Brooklyn and After & Poems 1973-1987

By Steven Klepeis

This book combines two previously unpublished volumes of poetry, POEMS 1973-1987, and BROOKLYN and AFTER. Together, these works comprise the author's complete work in poetry from the time he started writing in his early twenties through the 1990's.

After a long hiatus, during which the author devoted his time to the demands of his career in risk management, he has once again begun to write poetry, and he is currently working on a verse narrative of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the only truly successful Native American uprising in the history of North America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638607472

Book preview

ARABIANS IN A FIELD

stand, a flourish

in the wind’s glossy signature,

or graze about at will

in the whinnying waves

of silken alfalfa.

Manes toss,

the auburn, the egg speckle

white manes toss,

and the

sky tosses back

the tallest royal blue

of May’s daylight.

How long they’ve waited out

the chill air

for the gates at last to be opened-

the sudden

start and stop,

and start; the first hoof’s

compressing of soft sod.

How long the winter grates on our attention

till these swift days remove it,

and still an ear lobe reddens in this unending breeze.

Down about two hundred yards

in the open, the whole day

loops about them,

each movement a carefree

flinging of horse ghost

into the free air.

Their contentment is merely

breathing: perfume of shad bush,

Judas tree, and dandelion.

And all are clumped about furrows

in the field’s large rotation.

Today, the first day, a herd with no drifters.

The wind’s light leaps like a clear stream all their edges at the edges of the moving eye. It eats their voices.

MOSQUITO LARVA

Here

on the olive water

how it moves,

a frail sparkle

on the deep prospect of failure,

and the probability is multiplied.

Motion’s minutiae

so centrally in mind

in a pool

of snowmelt, fed by leaves and sun,

trapped in the lens of nature.

One wants to run

from all the oceans of wizardry

drained into this birth.

One wants to think it only wider

and wider

till one thinks it

out,

but a billion movements

note each passing fact:

the sudden

bone umbrella

flexing backward,

wrinkling in wind, and the touch

of stagnation’s glue

in the rich water’s massing

indifference;

craned like a stilted spider,

dazed as a broken fly,

possessing its

age only,

naked as a starling

and as yet without act,

it trembles

to find its worth

as a new thing made new.

ABOUT APRIL

1

The day warming, deep

on a country road and windows up,

our big truck, red truck

leaning its long throat up a hill,

and we so locked inside the ringing clatter,

as deep then

in still wells.

Passed a house, reached top, the engine

losing its labor like some

ancient fading airplane,

and the two of us, lost crew,

skeletons cleaned by noise,

rattled on gravel

and last winter’s crust, just

straining to see through,

stopped. And stalled the engine. There, in the road,

a turkey, no

grouse

yes

grouse.

ABOUT APRIL

2

With his black ring on tan round

the tan and russet courting fan,

some of the