Jeff Hardin

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His books have been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Southern Review, Hudson Review, Poetry Northwest, The Laurel Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in TN. Visit his website: www.jeffhardin.weebly.com.

The Text We Read Is just the One We See

How to say a thing and then to hear its implications

requires more years than we are given. I still dwell

on an oak in a field no longer there, replaced by

three houses whose stories are not my own. I trim

climbing roses obtained from cuttings of cuttings

first planted by my great-grandmother born in 1894.

She used to hide my brother in the folds of her dress.

She outlived her husband by a generation. Inheritance

that should have come down his line went down another

instead. My brother once wandered away, was found

hours later on a rock above the river. He would have

drowned had he slipped. No one knows if he almost did.

He was three, an age in which all our futures struggle

for supremacy. The text we read is just the one we see,

not all the versions that might have been. The barn loft

I sat in as a child is no longer there, but I can still feel

the rungs of its ladder against the arches of my feet.

Is that why I try to find a higher vantage point from

which to look upon my life? Off in the distance, corn

tassels hold a secret whose whispers I lean toward.

They sound like a river hidden in fog across which

a voice is summoning all who will come. Daily I

disappear from my life, sometimes only a moment,

sometimes for hours. What if it turns out we’ve all

been disinherited from a future we cannot imagine?

I have no idea what’s indeterminate or irrefutable.

The wind covers as much as it uncovers and vice versa.

A word says more than it says even if no one hears.

Belief is a metaphor for doubt, doubt a metaphor for

how we move all our lives toward beliefs we can bear.

Read Jeff’s work and more in Solum Journal Volume III.