Two Poems: Joe Bolton

Last week I was introduced to an amazing poet named Joe Bolton.  He was from Kentucky and died at the age of 28.  His poems burrow themselves into my flesh and my soul, they are utterly overwhelming in their beauty and sadness.  I find that a lot of what makes the deepest impression on me in life is both sad and beautiful, so it's no surprise that I have been walking to my mailbox everyday in anxious hope that his posthumously published collection, Last Nostalgia:  Poems, 1982 - 1990, will make its way to my home.

A Sort of Praise

Some morning in my city, a woman
Sits putting make-up on, expecting
No one, separated by one white wall
From the landscape that needs her.

And I--risen from fear, letting
My loneliness dissolve into the sunlit
Bough of a pine--will step out
And enter the shadows of tall buildings:

The sky glazed blue & gold, the streets
Drawing me to her door, the places
My feet hit like stones sticking up
Through the surface of some wide river.

And when our eyes meet, it will be
In the hue that happens when light finds dark,
In the secret music of worlds spinning true,
That we will move toward a sort of praise.

Death In Orange County

It's in the way the waves fall like dull lead,
Water warmer by September but still cold,
The bougainvillea's crinoline, fresh blood,

The sky's blank face, the blank face of a child.
A skywriter spells SURRENDER. To what?
This ease? This difficulty? Of the mild

Astonishments of a Saturday night,
Not one survives—not her face, not her name,
Not her. And certainly not how the light

Spilled broken on the bay and made a game
Of whatever it was you were trying
To make clear between you there, over rum.

Sometimes you don't feel like doing anything.
Sometimes you're done before you even rise.
It's in the way the sun mutes everything,

The mist, the fog, the high latticed fences.
The girl on the plane was reading a book:
Death of a "Jewish American Princess."

Sometimes you don't know quite what you feel like.
You put on your favorite disc, Camelot, 
And walk around the house having the look.

A good part of the time, you feel like shit.
It's in the stylishness of restaurants,
In the sweet note of a single gunshot

Echoing off the glass of lit storefronts,
In the cool distances of these houses.
Nobody knows what anybody wants,

Or else knows all too well what those tan faces
Are trying hard not to show they don't feel.
And that's all that's left to you now are the traces:

House, stock, Jacuzzi, clothes, automobile.

More Joe Bolton at Identity Theory