2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

Monsoon Season
-for Ed and Marcia Ward
by John Macker
The presence of absence pervades as time marches on.
–– David Meltzer
I’m lying on the floor listening for
the distant thunder,
sounds like deep songs,
like old lost friend’s voices milling
around the cosmos,
their chairs scraping the floor
in the El Chapultepec Bar.
The heat lightning of revelation strobes:
LA, Denver, Albuquerque,
old outposts
where flashes of inspiration
became epic burns
and the smoke tonight
drifts beyond
all proportion
under these
black gloved
clouds.
Memory, not as mellifluous as camaraderie
but I can hear them
there is more than
echoes and ashes dancing in time
to see or feel
or praise. The
changing features of the sky
can alter life and the lightning
126 Santa Fe Literary Review