Jeff Burt

Four Novembers

Child

My parents could not promise when we arrived
that we would not stay put for good

for they were experts at leaving, a hug,
a wave, an overloaded car

following the moving van as if we did not know
where it was headed

but wherever it was headed was good enough.
Our crying stopped in the distance

between our town and the next.
My mother said the friends we lost we would gain back

except they’d be new faces in new places.
But as we moved to the next place

the number diminished, until at the end of the moves
there were no friends left.

My father said we always had each other, but then
I left in November.

Mother

My mother died before Thanksgiving.
The memorial had turkey, potatoes, and squash.

Snow fell that day. I had desired a casket
to carry, but her body had been cremated, ash like snow.

She had spoken in tremolo, a fluctuating and warm sound,
and in the whiteout the memory of her voice

seemed to clear the road. The next day under more snow
the road could not hear her voice any longer.

Since that November, I searched for the road
that carried her song, that burned off the cold,

through one town and the next, never settled,
a Main Street, a side street, a lane the wind could empty.

Father

One year after my mother died, I walked a path
in a field of reeds with my father to an opening in a marsh

where geese and egrets congregate before flying south.
Wisdom had once flown out of his mouth,

but wit and humor had left him, and the following spring
when I returned, the geese had not come back, and never would.

Spouse

I chose to fast on Thanksgiving, took a narrow road
east from the college to an esker

where Ojibwe drummed and I drank so much tea
I jittered, clenched my teeth

and muscles and beat my feet to an awkward rhythm.
I could not dance.

I had lived ten lives in ten towns until college
and the constant mooring, unmooring made me travel lightly

as if I had stored my heavy possessions at my parents’ home
and would return for them later. I never returned.

When I married, I carried my bride into an apartment
and felt in my arms the weight of my life,

a joy I could forever suspend, inhabit,
a transiting home that stayed in one place.
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Swamp

My brother wears boots to tramp the swamp.
Even in summer, he tells, there’s invisible water
below each step, up to an inch, and ruin
comes to leather. Once, he said, the suck
of the soggy turf took one tennis shoe
and he was made to hop on return,
felt like a wounded cricket, except he can’t sing.
Larch thickets and paper birch populate
like mangroves in a coastal glade.
It’s where you grew up, he says,
where you return. Home.

Midges and non-malarial mosquitos prevail
but for a constant brushing with flailing arms
like window wipers in a storm. It always feels
like you’re playing charades with children
showing them an awkward flight, a propeller
of a plane or wings beating against the air.
They get it right away. The midges don’t.

I’ve had the opportunity in spring to stand
on the side of the road near the swamp
when the water is six inches deep
and watch deer wade, wonder where they hide
in such muck. Their hides look clean,
and somehow, they pick their way and hooves
don’t sink and foals follow almost dry.
It exhausts the eye to wait for them to move
any length, and who as a kid could watch
an asphalt truck take a day to lay
a short stretch of road? That’s the pace
in the swamp, not slow, but unseen,
requiring the patience of evolution,
one mutation on another, or none at all.
Standing on the road, I could see through
the looking glass of water to the sealed wood
of birches and the tangled mass of larch
and within the mess a thousand things
in swarm, nothing bigger than a tadpole,
darting, resting, molting, devouring,
some with those tiny bubbles of air
they’ve drawn from the surface
still attached to their heads,
astronauts or argonauts of their own dimension.
I got down on hands and knees
and admired the goo, water thick
from winter melt, and felt grateful
for this, and for rising from rickety knees
that popped so loud it scared the tadpoles.
I saw far off an egret gauging my interest
with that one-eyed look, a parent perhaps,
wary of my venture into its children’s park.
I felt at home there, but like a relative’s home
at which your intended stay is short,
for after all, I’d evolved, no more gel
and motive tail, I’d become a modern nomad
traveling from one territory to another
for work, and home had become
what I carried, like a burden, on my back.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, spending the seasons dodging fires, floods, earth-shaking, and all the other scrambling life-initiatives. He has contributed to Heartwood, Tiny Seeds Journal, Vita Poetica, and Willows Wept Review. He has a chapbook. Little Popple River, for free download at Red Wolf Editions.