Charles Rafferty ~ Five Poems

Status Report

Writing a poem feels
dan­ger­ous
again. We need to

be care­ful when
choos­ing
our words and then

we need to say them.

~

Love Song

You can see how Ptolemy
mis­un­der­stood the stars. It’s hard
to over­come the ten­den­cy
to put our­selves at the cen­ter
of every­thing. I’m sure
I would have made the same
mis­takes, and I would not
have had the dis­ci­pline
to be Copernican,
to take care in my records
and to watch the sky each night,
no mat­ter the TV line­up. Poor Ptolemy —
he had a view of the world
that every­one believed
until some­one looked more
close­ly. Thus, we used to wor­ship Zeus
and to think lov­ing­ly
of empire. We used to throw car
bat­ter­ies direct­ly into the sea.
Everything changes. My fin­gers find
their places on the neck
of my gui­tar, while the woman
I love is lis­ten­ing upstairs
and think­ing of some­one else.

~

Trying to Read the U.S. Constitution in the Backyard at Night

I can’t hear the stars
when I wear my read­ing glass­es.
I have to remem­ber
that they’re up there, wait­ing
for me to make
a fig­ure of them. We like
to impose a pat­tern.
We like a sto­ry
with pic­tures. But the book
in my hand can­not
be read by starlight,
and even Rigel and Sirius
are watery blobs
above me. This is the way
things are now — impos­si­ble
to read what’s close
or far, dif­fi­cult to tell
between pres­i­dent and tsar.

~

Drowned River

Now that I know there’s such
a thing, I find myself
think­ing of Beethoven, who wrote
his great­est works
with­out hear­ing them,
though he must have
tak­en con­so­la­tion
in the fortepi­ano
as he played it in the par­lor
while hold­ing a met­al rod
between his teeth. The riv­er
con­tin­ues under­neath the sea
and the smell of your neck
is undi­min­ished
as I car­ry it deep­er into my day.

~

For the Asteroid on Its Way

It’s hard to believe in things
that haven’t hap­pened yet,
like America and jus­tice.
An ear­ly warn­ing will only
give us time to deserve
the aster­oid. That’s what
Anne Bradstreet would have
said. She saw a sign
in every fever, in every dead child
lying in her lap. God was just
get­ting her back
on the path she had failed
to fol­low well. It’s hard
to bear that kind of sky, the way
it lets us look up into it
with­out ever telling why.

~

Charles Rafferty has pub­lished poems in such places as New World Writing Quarterly, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. His most recent col­lec­tion is The Appendectomy Grin (BOA Editions). He is also the author of the sto­ry col­lec­tion Somebody Who Knows Somebody and the nov­el Moscodelphia.