Rick Campbell: Two Poems

The Wild Lament of Saint Teresa

Two days’ storm, the beach wrack:
grass, dark feathers from a tern, skimmer,
a dark gull. We talk about love
and death, suspect choices, derelict
results. We walk beyond my usual end,
and finally find it, wrapped in grass,
and shells. Its long neck curved,
not as in flight, not as in swimming,
but as in dead. I nudge its white
collar with a bare toe and think of Eberhart’s
groundhog in the golden fields,
his wasp and the breath of life,
Stafford’s deer tumbling over the cliff.
Here it is, a loon. We turn back
into wind slinging a rain shroud
like a slow, soft parade.

~~~

The Old Places
for Philip Levine

Here, in the modern invention
of South Florida, I am trying
to remember a place that never was.
The ever and never changing malls,
gated communities with names
that conjure the idyllic out of palmetto
and scrub. I point to a road heading
west to more real estate and say
that’s mine. I flagged its only curve
and measured half mile sections
to the horizon. On the rich
island’s forbidden green
streets I take two quiet steps
on paver blocks I laid and tamped
with my German foreman and redneck crew.
All over this county there’s roads I drove
trucks down, condo stairs I carried sofas
and washing machines up. Out
on Haverhill when it was the western edge
of all that had been bought and sold, I
pounded on an ex-girlfriend’s door
at 3 a.m. and then slept off a mushroom
trip in the back seat of her unlocked
VW. I used to call the Singer Island
shoreline, where every high tide
washed away the evidence
that I was ever here, home.
 

Copyright 2024 Rick Campbell. From Fish Streets Before Dawn: Poems (Press 53, 2024).

Rick Campbell is a poet and essayist living on Alligator Point, Florida. He’s won a Pushcart Prize and an NEA Fellowship in Poetry. He teaches in the University of Nevada-Reno’s MFA program.