TO THE TOTAL ECLIPSE

by Bill Meissner

Though we don’t know exactly why,

we travel from afar just to see it. 

We’ll journey a hundred miles. A thousand. Ten

 

thousand or more. For some reason we don’t understand,

we want to turn our heads

toward the sun and see it slowly disappear, the same way

our hunched Neanderthal ancestors did, when they noticed  

a sudden strange moment of night just outside the mouth of the cave.

 

But we are modern, and civilized. We drive SUVs to Texas or Maine,

find the exact location with our GPS.

In case of a traffic jam, we pack the car with

rations and necessities: water, snacks, and cell phones.

 

We realize it will not be an easy journey.   

It will be almost like a war zone—

those four or five million people

all flocking to the narrow path  

where the eclipse

makes its total promise to the sky.

 

We don’t know exactly why, but something calls us to leave

the bright landscape where we live

and go there, to the land where the sun dims, and, eventually,

surrounds itself

with a thin gold wedding ring.

 

We’re drawn to that place, a place where we can finally put

our cell phones down, tilt our faces toward the sky,

hold hands with those we love,

and be primitive again, and full of something we don’t understand,

as we escape the world

for those four minutes and twenty-one seconds

of frightening, beautiful darkness.

Bill Meissner is the author of 12 books, including five collections of poetry and three novels. His most recent book of poems is The Mapmaker’s Dream (Finishing Line Press). His new carnival-themed novel The Wonders of the Little World features a fortune-teller mother who, with her precocious 11-year-old daughter, goes on a search for her tightrope walker husband. His previous novel about the effects of the Vietnam War on a family in a small Midwest town is Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire.

THE BROKEN CLOCK

by Bill Meissner

Though the black hour and minute hands
are stuck, motionless,
the second hand keeps circling and circling
the clock on our wall.

It reminds me of the older couple I saw once—
the man standing outside in the flowerbed,
the woman inside—placing their hands on
opposite sides of a large picture window.
I marveled at the way their arms moved together
in a graceful circling.

The second hand chases and
chases itself, as if it believes it
could catch up with itself.

I believed that couple was
slowly waving to each other, or
doing some kind of playful, synchronized
dance of love.  Until I realized their hands held stained cloths;
they were merely cleaning the streaked glass.

In fall, we lose an hour, like a key
slid behind a dresser, then,
six months later, like a missing sock found under the bed, we
gain one.  Each season we feel ourselves
become younger, then
older, then younger again.
And we can’t help but wonder:  how long can the foggy cells inside our body
keep cleaning their tiny windows?

This spring, after resetting our new clock,
you and I lift our hands toward each other,
gently press our palms together,
circle them around and
around, around and
around, keeping the dance going
as we polish the space between us.

Writer/teacher Bill Meissner is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry, including a recent poetry collection, The Mapmaker’s Dream (Finishing Line Press). His novel Spirits in the Grass (University of Notre Dame Press) won the Midwest Book Award.  He lives with his wife Christine in Minnesota where he resets his clocks two (or more) times per year.

LETTER BY LETTER

by Bill Meissner

That morning of my tenth birthday, I expected
a game, comic books. Instead,
my father lowered an American Heritage Dictionary
into my open palms,
told me he’d give me a small allowance
if I’d learn the definitions from A to Z.
I felt the weight of the book, its embossed leather cover
holding in those 225,000 words.

Caught in the middle of Iowa,
I knew nothing of aardvarks or zzyvas.
So each night, instead of watching TV,
I leaned close to the gold-leafed pages,
studying definitions that often eluded
me, meteors that glowed a few seconds
in the dome of sky before they faded.

     I can picture him now, after work at the used car lot,
     his beige dress shirt creased like the lines in a county map.
     He’d lean back on his La-Z-Boy in the den,
     paging through the latest National Geographic,
     marveling at the ancient mariners who navigated by the stars.
     As a young man, he dreamed of jumping on a freighter
     to ports in Anchorage, Buenos Aires, Caracas.
     Instead, he got a steady job. Instead,
     he wanted his son to learn the world,
     letter by letter, and then
     go there.

Months later, I gave up at F.
I even skimmed some of the blurred pages
just to get all the way to that failure,
then slid the dictionary into a mute dresser drawer.

Dad, I’m sorry. The universe was just too big for me
and I grew away from those words.
But I’m finding them now, years later, for this poem.
Here they are:  each one
like the light from a small, distant
star, finally reaching the earth.

Minnesota writer Bill Meissner is the author of five books of poems.  His forthcoming book of poetry The Mapmaker’s Dream will be published in early 2019. "Letter by Letter" will appear in that collection.  Meissner is also the author of two books of short stories and the novel Spirits in the Grass.

LOSING TIME: MY LAST JOG ON A CARIBBEAN BEACH

by Bill Meissner




via GIPHY

The watch slipped from my wrist and dropped
to the sand, burying itself. Retracing
my footprints, I couldn’t find it, though I searched
and searched, my palm skimming the beach
like a metal detector.

Home from vacation, I wonder who might
find that watch, wonder
what lonely, homeless beachcomber—years from now—
might idly sift a handful of sand and

discover it. Would the watch be
silent, its cracked face filled with grains that seeped in,
little by little, smothering the two luminous hands?
Or would it still be ticking away in some other time zone,
each sweep of the second hand like a wave
smoothing a distant shore?
If he held it to his ear, like a spiral seashell,
could he hear the azure roar of the ocean inside it?

If I could replace something, it wouldn’t be
the watch I lost. Instead, I’d retrieve
a minute, an hour, a day or two, a month,
even a whole year. I’d retrieve
a few friendships, the blurred mistakes I’ve made,
the faces that faded from the family photo,
an afternoon of tender touching. I’d recover

those moments that passed
while the grains
in the hourglass fell
and fell
in a line so thin and steady I could hardly tell it was moving.

Bill Meissner is a teacher/writer and the author of four books of poems, two short story collections, and a novel Spirits in the Grass which won the Midwest Book Award.  He lives in Minnesota.  Visit his Facebook author page.

WHAT THEY REALLY WANT

by Bill Meissner

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) this week said that a war with North Korea would be “worth it” in the long term. "All the damage that would come from a war would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security," the senator told CNN. —The Hill, March 2, 2018. Caricature via Pinterest.

What we want is to step over
the border and give our nearest neighbor a
black eye.
What we want is to gather up our rival countries like cards,
to stack them in a deck,
to shuffle or bend them whenever we wish.

We do not want trivialities, like hands holding other hands,
or a soft touch on the face, or peaceful encouraging voices.
We want our words to slap, to shout, to break knuckles, to cut the skin.
We want our words to weigh
down all other words, to suffocate them.

What we want is the power to press a
button and turn the lights out on a whole continent.
But what we want most
is to launch a missile that,
with its sharp nuclear warhead, will
stab the earth as if it were poking out an eye, blinding it
for once, and for all.

Bill Meissner is a teacher/writer and the author of four books of poems, two short story collections, and a novel Spirits in the Grass which won the Midwest Book Award.  He lives in Minnesota.  Visit his Facebook author page.

MY MOTHER’S OCEAN

by Bill Meissner

vis Giphy

I can never take just one photograph of
the ocean. The cerulean waves are too
lovely, too graceful, tumbling gently over themselves,
then turning to foam that kisses
the sandy lip of the world.
There are no other words for it—this
huge and endless ocean’s rise and fall, this
rocking back and forth, back
and forth, the way my mother used to

hold me when I was a small child, afraid
of the oncoming storm.
The brittle window glass rattled, but
she rocked me, and replaced the thunder
with a humming, a lullaby
that rose and fell.
It’s a melody I would,
as the years passed, remember,
then forget, then
remember again. There are no words

for this song my mother sang, her liquid voice
small, but still filling the room,
overpowering the fists of wind and stabs of lightning
with a language I couldn’t understand

at the time.
One single photograph
is never enough. I know now
that there is beauty in the things that are
closest to us, and beauty in the things
that we lose. She

is gone now.
But as a wave lifts itself and rolls
toward me, then bows down and becomes
a wing of bright diamonds,
I stand again on this shore, without words,
my bare feet sinking into
the hourglass sand,
and wait for that song to wash over me.

Bill Meissner is the author of eight books, including a novel and four books of poetry.  His most recent poetry book is American Compass from the University of Notre Dame Press.

VIEW OF EARTH FROM SPACE THROUGH THE DSCOVR TELESCOPE, AND A FEW WORDS ABOUT TERRORISM

by Bill Meissner

From a million miles away, it looks too blue:
perfectly rounded, haloed with graceful spirals of cumulus,
its continents drifting away from each other
like lovers that long to touch again.

But on its surface,
someone drives into a crowd, detonates a bomb, or lifts a weapon,
cradles it between a thumb and index finger,
contemplates the black hole
at the end of its long, sleek barrel.

The motive is always a little cloudy, yet the incidents repeat themselves:
in malls, in theaters, in schools, in dance clubs, on bridges.
No one can explain why. It’s something
to do with whatever it is that spins,
so red and angry, inside the skull.

There is no sound in outer space.
But here, some days, you can hear it, so close to you,
in the electronics aisle of a Wal-Mart.
Employees in the stock room look up, startled
by what sounds like a hollow box falling from a shelf.

From a million miles away, the earth looks blue as gunmetal—
it’s that same color we see from our back yards
when we tip our heads to the afternoon sky
and stare beyond those swirling clouds
that hide so much pain.

Bill Meissner is the author of eight books, including a novel and four books of poetry. His most recent poetry book is American Compass from the University of Notre Dame Press.  His 2008 novel Spirits In the Grass won the Midwest Book Award for Fiction/Novel.