Paul Clemente

Swamp Red Maple

You cannot trust a swamp red maple
to give you sugar and warming wood.
Her sap’s too thin to be a staple.
Her brittle boughs misunderstood.

Although her limbs expect decay,
a learned tree knows angry wails
and fights the Fall’s fiercest display.
She spurns the reaper and the gales.

October masts fly scarlet jibs.
In the breeze, a hush, a chime,
for branches weak as children's ribs
that fail when on their windswept climb

and do not return to reproduce.
So thoroughly are the prunings shed
that dawn reveals a somber truce
to let the living collect the dead.

You cannot trust a swamp red maple
to supply your sugar and warming wood.
Her sap’s too thin to be a staple.
Her brittle boughs misunderstood.


Tucson

The last time I saw my good friend the codger,
he was as alert as I had ever known him,
his poetry as Existential, but his knuckles
were red with arthritis. They were inflamed,
I supposed, by the dropping barometric pressure of
an approaching late-season snow storm.

In gravely Brooklynese, he told me
that the Irish Navy had eight ships and
that they were all named after writers.

He added that one ship was permanently stationed
in the Mediterranean to help save Syrian refugees.

Toasting life, and its struggles, we dismissed ex-pat New Yorkers
who move to Florida or Arizona in search of paradise.

He told me he didn’t keep a notebook anymore.
He said that if an idea is valuable enough, “it’ll be back.”
He also said that thoughts can haunt you.

He said that he’d been to Tucson once, back in 1956,
back before snowbirds and the sprawl.

He had known a girl there. She was living in a trailer on the
outskirts of town; right in the desert, surrounded by a saguaro cactus
forest. Her estranged husband had mental problems and had been
institutionalized but was released for “good behavior.”
While out, he beat her to death.

My old friend said, some thoughts haunt you your
whole life “and they aren’t worth a dime.”


25.9

Two gas pumps, in the shadow of a winged-stallion,
stood side by side like “American Gothic.”
My furlough completed, duty-bound for battalion,
I wondered aloud and questioned the logic

of fractional pricing at dust-bowl gas stations,
nine-tenths of a cent unlike that of a mile,
the price they are paid in these situations
for having foresight and marketing guile.

Traveling in uniform, 1968,
the country at war within and without
I could catch any ride and cross any state.
Never since, have I had that kind of clout.

In the Kansas high-plains they get twenty-five nine,
when you’re running on fumes at the end of the line.


About the Author

Paul Clemente was born and raised on the banks of the Hudson River. He is young enough to have missed Woodstock and old enough to recall the mothballed fleet of WWII ships floating in Haverstraw Bay. He is a scientist who spent his career with the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation. Now retired, he lives in Esopus NY with his wife and two sons.

He has published one chapbook “Luncheonette,” which contains twenty sonnets.

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