Three Poems

by Steve Huff

Coffee

It’s not merely coffee, but your cup
of travel, of humours, dilation of capillaries,
sharpening your ear to the black knock
of your car engine. You’re in
love & driving hard to get to her.
You stop along a road to piss, watch
the moon rolling in the vacant hills,
as you hold yourself. Although
coffee drops you sometimes without
warning like a boozie mother,
you’re still its monkey after all these years —
in love & out. (It funded your studies
with insomnia until studying turned to
creeping like an awed baby
through everything printed.)

— But you’re still no good at being alone,
although that is what coffee wants.
Those who are, who even choose it, unsettle you.
Yet you’re drawn to coffee like a moth
to a gladness of moon on a pool.
How good, how good it is to want.

This is for Nothing

they tell me: Sleep induced by valerian root,
echinacea to ward off flu, ginkgo for quicker
recall & a harder cock, one big multi-V
plus mega C, beta carotene, selenium, E
& a bunch of herbs so the angel of cancer
will pass my door. Then chamomile for the hot coal
in my ragged gut. This is costing me more
than the booze that once covered everything.
But for nothing.
Someday, they tell me, a big hand
will take the vitamins gently away,
put prescription pills in their place. Filch my
fiber beverage & give me a stool-softening tab.
I’ll be put to bed with a meal of white bread
& a Jello cup. No more witchcraft. I won’t
know the difference, they tell me. You won’t
know the difference either. We won’t be any wiser.

Scenarios in Pursuit of the Missing

It was just an act: those scenes of your home.
Complex & moving. But it’s ended. Fin.
Your life has left the building.

No, it was not an act. Your wife & baby went
down in a plane over the ocean. But then, how
do we account for your missing house?

It burned, they were in it, & now you can’t
bear to drive on that street.

No, stupid, it’s you who are missing. Your driver
took a wrong turn in Gaza. Your family
still waits, but they’ll soon give up.

The lover you took to visit your baby’s grave
left you, abruptly, as if she turned your picture over
horrified at the back of your face.

No, she simply left the airport
when your plane didn’t make it. What else could she do?

You went down in roughly the same water
as your wife & baby years ago.

No, idiot, you took a hundred sleeping pills
hoping to wake in the past,
& now no one remembers you.

One of the above is probably true.

The missing could reappear somewhere
like a reincarnated sage:
you test a mysterious boy with a riddle
& he doesn’t get it,

doesn’t recognize your wife’s shoes,
your baby’s fireproof receiving blanket,
so you go on.
Fuck that stupid kid.

Forget it all, everyone tells you. Invent a new life
where you are. The earth
will give you what you already own.

copyright © 2000, by Steve Huff

Steve Huff is Publisher & Managing Editor of BOA Editions, one of America's best-known independent literary publishing houses for poetry. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Hudson Review, Chelsea, Many Mountains Moving, and in Pushcart XX: Best of the Small Presses. He is host of the radio short-fiction anthology: Fiction in Shorts on WXXI, the PBS affiliate in Rochester, NY. He recently completed a short fiction collection: My Brilliant Death, and is working on a novel, The Poster God. His volume of poetry, The Water We Came From, will be published in December by FootHills Press.