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STEVE ULLOM
Poems
Seagull's Bell The piercing cry was like a bullet hitting a bell, jarring my quiet reverie into the present no, the past, those boats in my half-intended gaze pushing me back, pulling memory like hair on the brush in the morning easy walks on the sand holding hands as we thought of the future of where we’d be and what we’d say and how we’d kiss surf crashing in jazz rhythms the percussion of children’s laughter delighting in what the world is when you let it be what it wants The sun feels good. Like an old dog, I’m beginning to like the heat on my bones. There’s the gull. Well, there’s twenty gulls, no twenty-one but no one counts them anymore. My sons used to chase the gulls young legs pumping, small muscles snapping suddenly into action spraying sand as the gull lands here, no there, wait it flies off with a half sandwich smiles, full of the present, no thought to the future. Just sand, bucket, water imagination, and hands that dig into everything The gull’s cries, a bell rung above a merry go round of memory. Welch’s Ring of Bone. The school bell goes off and Todd and I take our beat poets off the beaten path, truth not bothered by working for a living, by fitting in, by bye The gull cries out, overhead a perfect circle, Next week I’ll bring everyone here
Always something to tell I remember this place. Rocks, water, waves, the laughter of people who have joined destinies time space For at least one night. This night. Music, beer, laughter skipping of stones exchanging the worst from work the best of back then, back When I get home I must remember to call Kelvin.
Return to N Park Road Tired eyes, long enslaved by civilized pursuits, rest on a symmetry of concrete blocks, placed one gray block on top of the next gray on top of… until a lifeless but castle-strong wall rose from the woods floor, dirtied by weathering, as if water, breath, the bleach of daylight could weather the beginning laid years ago. Undrinkable water trickles at the concrete foot, the whole thing’s purpose veiled until you find the storm outlet in the middle. The gray slab used to listen to our complaints and urges, but we have been ghosts a long, long time. If I sat on the blocks now, a mimic of yesterday, would I have the same complaints as memory? No matter, there it stands, our young bodies no longer sitting on the top of it, our minds no longer kings of the sunlight webbing down over it, we who knew no law but to live as we could. In the present spring, emaciated limbs of river birch, alder, and other supplicants, still tan from last summer’s anonymous work but stripped of leaves and anxious to shed dull winter purpose, stand outstretched in a frozen, apostolic ecstasy, waiting for the spring and sun to speak in tongues and resurrect them from small winter deaths. The only speech, however, is the ripple of creek, playing shifting verses of a whispered hymn and swirling in the liquid spill and confessional chatter over silt ridges, a witness to the passage of seasons and lives. Around the corner, Old Man Birch, stark naked and white from winter light, stands. Old when we were young, he seeded the earth. Now, my own hair white, I feel we are peers, he and I. I slap his trunk in long lost greeting feeling his skin and the solidity of a past shared. Was it not the same sky we sat under last time, what’s up there now? If not, tell me, what has changed, really, other than what the weather preaches in the tree canopy.