Novelist, scholar, humanitarian and gentleman, Howard Bahr also has a poet’s hand and ear, eye and heart.
For A Girl I Know, That She Might Not Grieve
When I am dead,
you must not think me dead,
but gone ahead on a two-lane desert blacktop
road, doing eighty with the top down
in a cream-colored ’40 Ford coupe
stroked and bored in Tucumcari.
Route 66 is a blue arrow to the mountains,
and the desert no dead place, but strewn
with flowers only Indians have the names to;
hawks aloft, and lizards legging it
over the hot sand, bellies raised; roadrunners
racing the hopped-up Ford through the Creosote
brush; shrikes perched on the telephone lines; and
an SP freight train running fast westbound–
a flat plume of smoke, all signals green.
Then mountains passed, the western slope kissed
with morning shadow, the fir trees dusted with snow.
The pastel desert towns lay behind me now,
and below a green valley, orange groves,
the distant glittering sea.
Now, after dark, in a bungalow in Elysian Park,
I labor as of old, trying to find the words to tell
of why we do the things we do: why we love;
why we strive in vain; why we let the rain beguile our hearts
with longing and desire.
And here, from time to time, I rise, go to the window,
pull the curtains by and raise the blinds,
and gaze upon the palms and Oleander
and the haze around the moon.
All is well. My heart’s alive.
I watch for your twin headlights in the drive.
Flamingo Arms
In apartments stuffed of furniture no one wants,
where children grown and gone
smile down from every horizontal place,
the old ones listen for the mail.
And when at last the postman brings the mail around,
he creaks the boxes open, creaks them shut again.
The old ones peer into the hall, then shuffle in their slippers
to the boxes on the wall: church bulletins, bills,
catalogs from a world no longer theirs.
But how is Judith faring in the city?
And Donny on the oil rig in the Gulf–
is he safe? Did he marry the girl from Lafayette?
What of young Alyssa at her college in the North?
Those lives are silent.
In the catalogs: plush counterpanes, support hose,
baths to sooth the feet, and means
to keep the patio insect-free.
The water bill is high this month.
Behind their curtains, the old ones open checkbooks,
calculate, despair.
Next day, the mail comes round again.
A Parable for My Students
Last night, my neighbor Pitts
Set out a Havahart for cats
That fell his birds. No luck.
Instead, today by early light,
I kenned a possum caught.
Unkempt he was, and fat, and pacing
To and fro. He rose to press his paws
Against the wire, then paced again: a turn,
And turn, and rise, and turn, and rise,
And turn, and rise to naught.
A ghostly, wedge-faced possum,
Rat du Bois, no good in stir to anyone
Except himself perhaps, or Johnny Cross
Who fattens one each year to bake
With sweet potatoes–God forbid the thought!
Anon, I rambled out and crossed
The dewy grass, took hold the door
And lifted it, and propped it with a stick.
“Now, scram,” said I. But, no, he hunkered down,
And bared his yellow teeth, and curled his tail
Just as his mama taught.
Thus he remained, like unto Death,
A mockery of Life, when all the while
The door stood open, beckoning him quit
The bars, and flee, and brave the morning
As a creature ought.
In early afternoon, old Pitts came out
And puzzled at his prize, and scratched his head,
And gazed suspicious at the stick. He shrugged at last
And took his snub-nosed .22 in hand:
Pop! Pop! it said, and so the possum bought.
Take heed, my Little Ones: the gate is raised;
Go hence and seek the morning. God be praised!
–Howard Bahr
