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Best Poems From
JOANNE MONTE
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1.
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The Hurricane
Threatening our tenacity that summer
were the most turbulent vandals of weather.
We drifted, guarding our freedom,
and not thinking the errors weve made
could prove our fragility. But then
a gloss-over in pewter at Hatteras
by that discreet brush of fog preceded a languor
at the marina where boats were sponged up like milk
into the null and void. Out of the southeast,
out of a free will that went undisciplined
all day and night, the wind looted the coastline
with more than one accomplice,
stealing in quick swiping gusts the sheen
of a generations endeavors. The sea in its turmoil,
rode a fast shuttle back and forth
into an outbreak of foam, a sparkling seltzer
of sea water that kept striking somewhere onshore,
housebreaking and plundering. Terror lit up
the eye of the lighthouse that stood on the edge
of familiar warnings, listening
ever so much in those desperate hours.
What does it mean to violate an appeal
for salvation; to surrender in exile
when at last the final scene plays out?
What will it mean to be left without bread,
without the reserve to take back, to take over
given nothing but the astonishing ruins of a landscape
we merely have the means to stare at?
Joanne Monte
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2.
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Displacement
Entering the garden,
I notice the rhododendron,
the platinum pearl, that had displaced
the unwanted vines of bittersweet
tangled around the throat of the honeysuckle,
as though the blossoms
had as much a rightful deed to be rooted
as the dove tree, hanging its branches
over the frame of the border,
not native to the land at all.
But the tree itself, untouched
in its mural of sun and partial shade,
and envied by its resolve to take the brunt
of radical weather, still struggled
in its purpose to remain in its quadrant,
eyed by yew hedges and stones,
its limbs heavy with the flesh of leaves
like the arms of a mother in wartime,
carrying her child on a sinuous path
to the border,
to the tent pitched under ice,
falling on her knees into an arrangement
as though for once she need not move,
as though finding in that reprieve
a sanctuary, or an almost perfect peace.
But if to be spared,
if to move across that border
and find the dove tree astonishingly depleted
but still rooted to its site,
is this, then, the law of continuity?
I look away
from what has been transplanted,
removed and replaced: the sidelong glance
of the rocks, piercing and upsetting
as if the unpolished stones
had been violated, and thrown
by demons into the fire
of all that had been uprooted in its time.
Joanne Monte
Read more: tree poems, weather poems, peace poems, child poems, mother poems, fire poems, sun poems, children poems
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3.
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River
The river below us:
nitrogen, phosphorous, petrochemicals,
dioxin from the paper mills,
a rich buffet of metals digested
from the mines, and still we remain
oblivious to its symptoms
until a skull-and-crossbones sign warns
of the poisons that run the course
of its slim body, writhing like a patient
on a gurney, admitted for treatment;
warns too, of its offspring
in the waiting room: soft-shell crabs, oysters,
the striped bass, the silk fillet,
and the trout we want to bring home
to the sizzle of butter and garlic
and the fresh herbs in the kitchen.
And suddenly we are left alone
to recover mere memory: the river
we had swung across on ropes
in the dungarees of childhood,
splashing in its shallow gut; the river
over which we fought and killed
and for which we even died
the river we damned.
Joanne Monte
Read more: river poems, childhood poems, memory poems, home poems, alone poems, warning poems, running poems
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4.
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At a Sidewalk Cafe
An ordinary morning―
awakening to nothing but daylight
prodding through the eggshell-tinted blinds
and the warm quilts to be tossed back
in which sleepers all over the city
groan, burying themselves deeper
into the sheets of oblivion.
Downstairs, the sidewalk cafι beckons
with the daily choices to be made: trays
of napoleons, parfait glasses filled
with strawberry cream, and the two-sided list
of coffees that patrons pour over
in their passion: the golden warmth of hazelnut,
the richness of Colombian,
the full-bodied Java―
even that everyday flirtation with espresso
and its bittersweet aftertaste,
an attraction so innocuous it seems,
that I wonder what quirks of fate
endear us to our choices in the end―
however invariable the consequences.
Joanne Monte
Read more: city poems, passion poems, fate poems
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