There are in our existence spots of time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain/A renovating virtue… William Wordsworth When a friend says he’s at your service, he means it. A live oak shades a woman & her three grandchildren, pea vines ripening behind them. In Spain, no clouds, milky coffee, braziers laden with anchovies. At the monastery, a long-handled brush & watery ink. Roast an eel over a peat fire. That file drawer holds hundreds of letters from dead friends, every first word “Dear.” Hickory & oak here, juniper & basalt there. This here’s a tree frog. Green never so green as a yew’s green. No one thinks sages exist anymore, yet one just died from a five-year-old tick bite, but not before making English psalms of Greek.

Breathing the Dust

Why keep breathing the clay dust 

broomed from fieldstone cellar walls 

pried from the hillside when the trees 

were primeval? Your lungs forty years clean,

it remains damp & hot down there, 

your face a mask of red mud in the hissing

light of a kerosene lantern. The kid who manned

the till at the Village Store has white eyebrows,

his mother the crone slicing ham behind the cooler. 

If you want to know what the years have done 

to each trail up the mountain, she’s the one to ask.

John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Sheila-Na-Gig Editions has just published his sixth book of poetry, Never Far from the Egg Harbor Ice House, also available via Repp’s website: https://johnreppwriter.com/the-latest.html.

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