs wet stones reconnoiter. Neither moon nor lighthouse punctures harbor mist. The ghosted outlines of parents say you must find your own way to remember us. For the horizon, primary colors harmonize into rust.
John Sibley Williams is the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies and the author of nine collections. A five-time Pushcart nominee and winner of the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Photo Credits: Fédèle Azari, photographer (Italian, 1895–1930), [Cityscape with blimp shadow], 1914–1929. Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
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