Four Poems | Craig Czury

There Are Ones

who stand on myth and the mystic

There are ones who stand on dream

There are ones who stand on the laws that defy the laws of gravity

There are ones who stand on the path of least resistance

The principle that everyone is created from nothing equally

The scent between your legs

There are ones who stand in the light inside the dark behind their eyelids

The ones who stand on nothing with nothing but everything in a naked look

A blank stare

That trance while waiting in line

The ones who stand in silence when pressed for a key

The vital signs of a solution

I know what that is but I don’t know how to say it

I’m going there now but

I’m standing on a hunch

A gut feeling

I’m standing on a figment of my imagination

A quirk

A fluke

A whim

My intuition of what it means to be standing in the ether

waiting for a sign to move into anyone’s good guess

Of Everything That Gets Lost

in a lifetime

Of everything that eventually gets justified

turned to irony or black humor

Of every way to go looking for reprieve or forgiveness

I'm propped up on my elbows out the open window

the train-length of what used to be Yugoslavia

three boys my age along the tracks are shooting us with stick guns

the field workers my age are cutting cornstalks with sickles

stacking them like teepees

a girl my age walks down to the well with a wooden bucket

lowers it on a rope

the grimace on her face when she pulls it full is pre-Biblical

Of everything in this lifetime forgotten

My friend undresses for me in the dark

dropping her prosthetic leg inside her jeans

the thud

Waking up in a cemetery after chased

by dogs across the railroad tracks

scaling the ancient stone wall

blood-caked nails

The swamp house with shadows of men walking around

inside the water through its burnt-out floorboards

Of everything needed to be memorized or written down

to be remembered

there is never enough vodka

never enough television

Of this I need to say to you at this whatever unexpected moment

there is never enough bewilderment

This Getting Older Thing

for the moment I get it

I get the clarity of all this seemingly vacant time

staring into a blank sheet of paper

as if the Freudian mirror of Jesus will appear

that's what clouds do

insects burrow through this black space under bark

we have holy people who dedicate their lives

to this kind of silence

staring into sheets of tree bark

blank canvas

empty dance floor score sheet

sending vibes someone parallel might call prayer

into the murk

the funny kids in my class know all about this

but I never stick around for them to say it's ok

I always ran with an older crowd

and when I was set loose

I hung with the broken coal miners and railroad bums

factor this into the syllabus

I need to figure out what it means to be human

Who's gonna learn anything from anyone their own age

I knew this the moment the woman who gave birth to me

signed me over to the Orphan’s Court

the moment the nurse brought me back to her

when she wasn't supposed to

once to feed

I Took The Old Woman’s Picture

and maybe I shouldn’t have

but it was from behind

Like so many women I've wondered about

she walked bent over with a stick

she wore a shami we call babushka

and I wanted to see her face

I’d seen her lowering a box trap over the riverbank on a rope

and said to my friend let’s go see what she’s doing

You know there’s no accounting for time in dreams

so when no one came with me

I doubled back to where she’s in her yard

stooped over the fire looking at me

Her face is young like my cousin Brenda’s

the last time I saw her in junior high school

and I offered her a breath mint

ludicrous but ancient and tribal

as the only thing I had in my pockets

Fast-forward midnight walking to the lake

there has to be a signal when I get scared or pick up a weird vibe

Ok baby just step on my foot and say let’s go

When all the streetlights blew we stepped on it

just before I turned eight

and my Hungarian grandmother died in the hospital crawling with ants

I carry a picture of her standing in her garden looking like Geronimo

with her earth-cracked face wearing a babushka holding a trowel

She was the first woman who terrified me with her gaunt steely eyes

recurring face in the window at night I stare hard to dissolve

The old woman on the riverbank

I walk faster to pass so I can turn to see her face

I want to go that far to what frightens me

and she welcomes me to her table

where she sits opposite and rubs my foot

You write a lot don’t you.

You shouldn’t write about the ones you see in your dreams

they live out there

It’s no good to bring them here in your writing

and I let her

Craig Czury is the author of Postcards & Ancient Texts (a 40-year collection of napkin poems), Fifteen Stones (prose poems from Italy, Chile, Lithuania, and the spaces between) with an Introduction by Zingonia Zingone, Non pensare ai camion – in autostop sulla faglia Marcellus (translated by Aldo Villagrossi), and American Know-how – in attesa di brevetto (translated by Riccardo Duranti). He is the 2019 recipient of the Dafne Lifetime Achievement Award in Aulla, Tuscany.
When he’s not making poetry happen at Istituto Galileo Galilei in Crema, living in Soncino, Lombardia, Craig lives in Scranton, PA, where he continues his weekly online Life-Writing from Cyberia workshops, and community writing project with the formerly incarcerated.

www.craigczury.com.