Two Poems
Inner Winter Solstice
Each year, I’m earth-
bound. I keep falling
into it with my feet.
I’m not sure what
I keep failing to see
between the long
shadows stretching
north now that once
required such stone-
work to be believed.
Unworshipped light,
I guess, moves on.
And what if where it’s
going, I can’t imagine
that either? Maybe to
some other planet
full of slimy fuckers
with dinner plates
for eyes? See what
I mean? I haven’t
got the chops for it.
All my aliens are green.
What if the best I can
do is a regular spaceship
to go chasing after in,
only a little bit slower,
falling forever behind?
Until, one day, what?
Getting to the end
of it, every known
thing in the rearview,
finally in a position
to think of something
new, only, it’s just
a sheetrock white
wall, gathering star-
light, which, when
seen all together,
looks like nothing.
Going Public
“Landslide” is playing,
but just the getting older part.
I assume that’s almost
always true. A law of airwaves,
maybe, specific to coffee shops.
It’s summertimeishness
that brings me out here,
baring hairy thighs too much
in the boring sun, or maybe
it’s my boring reasons
that bore it warmly.
If I understand anything
it’s this, and almost always
without mercy: I’m tired
of selling myself short.
On these nearly blinding
days, even the concrete
in bloom, I consider
my blending in a boutique
apology rounding out
the literal one I keep uttering
dumbly across counters,
registers, sidewalks, often
wirelessly, with space
doing the heavy lifting,
a thousand gigantic satellites
or more would seem to say.
I’m sorry for seeing it
this way, for however you
see me, auctioned off
by the particulars of angles,
lighting, the position
of my body in this chair.
It would be nice, I think,
to be among those
so enamored with this idea
that they feel comfortable
wearing an interesting hat
or like they can dance
proudly at weddings
in a way that involves
moving their feet. Sometimes,
I forget my body so much
that when my wife touches
her hand gently to my spine,
a reminder to straighten up,
I wonder if I look like someone
who’s constantly cowering,
slouching into the planet.
I tell people that in another
life I must have been
a meerkat or a prairie dog,
always watching for hawk-
shaped shadows, scurrying
back down into my burrow
to prepare myself to worry
more, to worry better.
Just the other day, I told
our daughter’s pediatrician
that I thought if I wasn’t
worried, then I wasn’t
being a good parent, and she
looked at me for a long time.
I wanted to say my line about
meerkats, a joke back down
into my burrow, but it was
already too late. Soon enough,
another song is on, or
it’s a different place with
different kinds of lights. These,
hanging down from the ceiling,
attached to ornate bronze
chains, unclear if their purpose
is for our seeing, or if they
are here merely to be seen.
∩
Eric Kocher’s chapbook Sky Mall was selected as a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize. He teaches Environmental Studies at Wofford College, where he also serves as director of the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, A Public Space, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and Oversound, among others. He lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife and their two children.