Robert Harlow

Poetry As A One Night Stand
                       All writers are liars. Writers of fiction choose to be,
                       whereas poets have no other choice. -Freud

One of the best things about writing poems
is that you can make them seem as if
everything you write actually happened.
You can claim the most beautiful woman
in the room was waiting for you to catch her eye
and, of course, went home with you and . . .
You know the rest.

Or that the flame-threaded building you raced into--
to save five puppies and two elderly pensioners--
collapsed just as you made it to the street,
all clustered in your arms, giving mouth-to-mouth
to the puppies, the kiss of life to save theirs
without consideration for your own.
Now you are a hero with few peers. And no one
has to know you’re the one who set the fire.

One of the worst things is that people tend
to believe what they read, even in poems,
that the you or I really is you. The beautiful woman
did go home with you, but things didn’t work out
as well as you imagined, but what ever does?
Some good but mostly bad memories she’ll talk about
in her poems, calling you out, using your real name,
frequently mentioning where you reside. Alone.

Although what happens may or may not be true,
and may or not be believed, you’ll stand by what you wrote,
at least until her friends turn their backs
whenever you’re around, even in her poems.
And there’s nothing you can do to set the record straight
no matter how many lies you tells yourself or write.
Even making up a quotation by Freud to start a poem off,
knowing someone out there will probably believe it
because it sounds as if it could be true.
Or at least truer than this poem will ever be.


The Right Place And Time
                           but clouds got in the way
                                    --Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now”

We were supposed to see it
bright in the southwest sky,
Winter Solstice 2020,
Jupiter, Saturn, and the Earth aligned
for the first time since the thirteenth century.
Rumored to be—but not by astronomers—
the Christmas Star pointing to Bethlehem.
We went out to see it, the wife and I,
her iPhone charged up, but not as much as we were,
in anticipation. However, clouds had other plans,
so we had to watch it on tv and online
after the fact of our missing it.
This is how it’s supposed to work:
hold your phone up to whatever’s going on
so you can watch it later, sometimes immediately
afterwards, because the nature of the beast
is to miss it when it’s happening,
opting to point the phone at whatever
we want to record, not watching it in reality
but looking at it on a smart-phone screen.
Playing it back, everything becomes second-hand.
But we can see what we missed, even show others,
in-person, or online where it can be viewed
and liked, or not, and followed by those
who might have been there but missed it as well.
Just like real life, sometimes we have to
take someone else’s word for what happened,
Christmas Star, as well. The planets cooperated
but clouds, as well as the latest technology,
conspired to get in the annoyingly literal,
metaphorical, and meteorological way.


Where The River Narrows

I find myself once again
Amtraking down the Hudson
to New York City
with Basho as a companion,
his Narrow Road to the Deep North
somewhere in my backpack.
I’m saving it for the return trip,
thinking there must be some parallels
he can help me with, even though
we won’t travel through forests
and boulder-strewn mountain passes
like he did on foot in the late-seventeenth century.
America was just revving up back then
while Japan was a wandering poet’s paradise.
It’s mostly scenic along the river,
and when it’s not, it’s best to have a book
to hide the view. If no one sits beside me
on my return, I’ll prop Basho in the window seat
and tell him about what I see along the way—

            Rising herons pause,
            wheel high above the river
            then return to shore

hoping he is proud of me as we head north,
not to the deep one, but close enough
to know the difference.


About the Author

Robert Harlow lives in Voorheesville NY. Born and raised in coastal Massachusetts, he received an MFA from the University of Arizona way back in the last century. He taught literature and writing at the University at Albany for a while but now he doesn't. Mostly he works as a carpenter and cabinetmaker because he is good with wood. He has poems in Chronogram, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, The Midwest Quarterly, Stone Canoe, and elsewhere or so he has been led to believe. He is the author Places Near and Far (Louisiana Literature), another thing he would also like to believe.

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