Seeker Magazine

John Horvath, Jr.

A Chicagoan living in Mississippi, John Horvath is a disabled veteran and a professor in literature and criticism. Since the late 1960s, he has performed his poetry in Munich, London, and across the U.S; his poetry appears in print and online. "I don't expect the world to see through my eyes nor do I expect many would like to see that way. That is called 'poetry'."
On writers: "I'm an eclectic reader: S.T. Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas alongside Akhmatova, Juhasz and Petofi, also Whitman, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti. Favorites change over time."
On writing: "The biographical, not autobiographical, and social narratives are a strong influence. Plato said that poetry endangers the established order of the soul; I write from "inside the sinner" where poetry exercises empathy and sympathy, renders the observed more open to discussion, more human, and perhaps more dignified. My technique is sprung or 'ruptured' rhythm: ideas are written in pen, revised into traditional metric/rhyme schemes (not necessarily English), then revised into free verse/lyrical form."

A POEM WHOSE TITLE IS ILLEGIBLE
but the poem - it is indeed a poem -
washed up in the gutter after the rain
(or perhaps it is a woman's tears after
reading the long ago words of a lover
now deceased or reported lost at sea

and now she is devastated by the loss,
she stands damp as a tree after a storm
she is torn and her limbs hang helpless
when she suddenly drops the letter from
her hand into the stream at her feet and
unable to move under the great weight
of loss she watches it vanish into its
watery grave; yes, she is like a tree

now broken despite years of standing
tall and straight against whatever wind
might blow (or it may be no more
than a grocery list of mundane needs -
like toilet paper bean sprouts tissues -
tossed from a passing car after used

(or unnoticed it blew from a window
(perhaps my own) and it is a message
from a lover to my wife who had been
(I noticed this morning) searching for
something before leaving for a "church
social" (what an excuse)))). THERE

I barely discern her name scrawled
(is that under or in the title); certain
that I can decipher the word LOVE that
stands alone untouched by nature as if
written in an ink that could never run

(oh if only love COULD be eternal
against all climates of the soul all
vices of the flesh all passing fancies
of the heart) or it is a note she wrote
hurriedly to me telling me she would
never return though her LOVE - that
one word is most certainly there - had
been real and strong and my doubt had
killed it slowly as if every question
about where had she been and every
questioning of what had she done with
whom had been so many small sharp
needles I tortured into her flesh and,
have failed to remove them, ignorant or
uncaring about how the heart would bleed
noticed nothing of how she turned pale.

No. It IS a poem, one I had written;
those are my tears that have washed
the dark ink into a cerulean waterpaint
of a horizon where small trees on
a barren hillside seem to spell
the word LOVE, for nature has
a sense of humor such as that.

SYNTHETIC PEARLS
I have seen the pearl in an oyster live;
I planted in the oyster shell my seed
and there it grew around itself a ring,
a ring, another, and another ring.

Smooth surface of the pearl in the oyster half,
reflects its maker's face on smooth soft arcs:
the light that was my soul exists inside the thing,
reflects its maker's life on its smooth new face.

Child, tighten yourself against the wayward seed.
The promise of the pearl is promised out of greed--
you must believe that oysters take some careful time
to find the grain that grows into those perfect arcs
that are unique and natural.

URGING THE PAST
As flax becomes the color of Garlic so dims an old man who, in the dim, remembers time. Others live in time. An old man is water in the tree; he keeps rings fresh 'til he falls. Autumn fears winter; the leaves fall and soon harvest will come upon us. Katya, Katya, ever fresh in the fields, you and America are my great romances. you are the mortar and the steel of the cities I build. The rock beneath the roads, Katya; come, Katya. Leave that road chosen for you; Bring to me the soft riverbanks and sweet Marcal water of home - they are your breasts and lips. Raise yourself a red sun over me; turn the cavernous city light. There is no darkness such as when I miss the barn owl's cry where we met after harvest; I shudder for the fieldmouse you became to fit the niche of my embrace. I embrace Katya; Come. What any man says of an embrace is that I have held you, held you close. To you, from the gray rock dove and brown sparrow dwelling in the cliffsides of the city, my words must echo amid the threshing rye. What has become of the seed that was love, our madness on the steps of the church where we nakedly professed forever would never be time for us, Katya? Time has eaten into the sweet meat; Fasting has made food bitter and rot. Katya, Katya, ever fresh in the fields, you and America were my great romances. You and the one who offered the apple. Katya, Katya, ever green in the fields, branch wide to shade a fool: forgive me. I shall never return. Come; Katya, come to me. I shall not return from the dead.

AFTER THE FIRE FLAMES OUT

After brooding summer windswept fire across fertile fields, valleys and creeks dry and ashen wait for cool winter white and deep spreading toward the edges of holidays, then the blank space in the heart craves movement Ice melts into parched rock and cuts meanders toward the sea where birds swerve through mists, on updrafts of promised rain toward moisture, moisture becoming the cloud the unfixed boundaries of craven movements. From first seeds blown from other lands toward this vacant burnt empty shore where the great sweep of storms drops lightening, these roots take hold and propagate along new banks. The time is come to fix our mobile hearts, our mobile thoughts, to plant our flags mid rock and daub of Divine and everlasting Truth. Woman takes a man; a man takes wife; their emptiness complete, it's sanctified by Church, made legal by an act of State: the river loses name when it enters a Great Lake (the waters keep it fresh; its commerce lives).

SEIZE THE DAY
The broad red morning sun would like
to reek of whorish wine and cheap cigars,
the pay-by-hour rooms, the emptiness
of time and place and man without a soul.
It wants to smell of greed and lust
and youth ill-spent. It wakes us with
its stoic purpose to repeat a senseless
day just as the last despite the night
that's lent itself to too often routine
pursuit of what I can get or what I got,
have gotten with my cash. I shall not
rise because it's risen as it's risen
in the past. Its rich red hue, its warmth
are passing promises too easy made and
just as often never kept - it makes me ill
to think so much is bartered in its name.
Seize the day. It makes me want to puke.
Sure. Seize the Day. It starts at dawn.
The sun objectively, it merely marks
beginning of another day; akin to hand
and feet and flesh - the sun's just there
as given us at birth untrained to make
some special claim upon how we might
act. It reeks of unreasoned metaphors,
and occasions we choose to celebrate,
the center of the worldly cults, a ruse
of newness in the Spring, the halfway
point of winter or the summer times.
And all of them, its huge red ass
from first to last of light will pass
along its same seamless track.

It acts for plant and beast perhaps but
not for man whose seasons fit the mind.
Oh, sink you bloated rankled orb of end-
less fire burning on imagined stuff.
Exhaust yourself. Leave my window and
my world; let me sleep and dream that
what I make of me, indeed I make in fact.
I need not seize your offering, that
lie of yours that burns--that we are
flesh and bone susceptible to heat.
Desires require only dark and simple
night, a shadow time, a ghosty place
of what we make with our own minds -
life's horrors and its whorish delights.

LOVERS PARTED

How long has it been since we've held hands
and leisurely strolled without regard
for the taunt and tsk-ing busy world
whirring 'round our simple pleasure

Has it been so long the fires embered,
turned to ash, our smiles remembered
but our lips have lost their playful twist--
o no, not at all, time without measure,

so small the moments when we're parted
that when we meet again my stalled
heart seems freshly started
and I am born again, sure

our friendship, then our love, had been fated.
Such emotions happen only once, I'm told;
but, if they've happened, the world's on hold.
Such pleasure to measure in leisure
the length of your smiles.

WHITFIELD LOOMIS

Gentle Loomis inserts ignition key to start
his Chevrolet then listens to the engine's
so silent perfect purr that growls a bit
when changing gears then settles to a drone
as if a Corvair aircraft on a runway awaits
its lift-off for a flight in cloudless skies.

With top down to catch whatever breeze, gust,
or wind that he may pass, and radio on high,
Loomis backs carefully from his driveway
onto Sunrise Lane to drive to the eastern end
of Main where he cruises slowly up and down
the business part of town. To and fro from
morning unto midday on a Monday in a humid,
sultry, summer month until he hits the brakes
and skids to curbside when he spies his prim
and proper sweetheart, Mrs. Sally DeLamour,
who craves an unexpected ride and something more.

But Loomis aims his Colt and shoots her point-
blank dead between her bright blue eyes grown
round and void at this surprise. Her straw hat
lifts off her head; a sticky sickly red splatters
over his front seat; her common calico yet
pretty dress is drenched with blood all down
her soft and shapely sexy back, and, when
Sal falls, he calls her "whore" because just
the night before alone with him in Loomis' home
Sal lay naked, smoking, on his bed and said,
"O No! I can't and won't become your wife;
I cannot leave my husband Stan (a Cajun and
a Catholic girl, she'd wed Stan and only Stan
for life despite his silly sissy sashay ways)."
So, when he'd questioned that, Sal said straight
out what Sal and Loomis love was all about:
the maculate conception of a one and only child
she could have. Yes, her impotent and unmoving
Stan would stand for that - Loomis as a sperm
bank used and set aside, a mechanical device
for sex. Surely Stan would understand and
surely Stan would stand for that. But Loomis
would not tolerate no bastard born of him and
phony love Sal seemed so much to have enjoyed.

Attorney Blake, appointed by the state to serve
some modicum of Defense though young and new
in town debated Loomis was insane; two PhDs had
questioned him - "you, yourself, Your Honor, had
assigned them to the test." The doctors labeled
Loomis "mad", a man who cares so much for cars
that after his one single perfect shot he stayed
beside the body of Sally DeLamour all stretched
out and oh so very dead to wipe red stains from
his front seat and greet the Cops. Despite
the drama of the plea that Loomis was insane,
the guilty verdict came; it read: ten to twenty
inside Whitfield was his fate. On sunny summer
days upon a bench in a small yard for exercise,
there loony Loomis sits and tells the inmates
passing near of how he rebuilt an antique
Chevvy out of junkyard scrap, a piece from here,
A bit from there, and painted it and polished it,
you'd damn right think it came straight off a lot.

(Copyright 2000 - All Rights Reserved by John Horvath, Jr.- No reproduction without express permission from the author)

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Letter to the Author:
John Horvath, Jr. at horvath1@bellsouth.net

For more information, visit PoetryRepairShop where he is editor, and his bibliography can be found at John Horvath, Jr..