The Last of an Orchard
Winter Fog
Monsters Among You
By David Hoffman
The Last of an Orchard
Smelling of blackness / the dad-shapen prairie
and scorched by the pond that’s west off the deck
Sprint-jumping-skip / and a crawl of a weave
betweening the gravel aflow is the river
Mapping the apples / from whence there were pears
peaches and plums aground are now ghosts
Taking a vantage / to look at the story
the wise in the kitchen to boys in a tizzy
A gnarly old fogey / of tree on the corner
kept unkempt-scratchy, spotty and tired
The end of a line / the one brother to bear
scatters of tartier teardrops for shoes
Tasting with toes / the drooling of tongues
picking with mitten-rich sweetness, a throw
In shadowy ditchness / yellow with wasps on the dead
a towering arbor in only itself
The friend of the sun / by the son by the son
is visited illness that’s glad for the myth
If in dying it goes / it gets sung by the fire
with glory, tired of smiling but smiling for us
Waving to waves / at the wavy assembly
and meeting the barn at the start of it all
Winter Fog
the edges, mystical
like a step in the blur would populate me at the opposite end of the dinner plate defined by the fog
a light breakfast
the cookie tinted, ice-white, creamy-centered light spills like milk into my dining room
the flow, propelling
from the considerate carpet onto the shocking wooden floor of the kitchen to fetch a coffee cup, groggily
an extension, the veil
my forgotten dreams shadow me so my usually regretful wokeness isn't welcome at the Keurig, dazed
my desktop: busywork
a world away (those other days), dutiful buildings beyond the breathing mist are a laughable fantasy
within it, globed-in
we're snowed-in, the lane a ledge bending into a foggy breath on glass in the crystalline atmosphere
Monsters Among You
The storied many
I suspect are fewer
Out, in open trust of all others
Uncaged roamers, docile
Mate-calling and trotting, unafraid
Alphas atop the food chain
The poisonous ideal, the sick sunlight
That shades are drawn against
‘Bright’ by all accounts but ignorance
Of their own aura that sends the nocturnal
Uncounted creatures, into hiding
But in that night
While the dwindling angels sleep
The disdained creatures
Cursed of opposite images in mirrors
Convinced they are monsters
Blindly echo about the towns
Doubt eternally in their shadowed shadows
Chasing, drinking, endlessly in the evening
A desperate hope that they are not alone
Gulping and gagging and choking
Until they are drunk on a belief
They worry is a lie
There is an image from David’s youth of an afterlife sky, purply above a round hill of fall prairie grass. His second-grade self wrote his first poem about that imagined place. Since then, he’s just been "going at it": writing because it feels that’s what David Hoffmans do. All trace of him just might vanish if he doesn't put himself on a page every now and again.