John T. Howard

A Short List of Things I’ve Recently Noticed That Have Absolutely Nothing To Do With Missing You

Smell of pine needles in the heat of a strong summer sun. Slight drop

of runoff falling over the low dam skirting the abandoned silverware

factory and some lone swan often seen there. Flies buzzing about eyes

and face of a dead squirrel bloated in the road. Defend Habeas Corpus

yard signs stabbed into grass. Dead arms of a long-dead tree that linger

high above the trail I’m walking. Fearing their fall as I walk beneath.

Notes on the Firmest of Forms

For some time, I thought of emptiness in musical tones. Orchestrated

from the sorrow of woodwinds, strings. Rain percussive against leaves.

Then I smelled the vacant hours. Tangle of damp string overwintered

in the yard. Stagnant water with a musty pull. The rot of bagged greens

long after deliquescing. Then I put my tongue to a silent, a lonely patch

of earth and tasted what there was to know of being alone. From soil

came the fragrant call of honeysuckle. Tiniest of cream-colored trumpets

to nip from. I remember the pull of other nameless blossoms witnessed

as an opportunity to grow one’s geography. I remember standing in rain

and the happiness we felt clutched together beneath it. All of this ash

now in my mouth. The remnants: a viola off in the dark playing suites

intended for the body of a cello. With aging ears, I can barely hear it—

but I recognize the measured pull of a bow across strings. I’ve learned

that the handle of any bow is called the bow’s frog. I’ve also been told

of a firm form needed to play any note correctly, how the bend of an arm

is often used to make certain sounds sound as if they are coming home.

Googling the Word for Heartache When it Disappears

an AI Overview said that there was no single

word for the exact moment when heart

ache disappears but instead offered up

several words to describe the process of pain

lessening or being replaced by positive feelings.

Once, in the entranceway of a small apartment

I spoke to this past about lessons that the past

had been planning for an immediate future.

Once, walking over that very same threshold

I spit out the name of Jesus as if his was a curse

given how little he has done to assuage our darkest

concerns. To abate & subside, there are the Spanish

words one nail drives out another nail. To heal, to mend

they must be heard in Spanish as a whisper that says

un clavo saca otro clavo. In Spanish whispers

I have embraced not one nail but ten, each of them

very finely enameled, each of them a murmur of skin

that speaks to all of the many moments when heart

ache disappears & finds itself replaced. Too often

my heart a muscle bound by complications. Too often

two small & beautiful hands have handled this pain

as if born to it. Too often, too often, too often, I have

allowed the past to muddy the present with a voice

in desperate need of solace. Too often, I have not held

the origins of this new name to the light to hold

fast to her strength & independence, as devotion to a divine

figure of the hunt, as want of a bountiful moon, as need

of a lush nature of skin that creeps in through the door

wanting nothing more than the prolonged crush of being

swept off into new territories of untouched snow

where any warmth of touch is but one answer to where

the heart lingers when the heart finds a place most dear.