Poems by Tom Raithel

Everything seems more possible now

that sunlight brushes the tops of the elm

and sparrows breeze through the garden.

Sidewalks stir to a runner’s clipped steps.

Houses slough off their shadows.

Windows re-open to widening sky. 

It’s an hour like childhood, with all the befores —

before any promising doors are slammed,

or closed with a click, or passed,

before the motoring off of friends,

of family, the parade of years, 

before the slash wounds of love.

Now the boulevard’s broad, uncluttered.

Everything speaks of beginnings.

It’s as if we could bang through the screen door again

and shout down the street to playground companions

waving at us to join them.

It’s as if we could simply start over.

from Open 24 Hours and Dark Leaves, Strange Light

The master of this river

chugs by in a johnboat.

Jeans and jacket smeared with slime,

he stinks of fish and gasoline,

the stubble on his weathered face

as rough as shoreline brush.

He’ll never blink.

The muck-brown eyes have seen it all—

glassy high-rise, hobo shack,

railroad baron, shackled slave,

sewage flows and floating dead.

He spits into the water.

And he tells you, as he draws his knife

and slices through a bait fish,

the wind that sweeps the clearest sky

will also drive the squall,

and even the accomplished eye

can fail to see

the snag beneath the backwater.

Sometimes when the moon bobs up

above the darkened cottonwoods,

you’ll see his boat and shadow

putter past the island sandbars,

churning out a wake of oily dreams.

from Southern Poetry Review, Dar Leaves, Strange Light

and The Boom Project, Voices of a Generation.

They look so lost, staring in windows

or standing wide-eyed by a neighbor’s pool

or stumbling up to a boulevard island,

pausing and gawking at cars around them.

With heads high or close to the ground,

they wander as if looking for something,

a highway sign for a home-bound exit,

a key they dropped to a door now closed.

Glassy new corporate towers above them,

around them the labyrinth car lots of malls,

they tread along roadways and well-mowed paths

that lead them to think they have somewhere to go.

A car honk startles. Sharp ears erect,

they take trembling steps, unsure what to do,

then quicken their journey on long, thin legs

through a world that won’t welcome, nor leave them alone.

They’ll lie down tonight on some golf-course green

or brambly edge of a railroad yard

and dream of a brook through a columbine meadow,

moonlight breezing through landscapes of pine.

from Tipton Poetry Journal

It isn’t really the end of the world.

Just the slow twist of one hour to the next,

a turning page, a guttering candle,

a small red spurt on a silver horizon.

So resist the thoughts that carry you down,

the leaves, say, falling in spirals

or that long diminishing trail of jet

descending to western fire.

Instead, fix your eyes on the slow, purple

flowering of clouds, the air’s blue light,

the crescent moon like a platinum brooch

on the dusky dress of the sky.

Those that are missing don’t matter here.

The graveyard’s hard to distinguish from pasture.

The whitest hairs become dark again

in the indigo wash of night.

Deny everything to the ultimate sputter,

the rattling gasp through thistles.

And when the last ghost of smoke has flown,

trees turned to deep-shadowed demons in starlight,

dream that you’ve become one of the things

that grow more alive in darkness —

the lyrical cricket, the toad at watch,

the firefly leading us up past the compost.

from Comstock Review and Dark Leaves, Strange Light

Look for them, and they vanish.

But they’ll come to you, indirectly,

out of the twilit corners.

Simply sit back on the evening porch

and let your eyes wander the blue horizon

into the August night.

Hear the deep-weeded dirge of crickets?

Laughter fading from nearby yards?

The other stars, too— the ones that don’t fall—

are turning their secret pages.

Soon you dissolve, and the wind recedes.

House lights go out. The night grows cold.

And there, above the far glow of the city,

another one falls. Then another.

from Open 24 Hours and Dark Leaves, Strange Light

Here is your forest pool hung on the wall,

a portrait of you with adjustable pose,

the window on one room you never can enter

though one you are already in.

You consult it daily, religiously even,

standing within its gaze like a shadow,

the bedroom behind you now thrown in front,

the light of the world bent backward.

It tells you your shirt and pants match today.

Your collar is crooked. Attractively roguish?

Your hair’s a mess. Pat it down there.

Is that just the light? New gray?

But no matter how deeply you peer into it,

of itself it tells you nothing.

A perfect companion— honest but silent.

All its reflections will be about you,

beholding you not as you are, exactly,

but as an immortal might see you —

you as a phantom, a short-lived brightness,

a flicker, a flourish, a trick of the light.

from Open 24 Hours