BROWSE Columns
✕
It doesn’t matter anymore that each time I step out
the wind searches my house—
kitchen, study, living room—looking for anything
I might finally have figured out . . .
it only turns up what it found last time ‘round,
some incomplete sentences
concerning dust, what might well not be beyond
scattered across my desk.
In the event a least bit of inspiration drifts by from
pittosporum blossoms years ago,
I leave the windows open as I walk to the cliff
to watch cumulus boat along
the horizon at dusk, to stand overlooking the shore,
useless again with wonder. . . .
Around the corner, minutes keep moving like fish
in the deep, memory like stardust,
still spinning. . . . Fog rolls in and I walk along
trying to remember what’s
still important? Time’s almost up, it seems, warnings
of trouble down the line
ignored as I shoved anything I could into my coat
hoping my cells might last
out the night. All I have left to pay back is a folder
of indifferent phrasings
I helped myself to from the blue. Conifers go on
climbing hand over hand
toward stars, galaxies redshifted and moving away . . .
and what can we do about that?
No one pays attention, or could care less as I stroll
the breakwater mumbling
beside the tide and blather of waves, nothing left
in my pockets but imagination,
a white handkerchief to wave in surrender to the sky.
Look . . . I’ll get there
when I get there—
the longer the road
these days, the better. . . .
If there was a moment
left to spare, god knows
where it went? I still hear
the barn cats mewing
for milk at the screen door
of my grandmother’s kitchen
where I’m helping press
biscuits from dough
with a water glass, then
sliding across the linoleum
in my red leather sandals
mother bought for summer. . . .
Mornings, I shuffle along
in my old shoes and hat
acknowledging a fanfare
of larks and bush sparrows—
nothing in my hands
to offer them, just a walking stick
which keeps me ½ way even
with the sky. At the corner
I stop and look both ways—
if I had a coin, I’d flip it,
turn with indifference and
tip my hat to panhandlers or
locals camped on the benches
who cannot recall what else
they might have been, or
1/2 of what keeps them here
unnoticed, and who go on
forgetting. . . .
I don’t remember
when I took the unpaid position
of Appraiser of Light, but it fit
my schedule, where each day
it’s less and less likely that
I’ll solve the expanding
equation of stars, even
to my hopeless satisfaction.
I’m content sauntering along
beneath old store fronts
like a building inspector
looking up to the sky for cracks
or water stains he’d missed.
But I get nowhere wondering
where the time’s gone, or
the lilacs and violet jacarandas,
the spectacular department stores
of my youth—all that metaphysics
used to add up to. Still,
I’m almost comfortable
sharing a little solitude with
the tide, a last shore bird
winging in as the wind
makes its list and never
leaves me off. Tomorrow,
before walking out, I’ll pause
on the porch, wet my finger
and hold it up for a forecast,
which again will be for dust—
more dust, any day I choose.
Christopher Buckley's SPREZZATURA is due from Lynx House Press, January 2025. His last book, One Sky to the Next, won the Longleaf Press Book Prize for 2022. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to Yugoslavia, and four Pushcart Prizes.
