Jared Carter Poems

It takes a long, smooth stroke practiced carefully
over many years and made with one steady motion.

You do not really cut glass, you score its length
...

If you were fortunate enough to live
on a planet circling a sun-like star
in the Large Magellanic Cloud -
...

One of life's simplest moments: the approaching of the first few drops of a summer rain. That it was coming, all along, and had been predicted since mid-morning, by neighbors pointing to the dark western sky, and by the agitation of robins, and the unusual silence of cicadas - all that was conceded, and understood, while the rain itself would be welcomed, for it would cool the trees and the houses and the grass, and nourish the creatures of the earth in its invisible and lasting way.

Certainly it was expected, and yet as I sat there reading, being drawn into a faraway world, I had entirely forgotten the roof and the porch, and the parched streets, and even the increased tempo of the wind blowing through the trees - and suddenly there it was, that sound, those drops scattering, nothing overwhelming, just the announcement, the presence, of rain come at last.
...

In a cold empty room, down
in the basement, the janitor
had rigged up an old buffer
from the shoe factory - it was
...

No, it's simple, you mustn't worry.
She won't mind, you'll see when we get there,
it will be all right. She's never in a hurry.
...

It was never anything we really wanted to do.
There was always so damned many of them.
When we went out to milk, in the dark hours
of the morning, they'd swarm through the stalls,
...

I like their stories about snow -
how deep it got by spring. And nobody
would eat tomatoes, they were poison.
...

To balance there, again, in the early dark,
three rungs up on the old stepladder,
afraid to go any higher, it wobbles so -
to reach out and find the first set-screw
...

Our favorite? Not exactly. Still,
you made the rain
Of yellow shavings curl and spill
from your rough plane.
...

The old stories do not end the way you were told.
Hansel and Gretel do not escape from the witch's house;
they decide to stay. Ali Baba does not emerge from the cave,
but enters a subterranean chamber that goes on for miles.
...