Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Rattletrap Ghazal, poems by John Philip Drury.
Rattletrap Ghazal
In a film noir, you try to step quietly, but your keys rattle.
Both on screen and in your home, moments of unease rattle.
My first memory is bare feet on snow when I snuck out of our house.
My wife’s first memory is the pink and blue on a baby’s rattle.
Colonials put coiled snakes on flags. Fine then, but now,
I don’t want to hear Don’t Tread on Me’s rattle.
Shakers, maracas, and castanets are running in place—
the way Venetian blinds, moved by a breeze, rattle.
My mother was alert to noises under the hood,
but no mechanic could puzzle out her jalopy’s rattle.
When wind picks up into gusts, and tornado watches begin,
even samaras, dangling on sugar-maple trees, rattle.
When I crack open a book of poems, I want to say
Please shake me up. Please stir and swizzle. Please rattle.
Ghazal of the Dark
Why do we humans claim to foresee dawn in the dark?
Afraid of what nightmares and blankness spawn in the dark?
When I was a kid, I never admitted my fear, but I kept
my door cracked, and from the hallway a light on in the dark.
When trouble roiled in our house of two women, one man,
my father drove off in our Chevrolet, gone in the dark.
When I walk my dog after midnight, I worry
about each step I take on strips of lawn in the dark.
Walking late at night on secluded calli in Venice,
I carried my keys as a weapon drawn in the dark.
Fighting off phantoms, brooding, I try to divert
and divest paranoia, brain calming brawn in the dark.
Sometimes, my dog spots something and stops in awe,
and then I make out a doe and her fawn in the dark.
I love our empty neighborhood, late at night, people asleep
or fretting alone. Walking my dog, I never yawn in the dark.
Ghazal of Home
When it gets dark, and I have to stop at a seedy motel, I’m at home,
especially when I look down at coins in a wishing well. I’m at home.
When I catch a whiff of lavender, or hear a cardinal’s riff and glimpse
a red blur, or notice a green vial on a windowsill, I’m at home.
When you happen upon my house, past boxwood hedge and crabapple trees,
even though I don’t answer the broken doorbell, I’m at home.
When the dog days and doldrums of August arrive, I’m anointed with sweat.
Insulated in “air-conditioned air” during the hot spell, I’m at home.
When I find myself alone on a waterbus’s deck, drifting
past marshland, channel markers, lagoon smell, I’m at home.
When a deadline looms, I’m lounging on the sofa, pen on pad,
or typing at my stand-up desk. Like a monk in his cell, I’m at home.
When an actor sings “poor Jud is dead,” but I hear my own name, John,
and the broken doorbell finally peals a festive knell, I’m at home.
© John Philip Drury
John Philip Drury is the author of six poetry collections: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.