Poems by Jeff Hardin
Among Common Things
I found I had been writing everything
to her, though she would never read it, being
dead a year, then two, then on and on.
I found the words were words she would have known,
the kind an evening breeze disperses down
along the quiet stems in flower beds.
Down where winged things fall often, slip away.
Down where the bulbs she planted bloom each year.
I lost my way among the common things
I touched each day—pens, doors, books’ turned pages.
Calls came. Bills. Rain. Another decade. Snow.
Soon I began to walk as an old man.
I sat some mornings listening to wind
that moved ground-low, unable to lift, heaving.
Deliberation
I want you first to hear a sonnet’s pace,
the slow deliberation of a thought
fit snug inside the rise and fall of breath.
Think whispered stream beside a field gone dark
with horses, each its own infinity
of shadows added unto others. Think
of thinking as the mind adjusting to
what is and isn’t there, or anywhere.
A gulf exists we cannot get across.
We seek and seek but mostly do not find.
A child may wander out away from others
and not return, belonging then to silence,
the stir of eddies, the shimmering of leaves.
How many moments turn without a trace?
Jeff Hardin has authored seven collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize); Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize); and No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize), among others. Recent poems appear in Image, Bennington Review, Southern Review, Louisiana Literature, Swing, Laurel Review, and others. Two collections, Coming into an Inheritance and A Right Devotion, are forthcoming.
Table of Contents for A Formal Feeling