Five Poems

by L. Ward Abel

Crows’ Breakfast

Frost follows

          the shadows

of trees pointed

          northwest

away from a dawn

          below

          freezing

until overtaken by

          that clear blue

          sun

in a bright

          orange-yellow

          sky

where blood-red crows

          gorge

on a shining

          mid-air

          breakfast.

Cathedral Group

I.

Funny the way you picture a place

never squares with the real one

—compare how towns look

when leaving to when

you’re coming in.

II.

A newer landscape shows youth

through crags and tilts and

sculptures jagged at profile

like arrowheads en route

to a wearing down.

III.

O, there is a truth, it has a name

this teeming this breathing blanket

clouded with stars spawned of

smallish light shown-through

taken from then given over

to Tír Na nÓg.

Winterbeach

A massive, barely rounded

white to green to brown line

breathing—these waters,

alive, would otherwise

leave, burned in a cold

January sun.

The astronauts spoke of

a change once they’d seen

themselves from out of range

—a quivering cell, a mostly

blue one, with skin-clear

cellophane

that cradles all we’ve been

and more, holding close

ten billion flashes, eyes—

see-through moving pictures

in and of, not the least within

our heaving swell.

A Swimmer Within Sight of His Moon

Facing edges that blend

            like where rivers join

            an open sea

I float out in the solar wind

            cooking with a scent

            of spiced ruins and

quiet.

I’m a tree frog latching there

            onto a glass sky

            wet, aglow

frozen hot, speaking green

            in Pentecostal tongues

            like a swimmer within sight

of his moon.

There could be a query

            here at this scene

a reason, a purpose

but I won’t ask it.  I hate questions,

those higher pitched

sentence-endings

disturb my drift.

Numberlessness

I sit here inside of now.

A ceiling fan wheels to a blur.

From here across two rooms

and outside—

          a grove.

The sacred instant. Stamped

like film, indelible. Still,

its bare brevity raises doubt

as to whether it ever even

          happens.

It lives in a place of infinity

halved then halved again then halved

to numberlessness and to where

it might cease to be

          at all.

Mass and motion

are irreducible

forking into a trillion possibles

whose nexus, this moment,

remains utterly

          alone.

I remember having been told

that this is all there is:

neither behind, ahead

once, future

forever

          now.

BIO: L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Worcester Review, Riverbed Review, Honest Ulsterman, Main Street Rag, others), including two recent nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and he is the author of three full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry, including American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (Erbacce-Press, 2016), The Width of Here (Silver Bow, 2021), and his latest collection, (Silver Bow, 2023).  He is a retired lawyer and teacher of literature, and he composes and plays music (Abel and Rawls). Abel resides in rural Georgia.