#251 Audience of One
The end arrives again
this early evening
in the snowy mountains
of our glowing prison grounds.
A mangy pack of thieves patrol the plain
beyond the razor wire,
and these I see
because I’m solo on the yard,
reciting Poems to an audience of one,
plus maybe God,
if God’s still interested in me.
This long-gone son.
At least I pay attention to the fire
in a brother human being’s
grievances, at least
I never let this growing
document of songs get misperceived
as firstly an affair
of personal achievement.
Look how silently the coyotes
disappeared into their arsenal
of darkness. Which of them
will last the winter toil
when the spring-time grasses
rise like miracles in aggregate
upon the sloped horizon?
Life up here is easy
on the eyes—
I will not lie—
and murder on the soul.
• • •
#253 Rocks of Gold
…there is nothing either good or bad
but thinking makes it so. To me, it is
a prison.
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, lines 268-270
The end arrives again,
though I will hold
my homie Hamlet to his word,
and ponder prison not as custody,
but as a form, reversibly,
of freedom. Embezzled books
are everywhere, like rocks of gold
embedded in the nooks
and crannies underneath a river’s
swirling eddy.
I attempt a hundred dives
a year, and still neglect
a thousand nuggets
of the literary biosphere,
a reader’s bitter disappointment
that I won’t go into here
in order to contain my cynicism.
Often you will spot
a killer on the block,
bedazzled, almost high,
on narrative, a battered
paperback of Dostoevski
in his pocket, macular
degeneration settling in
from all the quiet hours
squinting in the jaundiced,
schizophrenic light
of early morning.
He can always find me,
ready to discuss our liberties.
• • •
Peter Nathaniel Malae is the author of the novels, What We Are (Grove/Atlantic, ‘10), Our Frail Blood (Grove/Atlantic, ‘13), Son of Amity (Oregon State University Press, ‘18), the story collection, Teach the Free Man (Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, ‘07), and the play, “The Question,” each of which won a few awards. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in Cimarron Review, Missouri Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Southwest Review, Witness, ZYZZYVA and other magazines. A former John Steinbeck Fellow, Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellow, Oregon Literary Arts Fellow and MacDowell Colony Fellow and San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award winner, Malae is seeking a publisher for a manuscript of 384 poems composed over a five-year set in prison.