Tag: Carey Jobe

Two Poems by Carey Jobe

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

The Kelley Reunion

Stiff as starch, awkwardly ancestral,
Grandma and Pa Kelly stare,
their Irish eyes unsmiling,
out of a dark daguerreotype.

Could they commence this straying flock?
Across church grounds, stranger cousins
gather at shady tables, buzzing
out of the heat, removing ties.

A tardy van pulls up, unloading
bouncy Flo, just divorced, who totes
one more bucket of cold fried
chicken, more watery tea.

Uncle Ralph, his quarry cornered,
gestures with a drumstick. Myrtle
spots bun-haired Bett in a tipsy crowd
sipping the vintage gossip.

A throat clears. Nominations
are open for next year’s officers.
Palms are lifted. Oscar, who only
came for free eats, is elected

President. Tom nudges him upright.
He nods above his plate, accepting,
elbowing his wadded napkin
onto the flattened grass.

An announcement. Talkers, eaters
press together, primping, posturing
for the hired photographer.
All ages, all sizes, all smiles.

Grandma and Pa never blink.


Event

Briefly mobile as water,
jealous of its prerogatives
on its downhill surge as
any herd, frost-loosed
mudstone lunges past forests
beneath, beneath–

                    –erosion’s
millennial abrasions (in
the seconds it takes to be
misunderstood) caught giving
way to that most human
obsession, impatience.





Carey Jobe is a retired attorney who has published poetry over a 45-year span.  His work has recently appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Lyric, The Road Not Taken, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and The Society of Classical Poets.  He lives and writes in Crawfordville, Florida.

Two Poems by Carey Jobe

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

In Country

The conductor’s whistle,
an answering squeal as the train’s wheels
lurch, a quickening hiss
as milling, infernal crowds in the cavernous
Hauptbahnhof fall away to the dull sheens
of Frankfurt, the gray-green Main,
the cindery, static, mizzling slate
of a German sky…

Being American
is part of my baggage. Even before I greet
cabinmates with a botched
phrasebook sentence and sit, my tonsured scalp,
baby-pink GI face, draw stares or nods
of boreal politeness. I hunker,
arms locked, a deaf-mute, into my cushion.
Like a film screen,

fleeting scenery
at my shoulder offers bittersweet refuge out of
and into heaviness:
miniature, pastel, red-tile-roofed cottages,
bikers on beech lanes, pastures neat
as quilts under a skyline
of blue hills, like Tennessee’s, flash by.
What a poor guesser

the mind is!
Where is the Germany of the daydream? dirndled
villagefolk dancing
in the half-timbered Marktplatz? Horn-echoing
woodlands of Wagner, Goethe?—the generous
country of the tinted postcard
that somehow (oh, inevitable appetite
which makes the dissatisfied

put dreamage
to the proof!) enlisted a fleecy adolescent
indolence to board northeast-
erly-gusting winds and report for duty where
the Neckar feeds the Rhine? Today
I must confront
impermeable bedrock. The conductor, grunting,
punches my ticket.


On Grass

I stepped outdoors while the sun was warm
to search thin snow if something formed
could help dislodge a bedded, numb
river rock where the blood is warmed.

A robin kept fleeing my slow boot tread,
not far, re-staking each claim of ground
with quick jabs and quizzical cocks of head.
I wondered what livelihood it found.

The drab grass, strawy and rough to touch,
smelled moist, like spring, its patchy green
shiny with thaw in the windy March
day’s clashing tempers of cloud and sun.

“Winter will need to move indoors,”
I laughed aloud, misting chilly air
with cheer that nudged my heart-rock loose.
The scene didn’t notice or seem to care

about inner weathers, cheer or grief
or landscapes they carve in a human breast,
unless in the ruffled annoyance of
a bird hunting grasses for its spring nest.




Carey Jobe is a retired attorney who has published poetry over a 45-year span.  His work has recently appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Lyric, The Road Not Taken, The Chained Muse, and The Society of Classical Poets.  He has authored a volume of poetry, By River or Gravel Road, and is currently working on a second collection.  He lives and writes in Crawfordville, Florida.

Two Poems by Carey Jobe

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

The Creek’s Stones

No neighbor’s surprised Stone Creek
is threading the needle’s eye of August
aridity. As for weeks, parched cirrus
gauge the sky’s depth, rain’s delay:
Minnows trapped in shrinking puddles
probe edges, catch the colors

of the pebbles, crawstone oddities
littering the shambling creek bed
—quarters in banked spits, pennies
brimming wishing pools. Could a trickle’s
persistent drollery planish
their dented disks? I pick one,

a wet, hard smoothness. Brown-milky
seepage soon heals the scar.
Uninteresting, a drab wart-gray,
it denies my reflection, the drought
that strands it, even—a fossil
of blue Devonian bays, white beaches

kilned to bedrock, now resuming its
nature as sand. I toss it—clack!—
scan the creek. As if thrown years,
it’s vanished down this tributary
of things going unnoticed, to surface
randomly as a childhood memory

polished smoother. Could Stone Creek
erode them all? How?—Wet pebbles sprawl
under glazing sun, each a shape
partly resistance but mostly
acquiescence, like a mind’s
travel from rough to rounder.


Fear Under No Moon

Thieves’ Night, a moonless night.
Leaves crumple softly in my black yard.
I overheard,
listen hard:
a dog trailing some scent of fright?
cat on a bird,
or what?
Imagination’s lighted match,
and I forgot
to turn the deadbolt, latch…
Night fear, I’ll say. My mind’s dream play
with whispers, not…
—a watchdog’s bolted cry!
Houses off, but clear. By the pillow my
eyes go wide,
go blind. I am warned. Listen! Beside
the wall—the whistling corner sweep
of wind? Yes, wind! Still, I
won’t sleep…
Someone is outside. Someone real
at a task that ends before sunrise.
His owllike eyes
at my windowsill,
transfix me, chill
terror glistening like a spark
along my spine. No scream in the dark
is so truly fear
as this quiet nearing on moonless ground,
all things I hear
in a glimpse of sound.




Carey Jobe is a retired attorney and judge who has published poetry over a 45-year period.  His work has recently appeared in The Lyric, The Road Not Taken, and Orchards Poetry Journal.  He has published a collection of poetry, By River or Gravel Road (Aegina Press, 1997).  He resides in Crawfordville, Florida.