A Man Turns

by Steve Klepetar

A man turns, walks away.
From the way he bends,
you can tell he has lost
something he really cannot
do without. A darkness
follows, sniffing at his heels.
When he disappears from
view, you remember how
you woke in the night
feeling the earth’s weight
on your chest. So much
has been lost. You could
dig shafts into lightless
crust, penetrate to molten
rock and still find nothing
but emptiness to hold in
the frayed wings of your
tired, trembling hands.

And That’s Where it Ended

by Steve Klepetar

And that’s where it ended, standing
in thinning grass with my hands
out, palms up, a gesture so ancient
the trees remembered and sighed.
Beneath a red oak, beneath a cliff
with sharp gray rocks jutting out like
shark’s teeth from broken ground.
My voice came jagged as a wound
in the skin of silence, my footfalls
clumsy and dense in undergrowth.
All around birds rustling in the still
green leaves, swirling, patterning
in bright autumn air. So many
black specks high above our heads.
On the dirt road, wild turkey tracks
and then four of them scuttling
toward the woods. At night we hear
foxes scream, coyotes pad in close
to our garden’s rim, their yellow eyes
hard glinting stars, bright and unafraid.