Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Three
November- December 2025
My Father’s Footlocker, poems by David Graham.
My Father’s Footlocker
His old Army locker, scuffed and battered,
opens creakily in the attic. Where has this
prize been all these years? A smell of his lost
memories vanish soon as the air hits them.
No uniform, starched and pressed here,
no mementos, photos, or letters—love
or otherwise. And no key to the lock,
unlocked for good, whatever that means.
The locker’s stuck on Open forever.
I remember his big key ring, jangling
in his pocket. Where have all the keys gone?
Is an unlocked empty footlocker better
than some secret in a locked strongbox,
or even a desk drawer with no key
in sight? I can jimmy any secrecy
if I wish, but what if I find nothing? Then
the further nothing knowing finally at last?
If your silence passes the years more easily,
if silence gathers and needs nothing more,
I’ll step gingerly back down the stairs
from this attic. Not to further disturb
your shadows. At ease, Soldier. As you were.
The Boy Alive
Any boy will flip over rocks
in the stream bed—he won’t
need reasons. There may be
the gray ghost of a crayfish
scuttling off to deeper shadows,
or there might be nothing
but water flowing, a floating
leaf casting its paper-thin shade
over the boy’s cold, flickery
hand as it sweeps across
bottom silt. This is what happens
to the lost hour of daylight.
This is prayer in an empty
church, the boy moments
before a sneeze. This is
the boy alive in the man
you see at the bus stop, gazing
at some gleam in the gutter,
or smiling vaguely even though
no one has said a thing.
Geocentric
The earth is almost round
—Jim Harrison
The earth’s almost round
but not quite. This not-quiteness
gives our music its blue notes
and syncopation, brings fizz
to the blood, renders any night
bottomless. Rain and wind are
the clocks we trust, never
the same twice, and the sundial
cannot lie but doesn’t count
the seconds. So on we go, just
slightly out of plumb, our laces
loose but still knotted. We wobble
as on our first two-wheeler.
No straight lines in nature,
they say, yet very few perfect
curves, either: clouds, pollen
foam on the river, vast nebulae
old as time. All flirting with
a perfection that would be prison
if achieved. What to do but love
this here, this now, this frayed
and battered world in its
neverending almostness?
© David Graham
Most recent of David Graham’s seven collections of poetry is The Honey of Earth (Terrapin Books, 2019). He also co-edited (with Tom Montag) the anthology Local News: Poetry About Small Towns, and, with Kate Sontag, the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Confession (Graywolf Press, 2000). From 2016-2022 he wrote a regular column in the journal Verse-Virtual, “Poetic License” on poetry and poets. After teaching for thirty years at Ripon College in Wisconsin, he now calls himself a retired teacher and unretired poet.