The Last of an Orchard

Winter Fog

Monsters Among You

 By David Hoffman

The Last of an Orchard

Smelling of blackness / the dad-shapen prairie

and scorched by the pond that’s west off the deck

Sprint-jumping-skip / and a crawl of a weave

betweening the gravel aflow is the river

Mapping the apples / from whence there were pears

            peaches and plums aground are now ghosts

Taking a vantage / to look at the story

            the wise in the kitchen to boys in a tizzy

A gnarly old fogey / of tree on the corner

            kept unkempt-scratchy, spotty and tired

The end of a line / the one brother to bear

            scatters of tartier teardrops for shoes

Tasting with toes / the drooling of tongues

            picking with mitten-rich sweetness, a throw

In shadowy ditchness / yellow with wasps on the dead

            a towering arbor in only itself

The friend of the sun / by the son by the son

            is visited illness that’s glad for the myth

If in dying it goes / it gets sung by the fire

            with glory, tired of smiling but smiling for us

Waving to waves / at the wavy assembly

            and meeting the barn at the start of it all

Winter Fog

the edges, mystical

like a step in the blur would populate me at the opposite end of the dinner plate defined by the fog

a light breakfast

the cookie tinted, ice-white, creamy-centered light spills like milk into my dining room

the flow, propelling

from the considerate carpet onto the shocking wooden floor of the kitchen to fetch a coffee cup, groggily

an extension, the veil

my forgotten dreams shadow me so my usually regretful wokeness isn't welcome at the Keurig, dazed

my desktop: busywork

a world away (those other days), dutiful buildings beyond the breathing mist are a laughable fantasy

within it, globed-in

we're snowed-in, the lane a ledge bending into a foggy breath on glass in the crystalline atmosphere

Monsters Among You

The storied many

I suspect are fewer

            Out, in open trust of all others

            Uncaged roamers, docile

            Mate-calling and trotting, unafraid

            Alphas atop the food chain

The poisonous ideal, the sick sunlight

That shades are drawn against

‘Bright’ by all accounts but ignorance

Of their own aura that sends the nocturnal

Uncounted creatures, into hiding

But in that night

While the dwindling angels sleep

The disdained creatures

Cursed of opposite images in mirrors

Convinced they are monsters

Blindly echo about the towns

Doubt eternally in their shadowed shadows

Chasing, drinking, endlessly in the evening

A desperate hope that they are not alone

Gulping and gagging and choking

Until they are drunk on a belief

They worry is a lie

There is an image from David’s youth of an afterlife sky, purply above a round hill of fall prairie grass. His second-grade self wrote his first poem about that imagined place. Since then, he’s just been "going at it": writing because it feels that’s what David Hoffmans do. All trace of him just might vanish if he doesn't put himself on a page every now and again.