Jacob Oet

You don’t write poetry

For my parents

You don’t write poetry
You breathe it
No
you can’t breathe
underwater

You can’t kiss a poem
but you can taste it
No you can’t
swallow light

Before you watch a poem take wing
you nurture it
Then you let a poem go

You do it if it kills you

Because poetry
is like being dead—
Coming back to life
hours later

You get your hair wet
You shiver when you break the poem’s surface
feeling wind
Then
you call out the river’s name
and it answers

You call
and I answer
A poem is an echo
And if you are timid
I will be timid

But if you are mighty
if you sing out--
I am mighty; I sing out

Write me as a letter to the stars
I will shake their hearts
​and bring them back to life

---

Sap

Inside my body a tree is
growing. Lord,

I know the sting that raindrops bring;
the cold that falls

like evening in the skin;
the taste of silence

like metal. I am familiar
with wind, tussling my hair

like prairie grass.
I am familiar with fire.

Dry things burn so quickly.
I remember California. Lord,

the streets are pale. It hasn’t rained
for months, and if it has

I haven’t seen it.
But I know the taste

of dry saliva. Silence takes the air
as autumn turns to winter.

My body is a tree.
The transition too slow

for my taste. When sap dries
on the roots it becomes rough

like moss. Inside my body a tree
that has become slow,

​is waiting for the rain.

---

note to self

                                          
​stop wasting time wishing to write better
Write

all that you ever wanted to see printed across the faces of stars
like postage stamps Write letters to the universe
and back

and walk outside every once in a while
just to hear the applause of leaves

smell the clouds and their glorious soft tickled whites like eggs
laugh because you’ve never seen a silver lining, only soft daubs of pink
like bacon. Make this your breakfast, waking up

to the birds tracing black arrows across the sky
watch this through eyes
like telescope lenses

and wonder at wonder, and please
let happiness please you and
thank you is a nice thing to say
​every once in a while.

---

A Letter

By the time you read
this my body should be gone and my touch
a memory

But there are sounds
like easing of rain through the trees
bare heels slapping floor:

How everything persists in you
and this

Is to be raw
You touched me

your fingernails
piano storm the electrical wires
of my veins. I think you will find
wrists

to be the most subtle reminder.

Your lips like crescent
moons

fell and shattered
infinitely upon
mine

as if we were two oceans

Your cheeks like the first
snowfall over
autumn ground

But remember
what a pencil looked like
in my hand. How it changed.

The first time I saw you
you were
a letter

to nobody, waiting
to be heard,

but I hope
to have opened you.


 


--
Jacob Oet lives in Solon, Ohio. He has loved writing and making images since he was a boy. Jacob’s poetry and images appear in The New Verse News, and OVS Magazine.