AND THREE MORE NEW POEMS.
By TIM SUERMONDT.
CENTRAL PARK
A colder day. Not many people out
and I feel as if I have a country
all to myself. But a country that’s mine,
every path I’m sure I’ve traveled
coming and going to almost call it home.
My wife is waiting for me at the boathouse
where history promises to be on its
best behavior, no malice allowed, anywhere.
I trust it with conviction, this day only.
♦
HAVING TO WORK HARDER
Spring this year will arrive battered
and even a bursting of flowers
may not be sufficient to jam the tank
barrels, yet I remain ready
to put my winter coat in the closet,
ignoring the coat’s sadness, but it
will have its days again. I walk
over the city’s slivers of snow, close
to the Charles and flocks of geese,
the sun shining early in anticipation.
♦
ST. PATRICK’S DAY, 2022
The last bottle of Guinness
is rescued from the refrigerator—
the luck of the Irish salvaging
what’s possible. Sadness does pervade
the air, but hope butts its way in
with an aggression it didn’t know it had
and it doesn’t even apologize.
Someone is lost in a train station, a couple
dream of going to Paris one day, one day—
the last bottle of Guinness is poured into
glasses, devoutly like a priest who passes
the cheers in the form of a blessing.
♦
ASCENSION IS A FANCY WORD BUT I LIKE IT
……………….…the slopes
fester skywards
—Paul Celan
One can’t be sure
of anything,
but I’d like to think
at the very top
a semblance of glory resides,
where one of the words
forgotten is suffering.
If I’m correct, if I make it
all the way
it’s all I’ll need, all we’ll need,
love, a few books
we took on the journey shining
under a coppery light,
our hands sleek
like the wings of a Cooper’s hawk
with every page we turn,
every page we’ll never tire of.
♦
TIM SUERMONDT is the author of five full-length collections of poems, the latest: Josephine Baker Swimming Pool from MadHat Press, 2019. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, On the Seawall, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
The poems flow as naturally as casual conversation, but contain a depth I have grown to expect from Suermondt’s work. His simple language, elegance, with images that last:
“like the wings of a Cooper’s hawk
with every page we turn,
every page we never tire of.”
I like the surprises in Tim Suermondt’s poems, like “sad” winter coat, put in closet for spring, words suffering, and the last bottle of Guinness being “rescued”, all in his immediacy and powerful human experiencing his settings.