Gather
1.
Gather your things in a burlap sack:
Sleeping bag, tarp, a year’s worth of paperbacks,
red and white cans marked spinach and hash.
Leave home forever and don’t look back.
2.
No dialysis clinics, no emergency rooms,
no libraries, no movie theaters,
no potable water purification plants—no lights
for reading at night.
3.
Is there a duration of pain so brief
the most extreme is of no importance—
or a regret of only a feather’s weight
that burdens you an entire life?
4.
Some prosper on evil omens.
Grow rich on disasters, the larger the better.
Each new one confirms their belief
pain is for poor people.
5.
Stare into the valley at nightfall.
The glow of a river in darkness
is an unknown language. Of not much use
but it’s there for you, and it’s beautiful.
Arrival
Time and place were important for what they seldom bestow.
Setting out, I gained confidence in the maps, for what they didn’t show
on a journey of many days
that began at a turtle’s pace
freewheeling downhill through a range
where speed meant speed and speed more change
landscapes sailing around me, turning
to an inner axis of yearning
till I came to a desert and it was green.
An avenue shone like a river where no river was.
The twilight was boundless and filled by a tiny house.
The path to the door led through the seven seas,
light splashing around my ankles and knees
from stars in the night-blue sky,
the milk-white glow from light years away.
A promise I’d made drew me on to this place
where a small child sleeps and a woman waits.
Of David Salner’s sixth collection, The Green Vault Heist, John Skoyles, Ploughshares poetry editor, said: “Salner has the power to see into the heart of things, and records the lives of a great range of figures in poems as musical as they are clearly spoken.” His writing appears in Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, North American Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He’s worked as iron ore miner, steelworker, librarian, baseball usher, and in many other trades.