The Neighborhood in Two Poems
Vincent Hostak
October 5, 2022
I. Monsoon Days
In the land of the living
nothing is dead which may nourish another.
The magpie clutches this knowledge
shards of oyster shells and broken bracelets
trafficked from backyard museums
poured to the altar in a mate’s eyes.
Today he stops to feed in the place
where a squirrel took its last breath.
The curb briefly stained (before the next rain)
Until three o’clock (when the gods are drunk again).
What rests easy?
Not a yellow bullhead
circling the fogged creek bottom
puffing out a pebble
it mistook for a snail.
Not the water striders
on the taught skin of pond
miming falling rain
before it arrives.
The land of the living
is a neighborhood of unquenchable beasts
between foothills and hard acres
and groves of cattails, cleaved, menaced by seeds
where gifts from the impulsive sky
but for distractions each solves to seize.
II. The Peach Thief
Ambiguity
is the night’s best game.
Walk this neighborhood by daylight
you may never be surprised.
Step into this page, into the nigh black night
you arrive where the street
relaxes downslope from the park
(there’s a tiny pocket where the air is cooler).
Shadow
a mad architect
swallows all trusted shapes
returning: a space carved by an open door,
porch-lit bodies exquisitely tangled
or curtains hung from the jamb
(lovers saying goodbye, goodbye).
Everywhere, crumbs of consciousness,
rustlings nearly camouflaged
by songs of great bull-crickets,
leaves gossiping within a rare peach tree
(a hermit in this neighborhood that once was an orchard).
A hand conjoined to shadow
struggles through cords of cat’s eye leaves
swipes at the last fruit of summer.
A moonlight borne thief with
traces of windbreaker or vellum thin wings
(it’s the hour, who knows which?)
tunes out my wonder, minces away.
I consider these walk-ons:
a witness, a thief
an occasion after dawn
(when night selves retire).
What remains turns in a trance
with a different plot
where both scale the hill
search for vanished contours and
find everything less remarkable by daylight.
Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.
