Four Poems by Jason Spear: Visitors, Night Garden, Prelude to a Rose, Don Juan in the Desert

Four Poems

by Jason Spear

Visitors

We are visitors in these old rooms-
The white sheets on the furniture,
The silk scarf on the coat-rack
Clings to your perfumes;

The piano by the window, dust and black,
The keys waiting to be touched.
C has lost its lightness (like lemon sounds
you would say) the strings gone slack;

The mountains by the window
Are full of our wanderings,
Sweating up in summer in the florid air
And gliding down in winter, free;

Yellowed sheets spread out their cipher.
That last piece you were working on
Before you knew, silvery you said it must be,
Like something perfect we always remember-

The sunlight on the cragged streams here,
Chilly but not blue. Your unfinished song
Longs for you. The melody plays
White light till sudden silence

In the chill places where we played
A while (where I hear you now)
The thistle meets the snow.
We are visitors in these vanished spaces.

Night Garden

A moth moves
Round and round,
Devouring flowers
Without a sound;

Twilight and garden
Meet just an hour,
So their slowness
Is all for an hour,

Blue and bluer
Till darkness
Is all but the stars
Flickering, miraculous;

A spider brushes the
Silence while my eyes are
Closed, wondering
How near and far

Meet here sometimes.
They open to squared rings
Of weightlessness,
Glittering.

The moth on the
Petal flutters
In the web; the farthest
Stars shimmer

Here through light years tonight-
This sky, this web, this rest
In intricate simplicity.
Devil take the rest.

Prelude to a Rose

Here lies the water – Good.
-First Clown

It was blue water and a cadaver
Pulling the same ole face forever,
My fellow of infinite jest.

We laid violets on her breast in faith,
But roses? They are gone a down a…

Till Sleeping Beauty wakes
They must hesitate to bloom.

Their loss is for the while,
This silence, our exile.

Don Juan in the Desert

He struggled to make it there
At all, but the voice was tender,
Intimately familiar.
I will give you power over
Lovers, but nothing more.

-There is nothing more
Than love, he swore. And swore
He understood a singular
Love, but his vision was on fire,
In many tongues of his own desire.

Jason Spear is a writer, translator and teacher of Anglophone Literature at the Cité Scolaire Internationale in Lyon, France. Recent and forthcoming publications include Agenda, Arsenic Lobster, The American Drivel Review, Barnwood, Cipher Journal, The Furnace Review, The Houston Literary Review and Verse Daily.

Copyright 2011, Jason Spear. © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.