John Sokol

"Now What?" by John Sokol
acrylic on linen, 65 x 48"

John Sokol writes and paints in Akron, Ohio. Poems have appeared in Appalachia, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Flyway, Georgetown Review, Literal Latte', The New York Quarterly and Quarterly West, among others. His short stories have appeared in Redbook, Descant, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, The-Manhattanite.com and Strictly Fiction, among others. His drawings and paintings have appeared on more than forty book covers.

Contact John Sokol at: johnsokol57@earthlink.net
Or See His Web Site at:
http://johnsokol-artist-author.com/poems.html

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 sweetfern,

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.

-- from: "Kissing the Bees"/Redgreene Press

Thread

You fall asleep beneath a willow
in autumn woods near pine-pitched

water. When you awake, you discover
an orb weaver has chalked some lines

from a nearby branch to your shoulder,
a few silken joists for a web.

As the sun sinks below the treeline,
frogs and whippoorwills, crickets

and doves entice you to stay. You linger
awhile as you watch your lodger

pay her silver down. From beyond
the far edge of the forest, the groans

of an eighteen-wheeler struggling to make
a grade on the distant highway.

As you leave the dark woods, you scythe
your way through strands of thread

that connect everything to everything.

-- Appalachia, Vol. LI, #2, Dec., 1996

The Botanist of Memory

He roamed through a world of apian ways
and limbic rushes. Rosemary, for instance,
was not wife or lover, but the smell of turpentine
in a tender sprig of herb: when he crushed it
between his palms, he was -- that quickly --
a painter in Palermo. In miasmal woods,
a redolence of yarrow became his mnemonic
for 1969, the year he drove from Berkeley
to New York with Mary Jane in a minibus.
In August fields, aroma of agrimony
reminded him of apricots; of incense
in Alexandria; of the mistrals that blew
through open windows on slow trains
from Genoa to Marseille. Scents of lemon balm
and basil became a transilience of trees,
growing through rocks in the tortured fields
near Barcelona. Essence of sweet woodruff:
that July day, in Tippecanoe, when he helped
his grandmother put out salt licks for the cows.
The smell of a crushed stem of bottlebrush grass --
mixed with his own saliva -- always conjured up
memories of his father sharpening an axe;
of motor oil and a whetstone.
But there were times, too, when mephitic reminders
of loss and failure rose from the ground
like vaporous shades. They would follow him
through browning meadows and dark woods.
And he knew that, someday, in the blinding light
of his final moments, he would smell them again
in the life that passed before his eyes.

-- Westview, Vol. 15, # 2, Winter, 1995,
Weatherford, OK