Author of Kissing the Bees, John Sokol is a writer and painter living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the winner of the 1999 Redgreene Press Chapbook Competition. Judge, Andrena Zawinski says of his poetry: "The poems stand up and praise that which might slip by a common eye -- a girl enchanted with bees, a spider spinning, sex in a sumac grove. The images are fresh, rhythms smooth. language textured, all of which come together to form a lush wordscape."
His poems have appeared in America, Antigonish Review, Appalachia, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Georgetown Review, New Millennium Writings, The New York Quarterly, and Quarterly West, among others. His short stories have appeared in Akros, Descant, Mindscapes, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Redbook, and other journals. One of his stories has been translated into Danish, and, another, into Russian. His drawings and paintings have been reproduced on more than thirty-five book covers.
Vespers at Beechwood Farms
I have come to few conclusions concerning
order and randomness in the natural world,
the world of the cardinal in the pokeweed,
of the quirky towhee scratching out a living
in the dry leaves, of the primrose that opens
its petals at the same time each evening (so
punctual, you can almost set your watch to it).
I sit at this pond's edge where the dew on the
dogbane reminds me of when I was ten, when I
would break dogbane stems to watch milk-juice
ooze from their succulent veins. Now I recall that
time as I would if I were walking through the forest
of the suicides in Dante's Inferno, where to break the
limbs of those tree-souls would cause them to bleed.
I do not break the dogbane's limbs anymore, nor
do I meddle in the affairs of the spider that
impales a fly on the fishbone spike of a teasel. Oh,
but now -- up out of the goldenrod -- a red-winged
blackbird flaps its scarlet flag across the water
and is gone so quickly I am left only with the sound
of its clear-pitched O-ka-LEEEE! O-ka-LEEEE!
Is that a cry of lamentation, or is that a warning
that this world is leaving us by the day,
that the bleeding hearts have their reason,
that the heavy, drooping heads of the sunflowers
are omens going to seed? Perhaps
it's a cry of lamentation and a warning.
So let us pray. Bless the nodding wild onions.
Bless the bees in the yarrow. Bless the vetch
and the wild thyme, the woundwort and the thistle,
the field mouse in the timothy. Bless the kingsnake,
in whose mid-length the bullfrog bulges. Bless the
white-tailed deer and the red-tailed hawk; the millipede
and the muskrat. Bless it all, for it is evening now
and flurries of milkweed fly everywhere over these
browning fields, like premonitions of winter.
One Is for Bad News . . .
. . . two is for mirth.
Three is a wedding.
Four is a birth . . .
Here, in the woods, four crows --
back from another day on the road -- tack
across the evening sky and heckle
the hard workers below: the Protestant
robin and blue-collar jay, the tireless
spider and the driven ant.
Ruby-throated hummingbirds
work all day in the bee balm and jewelweed,
and downy woodpeckers hammer
their beaks to the bone for every last grub.
Meanwhile, these hoods-with-a-hunch spread
their scrofulous wings and strut down
Easy Street, where it's fast food in the slow
lane, and carrion "to go." When they're
not on the dole from nature's tacit agreement
with death, they rob the banks
along the highways, and haul cut-rate
jewelry -- bottle caps and broken glass,
cigarette wrappers and pop-tops -- back
to their hideaway in the woods.
When I was a boy, and we lived in Missouri,
crows would gather by the thousands,
and roost in the trees, over the crops.
They looked like undertakers at a convention,
all dressed-up in their ratty tuxedos.
For weeks, we listened to the ruckus
of their flapping wings and throaty chatter.
They'd loot corn from the fields, until,
finally, my father and his neighbors resorted
to dynamite. I remember the eerie silence
that followed the blast, after all those crows
rained down to the dirt, thumping and thudding,
like a bad cartoon. I watched my father
and his friends go out to the field,
shovel the carcasses into piles, douse
them with gasoline, and set them on fire.
This remains my father's favorite story.
Maybe I'll ask him to tell it one last time,
because, now, as I watch these four crows,
I imagine them, sleeping, tonight,
in the trees. All I see are long black coats,
hung on black branches, in the black night.
All I hear is silence.
What the Screech Owl Knows
-- for Kate
She knows this: that, here, in the woods
of western Pennsylvania, life burgeons
by the hour while death rides a pig,
that larvae open like popcorn
while dung beetles stock their larders.
She knows all the poems that hide
in the cattails, that sinuate across
the pond, and rummage beneath
the midnight moon. She knows that
open-ended conceits -- with their noses
in the air and their bone-backs to the sun --
abound; that the dog violets, hawkweed
and toadflax along the paths are ciphers
to lost legends. She knows the grasshopper
stories that vibrate from the throats
of red-winged blackbirds at dusk,
and that Socratic allegories loom in the
hemlock. She knows that the torments
of St. Anthony tremble in a grove of
pitch pine. When evening comes,
and the chorus of frogs start calling
to one another across the pond, she
listens to the arias of the bulls
and knows the taste of the weakest note.
She knows that someone, somewhere,
someday, will write a poem called
"Frog Phone Sex," and it will be just like
the one she already knows. She knows, too,
that in the understory of the hardwoods,
at the edge of the meadow, there are faces
in the drooping clusters of wine-colored
berries that bloom on the devil's walking-sticks.
But she knows there's no devil here,
and even if there were, the holy dogwoods
grow here, too. She knows nothing
of good and evil, and cares little
for the light of day. What she knows best,
is, that when night falls, the world
is right for her, and everything is vision,
everything is knowledge.
Night Fishing with Ludwig
He had a pole and I had a paddle, and --
just like that -- there we were, pushing off
in our little boat: part dinghy, part canoe;
like something Charon might use on a
slow night. As we headed for the middle
of the lake, I was mesmerized
by the two tiny fires that flickered in the
grottoes below his stern brow. He pointed
at me with his bony finger. "Any Moonlight
Sonata jokes, and it's over! Understand?"
"Deal," I said. Soon, we were in deep water
and he was humming and mumbling
in the back of the boat, muttering to himself.
Fortunately, he talked while I listened.
My head bobbed, as I commiserated and
agreed with everything he said. He reached
down through the glossy varnish of dark water
and cooled his hand there; exercised
his old fingers against the boards of the boat.
When he pulled his hand out, and held it up,
diamonds dripped from his fingertips
and mingled with the stars in the mirror
of the lake. He stared into the water for a long
time, so I stared, too. Brightly-colored fish,
like pieces of broken chalk, moved slowly
over ultramarine and goldleaf rocks.
Iridescent sea grass shimmered like Egyptian
silk. When we threw our lines out, we
watched screeching bats dive at the bobbers,
and we listened to the mournful Kyries
of distant loons. But, mostly, I watched him
stare at the stars. He studied them as though
they were quarter notes on a black page.
He pointed up, and showed me Canis,
the Little dog, and Corvus, the Crow;
Cassiopeia, in her chair, and the Flying Fish;
the Southern Cross and the Northern Crown;
the Little Horse and the Hare. When he
pointed, I watched the hairs on his broad
hand turn into filaments of light. While he
talked, I stared at his large head, transfixed
by the craters on his moonlit face. He told
me how Haydn had stabbed him in the back
after hearing his C-Minor Trio. He said Mozart
was a perfect music machine, as well as
a scurrilous little brat. He told me
how much he admired Goethe's drawings
of Tuscany, and how young lovers,
all over Germany, jumped to their deaths
after The Sufferings of Young Werther came
out. But, he said, when he finally met Goethe
at Toplitz, he was disappointed at the haughtiness
of the man. On the way back to shore, we hummed
Ode to Joy, exaggerating the descending
bars, like two drunken sailors.
As our laughter echoed across the water,
I drummed on the side of the boat and he
played air piano. When he stepped out of
the boat, he wrapped his black cape around him,
put on his top hat, and said, "Wanna do this
again, sometime?" "You bet!" I said.
Old Soul
In a house of bone, on a belly
of shell, you wander, alone,
through tussock sedge and fetid
leaves; over hummocks, and
into swales; through mud
and muck and matted reeds.
With seismic sense, and skeleton
reversed, you trudge through
fields of bluestem, and
wallow through hollows of
bracken, as you head for the sand
pits and the scent of sweet fern,
near thickets of alder and willow.
When you meet your reflection
at the edge of the marsh, you see
a stranger in your own home.
Resigned to your fate, and a legacy
of 200-million years, you search for
an isle of log, or a warm stone,
as you paddle and glide through
aqueous green. Had you been a
Buddhist, at Wat Po -- where turtles
are revered as human souls,
making their way through one
of many lives -- you might have
known the slow road to Nirvana
could ditch you here, where you
drag the bottom of a watery
world, and make do in the mud,
with your mutable soul.
©Copyright, 1999, John Sokol
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.