Three

Poems

by

Paul

Willis

audio

 

Just after Groundhog Day

Just after Groundhog Day, summer begins
in Santa Barbara.  Keen smells of blossoms
layer the air, the yellow bloom of mustard
weed and sourgrass and acacia fulfilling
their own prophecy on every side.

Frogs erupt in the barranca,
and out by the mailbox where we linger
to talk in the evening, mosquitoes
gather to be with us, flitting
against the silhouette of the islands
at the foot of the street. 

All is latent, luscious, languorous,
the tall grass under the oaks
already thick and green and shining.

Mornings in May could be like this in Oregon
when I got up to deliver papers on my bike.
The houses slept amidst a waking of everything
that was young again—the river, the sky,
the bigleaf maples—while I flung the news
like birdsong, end over end to every doorstep.

 

Extra Innings

From a shaky scaffold rising out of the poison oak,
a pair of men are tearing off
the back of our redwood baseball stands.
 
Who would have guessed it? 
Between the boards, row on row of honeycombs,
packed in like a visiting team in brown and saffron uniforms. 

All these years a sweetness
building at our backs, a hidden infield
of play, the score kept in numberless columns

by so many runs home.  Here was a game
never called on account of darkness,
only halted by too much light.

 

All Saints

November dawns the cool side of sunny,
and I walk to class thinking what I might suggest
to the eight young writers around the long, dark table.
I could point out once again that the walls in our room
are made of windows, that mountains are trying to get in.

Or I might say, “The soccer coach greeted me
in the parking lot in high spirits.  His team is going
to the playoffs; his father, however, is dying of cancer.”
Or I might say, “The Filipino maintenance man
asked me this morning what I am teaching.

‘Shakespeare,’ I told him.  ‘Is Shakespeare in the arts?’
he asked.  ‘Does he write opera?  Is he an American?’”
Or perhaps I could share my sorrow about the Korean
pitcher who lost a World Series game in Yankee Stadium
last night.  It was midnight, Halloween, there in

Yankee Stadium, but for all of his countrymen
in Korea, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. 
In Korea, it had been November for a long time
when the ball sailed into the stands and the pitcher
placed his black glove like a dark flower upon his face.

 

 

Paul J. Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.  His poems have appeared in Poetry, Wilderness and The Best American Poetry series.  His most recent poetry chapbooks are Poison Oak (Mille Grazie Press, 1999), The Deep and Secret Color of Ice (Small Poetry Press, 2003), and How to Get There (Finishing Line Press, 2004).  With David Starkey, he is editor of the anthology In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press, 2005).  Willis is also author of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild (WordFarm, 2005). 

Paul Willis at Westmont

SB POETS READ