The Continuous Present

Eric Pankey

 

From a certain height and distance,
He can observe the river’s meander,
How it turns back on itself
To move ahead
Toward some unseen body
Of water that pulls it, calls to it.
And on summer nights,
From that same spot
He can watch the ether propagate stars—
The orbs filled
With a glass-blower’s breath—
And with each new star
He must reconfigure the site-lines,
The map of the simple path home.
What is a body but the remnants of touch,
Marks left by previous contact
And collisions?
For a long time he believed
Looking down at a river
Or keeping current a ledger of stars
Was an antidote to uncertainty,
And not, as he knows now, a giving in
To it. He blinks and disrupts
The continuous present.
He pulls the car over
On the off-ramp’s downward curve
And rolls down the window.
He cannot hear the river
Through the scrubby woodland,
Nor see the stars
Through the hazy dome of city light.
He listens to the traffic,
A rush this way and that,
As if any direction could be his destination,
A road that connects to a road home.

 

 

The Crossing

Eric Pankey

 

The moon—another stone tumbled from a wall,
White-washed in a haphazard manner—
Hoards the little light that falls upon it.
To see it is to trespass. The signs are posted
And that slack length of uncoiled barbwire
Was meant to keep you on the other side.
The password you scribbled down is out of date.
It does not matter. The checkpoint guard
Has abandoned his post. Like you, he is where
He should not be, squinting to see something
Lit by a sullen, threadbare, secondhand light.

 

 

Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poems. His latest book “The Owl of Minerva” is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2019. He teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at George Mason University.