Two Poems Walk into a Bar
by Jack Powers

It’s not that I don’t want to talk,
but I’ve got nothing to say to you, Poetry.
Nothing, that is, that hasn’t been said.
The sonnets alone have covered love.
And death? Aren’t they all about death?
I guess I’m speaking now about loneliness,
but what do I have to complain about? No,
Poetry, talk to me instead. Let me feel what you’ve felt,
see what you – Laugh what you’ve laughed? Sure.
Two poems walk into a bar… And? Ouch! No. Poetry, listen:
two poems walk into a bar. They buy a round for the house,
play some pool, lead the bar in song. Later that night
under a cue ball moon, little poems are conceived
all over town. No one is lonely again.

Jack Powers, CWP Fellow in 1986 and an active teacher/consultant ever since, has been named Poet of the Year by the New England Association of Teachers of English, an affiliate of NCTE.

Jack has been an inspiration for many writers – from youngsters in elementary and secondary schools in Connecticut to participants in all of the Institutes sponsored by CWP-Fairfield.

He remains the glue for his Writing Group that has been together since 1986!

Below are the poems that NEATE recognized as outstanding!!!! They reflect the wit, craft, insight and depth of vision that I and his many fans recognize as the heart and soul of Jack, a person we admire, respect and love

I Was Here

Rising out of the stone-strewn ebb tide estuary are rocks stacked,
a towering sight I’ve seen at every rocky beach I rode by this summer
saying no more than “I was here.” And no less. Like ground-smoothed

stones left on tombs. A calling card. Yet this one makes me stop,
get off my bike, climb down the seawall to get a closer look.
A foot-round base of smaller stones supports a long thin but solid stem

half-rock/half-cement – a sea wall remnant. On top, a brick balances
under a flat black stone – a pedestal with small stones stacked like a bird
from the road side or from another angle a delicate rickety bridge.

As I circle round, admiring this shrine to both memory and forgetting,
I think, for some reason, of my father, curled, thin and rasping,
in his hospital bed, his final breath one step ahead of the nursing home

and its waiting chair by the window. He dreamed of being a writer –
early boxing novels for teens gave way to PR releases
and corporate speeches and letters to friends and birthday poems

now lost or filed in some box or forgotten drawer. I am, I must confess,
as much monument to what he wasn’t as what he was, determined
to re-fashion, but made, I’ve learned, from the same found materials

evident in my son’s voice, my face in the mirror. Now I wish
I could take a photograph before this all is washed to sea. I resist the urge
to add a stone or freeze the moment. I bow my head to this unknown master

and leave his work to the tides and wind, to the kids and birds, the setting sun,
to gravity and even to the faint moon rising now ahead of the black, black night.

You don’t have to bomb Dresden to prove you can fly a plane.
– Warren Zevon

Amsterdam, Cracow, Budapest, Prague.
I trace your postcard postmarks –
faint waves across a woozy sea.
Each name lights up an image

from a grade school textbook.
On my morning drive, I practice being numb
unworried about your unscripted journey –
reckless, lonely, stubborn – but I concede.

You’ve made your point. When Kosovo
turns to Istanbul, Damascus, Tel Aviv,
I parse the difference between want
and need. I don’t know anymore,

I write back. You win.
You’re braver. Please. Come home.

Spittin’ Image

The first time I heard it was from a caricaturist in Provincetown.
Same thing without the pipe, he said when I, at five, followed my father
into the chair. My reactions ranged from flattered then to angry
at 14, to bewildered in ponytail and Fu Manchu at 20, to mildly amused
at 40 as I felt successful in my campaign to be the anti-him. And now
when he struggles to decipher a hotdog shack menu and asks
the same question again and again, I nod my head when the waitress says,
Must be your dad, as I help him on to the wobbly stool.

In Plain Air

Someday, I say, I’ll bring a camera
and stop each morning instead of barreling down Burr,
rocketing left on Black Rock and glancing only briefly
between the trees at the tumble of rocks that jut out into the reservoir.
Each day the light is different: the sun angled higher,
the mist clinging tighter, bluer to the water, my eyes a little blearier.
I cling to that scene in my head, but it slides away, away,
graying to blurry motes of memory by the time I park
and my head fills with day. I savor and forget.
Morning after morning, the birches whisper,
Slow down, until at some point counting up
seesaws to counting down.
From the black on black of mid-December
to the grey ice and snow of February to the slow
yellowing of late March, I will set up my tripod in the wood,
keep the frame the same and click, capturing my own Haystacks –
my study of light and shadow. But now I grasp
each glance like a pearl – brief, beautiful, gone.
Someday, I say, I’ll bring a camera.