This week, we're pleased to feature two poems by Stephen Siperstein. Stephen is from Marblehead, MA, and currently pides his time between the Boston area and Oregon, where he is pursuing a graduate degree. Stephen's poetry has appeared in Ecotone: The Journal of Environmental Studies. Read on!
Two Poems
Waiting in the Parking Lot
my father always told me it would come to this,
this or I would drive a cab up and down Broadway,
which always seemed just a bit more glamorous than
waiting to confront you in the parking lot
with soft words and accusations
why are you leaving? why not stay and listen
to your neighbors reading dreams,
deciphering the patterns on yellowing bedsheets.
I am the poet waiting in the parking lot.
if you stay I’ll check your oil and fluids
my father taught me years ago
something I would need to know, he said,
especially if I drove a cab.
so now I have something to offer you
if you stay, I’ll do this.
or if you go back inside we can build
forts behind bookshelves
Jefferson will be one cornerstone, Woolf the other
and it will be like the forts we built
in our fathers’ basements, when they were still
basements with grey concrete floors
before they became the carpeted confinement
lairs of Sunday night television
before we had to escape they were ours.
stacks of books will be our walls, our roof, and our neighbors
will read us poems.
I am the poet waiting in the parking lot.
go inside.
I will follow you there.
on reading Frank O’Hara far away
I read Frank O’Hara far away
I think, now you are walking uptown
through sacred snowfalls now
turning off the street into a coffee shop
where in the corner one empty chair
tied with balloons and ribbons, sparklers even
yes, now someone’s been waiting for you
with new stories and a steaming coffee in a to-go cup
to-go because your apartment is not far away
and you might need help warming the cold sheets.
I sit among rotting logs tickled by ferns
unfurling into the darkness of my ears I hear
the words of whom you will meet
on any evening, early or late,
yet my own encounters
seem inevitable to me now
with each snagging branch
predicted by some ancient prescience
the call of ravens marking the circles
of hours back unto themselves
and finding constancy not in some
undying grind or other things near to love
but elsewhere, by the light of the refrigerator
or the smell of a highway truck stop
which really I suppose is not so different from love or the smell of tenth avenue on a Monday
our true blue American waterway not far in the distance
you not far in the distance, the distance from any one trillium
to any other trillium I regret to measure
rather assuming that in this land of overwhelming green,
roots eventually entwine
when the snow begins to thicken
and seeking the warmth of tunnels
when the weeds are first breaking through,
the currents dance, spring up as sparks to our heels,
and strides more honest and full of purpose
take us away.
