Zachariah Wells

There Is Something Intractable in Me

Keeping me from sentimental verse
About your birth and growth and milestones.
Love like this is best left mute, though I curse
Each impulse to crush clichés like bones
Broken in a vise. Can’t say what’s worse:

Diving in headfirst or standing shin-deep
On a shoal. Never been much of a swimmer.
Vigils, my son, I’ve held, to see you sleep
In dusk-dim light and I’ve felt the dimmer
Numbness in me melt. I’ve tried to keep

Watch from a safe ascetic distance,
Emotion held in check—a trick that’s killed
Love in the past. The slant consonance
Linking us will stall me, until I’ve fulfilled,
Stubbornly, the demands of these constraints.

The Poetry in Him

The poetry in him’s not hard to miss—
Lear’s Kent, steady servant, taking cover
When cynics stormed the stage, but never
Hiding out. No lies in him, his honest
Talk not florid, stripped of artifice
And ornament. Plain. Don’t take his silence
For indifference, don’t mistake it for a lack
Of love, nor his boxer’s skill for violence,
His aptitude with axe and saw and maul
For bloodlust. Flawed? Yes, but what he hacked
Apart he raised into a home, a small
Solid shield against impending weather,
And at its heart a Jotul blazing hot.
My father was not a man who said a lot.

Kaddish

I’m told that I resemble you. I do,
It’s true, like an Arab a Jew, I can see

Me in you, right to my left shoe, bootstrapped
And blue. Dear zeyda, dear grampa, dear Lou,

Let’s marry, let’s say our I do’s, our boo-
Hoos, our adieus. She never left you—you

Were threaded in her like a screw, staining
Her like a tattoo, drubbing and draining

Her blue. It was you, Lou, you who flew,
Old Lear, into rages and bottles and fugues,

Into the storm you flew—where I met you,
Cursing the gods and the fools who weren’t you.

And goddamnit, grandfather, I am you,
Stubborn, wicked and true. I never knew

You in life, but I didn’t need to—
And it’s not long now till I’m dust, too.

The Same Man Never Steps into a River Twice

Find yourself a flat stone by the bank,
Sit down and watch the river purl and froth
And flow; note where it pools and how its flanks
Straighten and bend into bows. It is both

Protean and permanent. You’ll never
See the same wave twice; the molecules
Of H2O won’t sit still and make fools
Of sages who would fix them. But clever

Man has done it, naming this forever
Fitful stream of fluxity, nailing its
Matrix, water, and its channel, river,
As if they were as still as stone. A man sits

By a river. He is no more the same
Man he was, yet he bears a constant name.

after Jean-Baptiste Chassignet

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