Ed Haworth Hoeppner is the author of three books of poetry, Rain through High Windows, Ancestral Radio, and Blood Prism, the last of which won The Journal/Ohio State U Press award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Memorial Prize.  He has also written Echoes and Moving Fields about the work of W.S. Merwin and John Ashbery. He teaches at Oakland University and directs the creative writing program there.

Against  Emptiness

After little sleep, the day got by sun.
The spoons shimmer into rain, each drop full.
The smell of bread and coffee.

The untrained mind, with its beetles clicking,
tries to drive me now toward emptiness.
I will not go, this morning.  I will hover.

Let mourners keep watch on the over-pass,
through the chain link to cortege.
Let others conjure now this only world as loss.

Ice*

No anger and transparent, its tips at the windows,
throat-wise, it dams
and threatens to collapse the shallow-peaked garage.

The string of those who wait
and those who don’t arrive, slide into abutments,
lengthens.  Glistening.

Almost to fly, to skate and, skating, curve backward,
my childhood friends shrinking
as I watched them, animal-glad, and to sail the great

oblique, return to the pack.
Once it was my greatest pleasure.  The high lip of snow
around the rink, the clouds

of voice, the small blots of bright color, blue mittens
and red, swinging, hand-in hand.
The early dark, then.  And the cold, sharp and shared.

OMEGA*

Monster like the drunks who stand outside
the dark church, waiting in a thick snow fall:
show of want.
And something else hovers
in the deepening cold, almost visible, a bruise.

One has other clothes to wear and one has not.
Later I have said my piece and later yet
I see the tiny sparks inside my hands,
taking off my sweater in the black bedroom.

The chirping in my worse ear that never goes
away, the little waterfall I populate with frogs
singing in an April night so I can get to sleep
even now, in January.
I took my name off
the do not call list, but I keep getting voices

asking for the veterans without arms or legs,
minds shot up, the children with a wish
to see Disneyland before they die.  Time

and want.  I’m trying not to think of anything,

but what good is that?  The thought of trying?
And why, after all, puppet through another night
of wishing everything would just go away?

Odds are I will live 200 months or so.

Things that I will never do will grow.

-Edward Haworth Hoeppner

*From the spring issue of Peninsula Poets