The effect of rain
is not the rain but afterwards
a crisp sensation
on a muddled lawn the shyness of green

fecundity is holding hands
and after rain beneath dripping eaves
and gurgle-drained sky
slopping ideas like yesterday’s remembered invention
so important to holding hands with an eye
on the horizon of always

soft huddled statements
dewy soft fingers of memory

the effect of time is not the rain
but boy empires, girl empires, and kisses.


© 2006 Andre Narbonne

One Empty Chair

Perhaps he’d been blacklisted for falling 
asleep at the throttles and arriving nowhere important.  

Perhaps he was a disgraced doctor, a hated public 
school teacher gone senile,
someone who’d spent a lifetime selling tickets,

that old man
by himself at a table
in Montreal

As the afternoon wore 
on, bit-by-bit, 
the bar swelled and
the music raged.

Periodically
an ambassador from another world too green for grey would startle
the old man from the ice cold fogbank of reverie. 

He would start attentively, as though expecting to hear something of moment,  
some necessary news from a foreign front,

always smiled through what must have been the poisoned humiliation
of being asked for another chair. Only. Until 

he was left at last with one single empty chair 
at a large table.

They seemed to face each other lustily,
the old man and the empty seat of companionship.

When the last young man he would talk to that night 
came up and asked for that final chair 
I heard a rat weep in the alley.  

It was a hopeless table 
the old man left
with an expression of supreme apology
(like a convict before a firing squad)

that made the idiot cat in the kitchen lick its paws.


© 2006 Andre Narbonne

Turtle Poem

It was the last time I was fishing 
with my father and I caught 
a sunfish: it must have been 
summer. 

There was a turtle
in the river. “Beware,” he said,
“Fait attention.” I think I knew
from his deep breath
the turtle was a monster.

I kept staring at the far bank
at the green where no one was, 
and no turtles
and my father’s eye on the far bank;
it was the furthest thing from childhood,
the crystal fog of early morning
the tiny tug of teeth on drowning bait 
...bobber plunging
down into the 
mystery 

in my father’s head
I thought it was the turtle.


© 2006 Andre Narbonne

I'm in Love

I’m in love
with the mad woman
from Woody Point and we stood
on the dock I said
no one can describe these
mountains without
living in this town I said this mantle
rock begins in a fisherman’s boot
these clouds can’t be inherited at
a glance and we shivered in the
wind I held her saying no stranger
can draw anything but a self-portrait
I’m in love
with the mad woman
from Woody Point


© 2006 Andre Narbonne

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