Issue #30.1 Three Poems by Harold Bowes
Photo with Text Message
K,
We saw this driving in town today, on the porch of an older restored house. The house has new owners, and they’ve hung some living room art on their front porch facing out to the street: see, a snow-covered house in a country landscape.
My first reaction was that they are genuine art lovers, and in love with their new home, and just need to be schooled in the finer skills of art appreciation. I turned to M and suggested we should offer our services as art appreciators to them. We could be their tutors, I said. Suggest track lighting.
Then I had another thought. Maybe it’s a new trend, placing inexpensive art on your home’s exterior.
I don’t know if you saw this where you live, though I bet you did when you lived in Spokane: the five point metal stars that became popular as outdoor art in rural areas about 25 years ago. You still see them sometimes.
There is a desperate impulse. There is an aching need for art.
H
Office Inventory
The diameter of a coin the width of its stand Was it four inches?
My friendship with Jay spanned four years
People ask me about Jay’s award because it’s small and human not large and formal like the certificates on the wall
There is an entry point I can tell the story about the coin, where it came from why it’s on this stand
There’s a literal human face
He made the stand by hand
Because he was very intelligent Jay could see the little things that made up the whole
The importance of each component without which the larger whole wouldn’t exist
On a trip to my hometown standing on the bank of the river there a half dollar coin in my hand I realized I had run out of time
What did Jay say sometimes? “Out of the indefinite, the definite”
“The Same Rules for the Ox as for the Lion Is Oppression “
We drove to the luau in a Plymouth sedan the size of an F250. The Plymouth was the sexy version of a Dodge.
I’m traveling with my mother and brothers. Mother and brother are both the “other.”
Father was recently dead. “ather” doesn’t mean anything.
The fronds on the palm trees were eye level from the second story balcony at the hotel.
There was tea in the hotel room. Tea is tree without the “r”.
Tea with an “r” is tear.
Mother’s niece had married an army captain stationed in Oahu.
My brothers and I had grown our hair long.
Mother’s niece explained about the Hulu dancers, that they may call you on stage to dance with them,
“but don’t worry.”
I worry the whole time and I’ve never stopped.
Decades go by.
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Harold Bowes is the author of Detached Palace Garden (Ravenna Press, 2017). Harold’s poems have appeared in elimae, THRUSH Poetry Journal, alice blue, SOFTBLOW, Portland Review, DMQ Review, failbetter, and many others.
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