Poems by Bruce Hawkins
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Kindness
by Bruce Hawkins
Bruce lives between the Cerrito Creek and Baxter Creek watersheds near the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay.
Oil drips in the dark pit.
Like nervous sweat the wet
patch widens and I drop
in the match, watch it catch,
the flames low, slow, creeping
then a batter of wings.
I clang the door shut
against what is leaping
at me, look that no feathers
have fallen to the floor.
This is kindness which, kept
in its cast iron cage,
warms the small house, allows
me to undress, listen
to the midnight wind, sit
complacent as a rose,
while it exacts a price
so small I hardly notice.
© Bruce Hawkins
Kindness
by Bruce Hawkins
Oil drips in the dark pit.
Like nervous sweat the wet
patch widens and I drop
in the match, watch it catch,
the flames low, slow, creeping
then a batter of wings.
I clang the door shut
against what is leaping
at me, look that no feathers
have fallen to the floor.
This is kindness which, kept
in its cast iron cage,
warms the small house, allows
me to undress, listen
to the midnight wind, sit
complacent as a rose,
while it exacts a price
so small I hardly notice.
© Bruce Hawkins
Nest of
by Bruce Hawkins
From Canary Spring 2018
Babysnakes in tall grass
broken in upon
and the knot they are
knowing just to do
is no more in an instant
than the skeleton
of a breeze where
leaves still quiver
© Bruce Hawkins
The Flood
by Bruce Hawkins
From Canary Spring 2019
The flood is a beast that grows
by always seeking the lowest levels,
carrying those lowest levels
to higher and higher ground.
After the waters of a flood recede
the fields have a strange look
of electrocution, of words
with no meaning for us, that
sit in books like burned out flashbulbs.
Analogy snaps, the fields recover,
are often stronger for the silt they have received,
while the words continue to accumulate:
deadnesses, clichés, unusable areas.
When the waters receded from my uncle’s farm
there were steelhead in the front yard;
a big one, caught in the branches of the holly,
fell like a bloated, silvery fruit
near the front porch. The children
carried it back to the river;
nobody bothered to stop them.
They threw it in and watched it float.
© Bruce Hawkins
There's No Place to Go
by Bruce Hawkins
The birds fly and land and fly
and light on wires and fly.
Small birds, they scratch
around and bicker under
the sparse hedge. There’s
nothing to do. They are
little streaks and passages
of brown and black with
pencil colored beaks.
They live near
the cafeteria, almost
all they do is eat,
yet Lesbia supposedly
loved one dearly. Why not,
one time, be this easy
on each other?
© Bruce Hawkins
War Voice: Project Construction
by Bruce Hawkins
From Canary Spring 2019
Through this maze of skeletal, slapped-up houses
runs a ribbon of sidewalk laid out this morning,
a gleaming wetness, a smell still bakery fresh,
an orphic door just now shut, reverberating, wrong.
Red wing blackbirds skim a field
where already the blocks have been surveyed,
where next week the bulldozers begin,
where next month the wives of soldiers will move in.
I smell the quick, vanishing protest of broken stalks,
I watch the look of a newly formed “O,”
the one round lip whitening with sap.
Giving way and giving way to man’s designs
the green world survives by horrible acquiescence,
and with elegant vanishing ink
each blackbird’s low flight inscribes the tangled manuscript.
Because there is no sound in this, the hammering
drone of cargo planes does not exist.
How can you fight this thistle and milkweed, soldier,
this stuff which fucks the very air around you,
which opens for the wind
and flaunts it in your face,
sends guards on duty into spasms of sneezing?
Bulldoze the whole patch out,
burn the dried-up piles of spindly dead
and watch your new sidewalks, how soon the first
cracks come.
© Bruce Hawkins
Washed Ashore
by Bruce Hawkins
The sand tormented stingray lies
up near the logline,
a smoldering necktie,
a suffering piece of geometry.
We walk the shortest distance
away from it
into a black-red slab of sunrise,
liver on butcher paper.
This, of course, is only the world
as I am seeing it,
overstated, and colored
by what seeps
from the cracks in
our conversation.
I must stop and clear my eyes
of this
crude accuracy.
All around us, pieces
of jellyfish lie spattered, as if
some god just sneezed.
© Bruce Hawkins