April Poetry | howard’s

howard’s

by Beth Myhr

for howard tellefsen

one man can make a world in a room
as howard did in an old shack sitting in the shadow
of the straits like a cold museum tended
by the last man of an age

he let us in just once and we came to know it
how art is made from broken time and mended
by an inclination to save the blue and green
from the green and dying

how a beach below a bluff facing north
and a light like new silver
on water like lost silk a mile out
can give a man his history

a mile of purpled cold salt and kelp whips torn up
by their bulb roots to float and rot
or in living groves tangle even the best line or float
so that no knifeless man in a boat can pull
what’s useful from what the tide keeps

howard knew being master of all wreckage
with its special qualities
of abandonment exhaustion surprise
and perhaps rules of embodiment that say

what gets lost doesn’t disappear but stays
and stays washing up on a shore between a country
and its own temporal self
that no one knows about the inhuman tide metered world

howard did the dragging up of what that mile offers
up over rock outcroppings and goose tongue
through rein orchid tarweed nodding onion
kamchatka lilies through silkflower

a rusted plough and harness on the ceiling
glass bottles made by hand bolts knitted torn net
lines strung with carved wooden fishing floats
oars and paddles and hunks of bow and stern
wood handled rakes and shovels
and the latest from the new world cable spindles

I saw the light blazing in the glass floats
where one man’s long breath floated
four thousand salty miles to be gathered
into that old shack the beginning of now