Two Poems by John Goodhue

John Goodhue

John Goodhue

John Goodhue is a graduate from Western Washington University. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Knockout Magazine, and burntdistrict, among others. He currently resides on Bainbridge Island.

Caretaker
 
Watching a friend’s house,
I feed the cat, empty garbage,
water plants,
 
find in the study a photograph,
where a thicket
 
of banana trees, greyscaled, is
burning. Toward the viewer,
             a man carries a leg
 
from thigh down,
his sunken palms spread
from ankle to severance
 
             as if guarding an only rifle.
 
The leg—its bone spurs,
its stippled flesh—like a godsend,
born of some greater absence.
 
Behind, I notice
what the fire has not engulfed:
 
            several figures bowed in bright pools,
            a lady donning an apron,
            a child chasing a dog,
 
and the meaning of this— 
 
there is no sky for a body
to leave into; the heft of being
is not a pretense.
 
I notice the man’s stare
could too be a map
of more than just bones,
 
or how he could be saying
“hallelujah” just the same
                                   as “landmine.”

 

 

 

Famishment
 
In this version, a man dies
             arms trussed between swathes of trees
 
and the space occupied for
             their decay.                                                      A cairn becomes you
 
to consider both you and the moon
             befriend first the corpse, then the reason.
 
And when one considers things still breed
             as skin rescinds. And when one considers what is tried
 
in a world whose momentum is love of … And when no one considers
             what god is rendered by scarcity.
 
And when considered is this man, beside a thistle plant
             a sudden flutter in the chest
 
suggests the mouth suggesting –
             the body                                                          becoming food.
 
And you, now cradling his figure,
             a quality, an antiqued linger of life once assuming, or how
 
you hold up his arm in space as though it filled none, the poor flesh,
             the weeds burgeon wrongly, everything
 
burgeoning, wrongly. These trees
             preserving too many raw moments.
 
The river hulling those moments into sounds
             which retain little but kernels of
 
their indifference. Everything suggesting famine
             as you undress the body, ready its milking
 
and above, the stars, like a hunger,
             like this hunger, query what parts you remove
 
from where.