By Jeremy Cantor on April 18, 2018
Jeremy Cantor: Three Poems
Poetry
A Toast
Here’s to the song you heard when you
were falling in love but have forgotten
the title and the tune and the lyrics
so even if you fell in love to
some other song you’ll
think this song is that song.
Here’s to the way your heart
shunted your brain onto a side track
and left it where you would have to go
and find it and drive it back into town
the next day or the next year or
maybe not ever.
Here’s to the way the morning sun
through the curtains on the kitchen window
during breakfast the morning after
suddenly made you think not of Vermeer
but of Edward Hopper.
Here’s to the surface of the water that
has already crossed into night trying to
reflect the evening sky’s indigo but instead
showing you a color you have no name for
that promises quiet if only you will
slip beneath the surface past the point
where you’ll hear water lapping at your ears
to where eyes closed or eyes open
is all the same.
*
What You Don’t Know
it feels like the season’s last rain
the last rain before the living sweet green
on the hills turns first to the golden brown I love
then to the grey brown I don’t understand
the still night air encourages a cloud
of the orange tree’s scent
to come out of hiding, envelop the house,
creeping even as far as my open window
around the corner on the south wall
if you stood by me you would not smell it
they could not figure out how else to stop
the little girl’s nosebleeds so they cauterized
and left scar tissue covering the nerves
now seventy years later I can count on one hand
the number of things you can smell
and that number does not include
the smell of orange blossoms at night
or the smell of the rain that is about to fall
*
There Is Nothing Like A Berkeley Estate Sale
her microscope (brass barrels)
her short-wave radio (vacuum tubes)
her slide rule (ivory-faced)
her mechanical polar planimeter (does anyone still make those?)
one copy of every journal her work appeared in
books inscribed to her by most of the famous people in her field
boots, butterflies, black and white photographs
boxes of things I looked at for an hour
but can’t recall
a monkey’s skull studded all over with
round silver ornaments like upholstery tacks
sheet music for piano
an oboe reed
an mbira
a djembe
dictionaries in four languages
novels in three
poetry in two
dust the agent missed when cleaning for the sale
two shelves of journals
with entries in two different hands
except for the last volume
with entries in hers only
a wedding ring
her underwear which of course
she needed until the day she died
but there was no one left who
cared enough to get rid of it
before the sale
back at the car you said “Please, love—
don’t let that happen to me.”
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Author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeremy Cantor began writing when he retired from a career in laboratory chemistry. He has made and tested engine oil additives, detergents and pharmaceuticals, driven a forklift, worked in a full-body acid-proof hazmat suit, tried to keep his fingers working in a walk-in freezer at -40°F and worked behind radiation shielding. He prefers writing. Six poems from his book Wisteria from Seed (2015) were set to music by composer Robert Gross and performed in arrangement for mezzo-soprano, piano and recorder at the Boston Conservatory as well as at venues in San Francisco and Tucson. Jeremy was a semi-finalist in the competition for the Dartmouth Poet in Residence at The Frost Place, a museum and nonprofit educational center for poetry located at Robert Frost's former home in Franconia, New Hampshire, and was twice a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Poetry. His poems, which have appeared in ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, published in conjunction with Oxford University Press), Ithaca Lit, Canary, and other journals, arise from the meeting place of the sounds and rhythms of literature, music, natural history and science.
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