Carillon from North Haven
January 2021
among the balsam on black water
solemn as forbidden laughter
effervescent as a cure
thinner than connective wire
binding us to a rarer air
where breath is safe and now is here
far from the past’s sequestered prayer
and the city’s fear-dread-fear-hope-fear
carol bells in a quarry hardship
bells in a season tired of worship
borrowed songs we’ve sung before
free-riding the yachting corridor
Social Distancing
Before I know
I’m aware.
We say feel
but it isn’t touch,
it’s not touch
that I feel.
It just feels too close.
Where before
the air felt free
the air feels bought.
I thought
that sharing air
was easy
live-let-live.
And I wanted to give
even uneasily
what should be given
the general good.
It could never be
too much
to do what I could.
What can I do
when breath is threat
and friendship’s basic
give-and-take
is a contact trace?
Even the love letter
that I wrote to you, and sent
with hope, was sealed
in a protein envelope.
Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press) and Deviants (SFASU Press). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House, James Merrill House, and Hemingway House, and has won the Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, and The Columbia Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and the Persea anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange. Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon. He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University, and can be found online at www.peterklinepoetry.com.