John Popielaski
Mundane
I’ve been seeing halos recently
above and just behind the crowns of beings
I would not have previously supposed
were eligible for sanctity.
The first conclusion that I jumped to
was that something tragic was
unfolding in my retinas or brain.
The second was that it was possible
the purple tab of acid
I put on my tongue in 1987
wasn’t done with me.
But none of this feels harrowing.
Think firefly. Think sunrise.
Three days before the winter solstice
I stood at a window on the other side
of which was the expected darkness
and the things experience assured me
probably were still there in the darkness.
Water from the tap came out as usual.
I caught it in a quart receptacle
and watched a disc of light fly low
outside the window, inches from the ground.
I turned the water off and jumped
to those conclusions that I told you of.
I turned the light above the sink off,
and my pupils widened instantly.
The disc of light lit George
collecting fallen sunflower seeds,
lapping water from the silver bowl.
I call all the possums George and make believe
that this year he or she is nearing twenty
for the years that I have been here.
George left before the sun came up.
The halo blinked and fractured in the underbrush
and disappeared like something
I could not confess to having seen.
I poured a coffee by the microwave’s
ghastly, digital light and sipped
my way to sunrise, studying the halos
hovering above and just behind the crowns
of the awakened birds and squirrels,
the December chipmunk and the junipers, halos
everywhere until the sun outshined them
and invited me to think again
about belonging to the world.
Holdup
A chiseled man who seemed to struggle
with the ripples of his service to the country
held a gun to my occipital bun this afternoon
and said he’d blow my head off
if I didn’t name right fucking now
an animal I once thought truly hibernated
but turned out to be a representative
of periodic torpor after all.
My life did not cascade before my eyes.
I didn’t feel that it was really time for me
to die because for years I did believe
that chipmunks hibernated in the dead
of winter, all the metabolic wonders
powered down to almost nothing, a suggestion
of a heartbeat here, a wisp of respiration
there, no appetite, each chipmunk
like a subterranean caesura,
just a bookmark, just an epic dream
until the sweet release of spring winked
like a starlet at the ghost of T.S. Eliot again.
John Popielaski is the author of several poetry collections, including most recently That Special Something from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, as well as Attuning, a novel from Broken Tribe Press. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Cutleaf, Gramercy Review, and Home Planet News.
Banner Art:
Photo by Helga Kattinger, Pixabay, 2021
