Mark D. Hart

September 23, 2014

“Ichabod” by Mark D. HartPosted by

Mark D. Hart

ICHABOD

No telling him
he looks ridiculous.
This banty rooster—
all 8 inches of him—
puffs up and
struts his maleness
dwarfed by the full-sized hens.
Icky’s crow is an
octave too high and it
falters at the end to a
squeak, and we laugh,
but fondly.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
Tribute to Love Poems

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__________

Mark D. Hart: “Our little banty rooster, Ichabod, has been dead for years now, but he remains alive in the treasury of family memories. Writing poetry is a way for me to, if not immortalize, at least prolong the memory and the savor of the joys and sorrows that have made up my life and to share them with others.” (website)

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December 26, 2010

“Incompetence” by Mark D. HartPosted by

Mark D. Hart

INCOMPETENCE

It’s uncanny how often
when I sit on this bench
by the bakery someone really
screws up parallel parking
in the space next to me.
It’s uncanny how this space
is often empty while all
other spots are filled.

Is it cursed? The drivers
are always female, which
is not PC of me to notice,
and young—this is a
college town. I watch them
hit the curb, go up onto it,
or end up so far from the curb
they need a drawbridge.

They jockey forward and
backward, ending up
no closer, start over again
in traffic, end no better.
They notice me watching,
which in this frustration
produces inevitably
an embarrassed smile.

I compound the problem,
but I return the smile
in empathy and bemusement
and just a slight edge
of flirtation. I feel better
and go about my day,
thinking about how our
incompetence connects us.

—from Rattle #33, Summer 2010
Tribute to Humor

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July 17, 2009

“The Calf in the Pantry” by Mark D. HartPosted by

Mark D. Hart

THE CALF IN THE PANTRY

At the base of cream-colored cabinets,
the milk of his newborn face gazing
toward the kitchen, the brown rug
of his body shivering on the linoleum,
unlicked and slick with the balm
of his intrauterine life, the abandoned calf,
legs bent and untried beneath him,
lay at the feet of the very utility sink where,
after the fall butchering,
cold cow hearts would be soaking in a pail.

I imagined Dad in coveralls
carrying the calf in his arms from the barnyard
just like the plaster shepherd
in the Christmas crib scene.

We kids dabbed him dry with towels,
eager for the feel of him. We mixed
warm water with formula and fed him
from a bucket with a huge latex nipple
protruding from its side, his throat
greedily sucking and swallowing.
The rose bush behind the house
scratched on the window pane
buffeted by a cold March wind.

—from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry

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July 16, 2008

“Torching the Playhouse” by Mark D. HartPosted by

Mark D. Hart

TORCHING THE PLAYHOUSE

Flames incinerate our years of studied play.
It had been an old pig barn, and we squealed
to have it as our own, mopped it out,
washed the windows, drug into it desks, chairs,
and a couch resembling Freud’s that now
lights into smoke and flame and
vanishes like a dream, unrecoverable by analysis.
Labs with colored chemicals whose rows of jars
beckon like crayons to idle minds exploring a
Middle Earth between innocence and adulthood
fall and shatter as tables and shelves give way beneath them.
Posters, calendars, remnants of the haunted house
for Halloween flower into flame, we watch them go,
watch flames lick the rough boards, hungry,
inside because we lit the match
until heat drives us out and we stand back
bright-eyed, flames crawling out the rafters,
running up the roof, leaping, roaring,
bestial, eating out the blackening core
more swiftly than we had guessed.
Arsonists of our childhood,
privy to the plans to burn it anyway,
we seize the chance to fire this final rocket,
to send something of our intensity skyward,
adrenal, no hope of recovery, we want to see
the deep death latent in all things, play with it,
welcome it, fill our ignorance of it,
let the structure collapse
and its matter and time implode into
the black holes of our eyes.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

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