Dave Seter: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Dave Seter
Three Poems
The Man Whose Bones Are Gone
Plenty of salt in the desert we made but never enough water.
Instead, Sunday’s thimbles of sacramental wine
helped him to incrementally drift away from this earth,
leaving behind jealousy, dogs and their bones.
He’d watched strays worry those found femurs
and circle their own tails like currents of water
flowing through city parks, the bounds of their earth
as they mourned their losses, whining.
The man grew a thirst for ordinary wine.
He grieved over the San Andreas Fault’s broken bones
and the last resting places of sailors in offshore waters,
who never felt at home in their bodies on earth.
He watched people, shot at, hugging the dirt,
suddenly in love with their bones.
What of the miracle of turning water into wine?
And the human body a miracle, almost all water?
He’s gone from his bones and his body mostly water,
freed from wine-soaked earth, from all that troubling blood.
Letter to Paul
Now I find myself somewhere West of the Mississippi,
but I’ll never forget the fire and ice,
those shots of schnapps
you bought me and my bride to be
at that Plainsboro bar where she and I skied
that rare New Jersey winter of moonlight and snow.
I’m sorry I didn’t find you again
until ten years later in an obituary.
I was broken up by the breakup of the marriage,
had removed myself three thousand miles.
But somewhere I still have your wedding present—
that sterling silver shot glass—
I just need to rummage into the past to find it.
When you left this world—I hope, for another—
did you drive the spirit of your cherry red Celica coupe,
the one you spun out—in the NJDEP parking lot—
in front of General Whipple our leader
who frowned upon Hawaiian Shirt Fridays?
Was your death like your father’s?
Remember—you confided in me once—
about his early fall from a ladder leaving you lost?
The only time you spoke of your father.
And I’m confiding in you now, a little late,
confessing, I forgot, for a while, our brotherhood.
Did an angel reply to your finger pain
when you plucked at the strings of that guitar,
a Winston on your lips, vodka on ice,
chiming lamplight at your right elbow?
Tell me what the angels have to say to us all—
one day—will we become elemental?
Growing Green Diesel
Work the field, tend tendrils of hope clinging to vertical rows of string,
play the field if you’re a free agent divested of your wedding ring
and all accoutrements. I will join you, harvesting Nelson hops,
brewing them into green diesel to drive the tractor of my imagination.
Because loneliness tends its own strands, seeing blonde hair
when there’s nothing there or finding them between the seats of that old Mazda,
though I traded away that memory years ago with its original clutch—
I was so gentle with it on the hills, climbing San Francisco.
Let’s run our tractors on green diesel and run circles around each other,
our childhood ponies painted without remorse. And while you’re at it,
please send me the secret code—how to live on a warming planet—
can we talk it over? Over a glass of green diesel? The tightly wound strands
of my worrisome mind have caught in the tractor’s gears, bewildered.
Author Bio:
Dave Seter is an environmental engineer, poet, essayist, and the author of Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag). He earned his undergraduate degree in engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California. He has been named Sonoma County Poet Laureate for 2024-26. More at: https://www.daveseter.com On Instagram: @daveseter_ecopoet
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