STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
JEFF HARDIN
Morning or evening when I hear the dove call,
I don’t mind being the orphan I am, though
I’ve never been far from the calling of home.
Across the hollow, some late light starts to burn.
I’ll watch for a while and imagine a child bent
to scenes that emerge from the tip of his brush.
What am I waiting on? the news of my life?
some patchwork truce to the back and forth
between light and shade on an autumn leaf?
So thin is the prayer of a man who complains.
I hope not to be him though I fear that I am,
for my joy sometimes, too, is an open complaint.
When I hear the dove, I breathe who I am through
limbs toward the stars at the end of my breath. I
breathe my believing toward an answering day.
He turns on the road in the mist-light rising off the mountain,
into the image of abundance he thinks of as his life,
and the speed limit, being twenty, forces him to go
slow, slower, to imagine the trees’ leaves stippling the light.
Because a person is, essentially, always the same person,
with minor interruptions, an occasional discernment,
once again he thinks of feeling around for a narrative thread,
something to move his story forward, finding only
his same face in the mirror, endlessly itself.
Ten generations his people have made their way here,
going and coming, “plain mountain folk,” he’ll tell you,
with little to show or leave behind. Old himself,
seven decades worth, he checks the cemetery markers daily,
“to see the kinfolk and tell them how it is now.”
More and more, the cool of summer mornings is his favorite time,
the calls of crows in the stand of trees behind his house
first thing every morning and what he holds to be a tender light
pouring through his window, to nudge him awake.
And then this drive through the mist he never wearies of,
how all-surrounding it feels and cool on his hand out the window,
womb-like, or an intimacy of simply being present in the world,
which no one, neither poets nor philosophers, have fully explained.
The trouble, he supposes, “the catch of the whole thing,”
is how one mostly stands outside of everything, looking in,
even outside one’s own life, this brushed-aside thing,
this failed and failing attempt to get to the center
of whatever meaning the premise of meaning seems to withhold.
Possibly all he’ll find this morning is the quiet of centuries
no one but the dead have seen and shrugged away
as nothing more than shifting stones and creeper vines.
Or maybe in the mist he’ll stream his hand outside the window
and for an hour feel as though he’s floating—
wakening and wakening, always to waken inside his life.
Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Southern Review, Bennington Review, Image, The Laurel Review, The Louisville Review, Poetry South, Literary Matters, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Zone 3, Cutleaf, and others. He lives and teaches in TN.
