Ken Haas’ poems have appeared in over 50 respected journals and numerous anthologies. His first book, Borrowed Light (Red Mountain Press, 2020), won a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women. Ken has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award. kenhaas.org.
When the Parrots Came
Two conures, South Americans, bagged at birth,
slipped their gilded cage here mid-90s,
started a flock, numbering hundred now,
flitting on the laurel, live oak, saucer magnolia
and power lines tangled over Telegraph Hill.
2020, fighting tumors, Susan sees a pair of them
testing our fire escape, a sixth-floor rental miles west.
They perch an hour, then zip off with a greening throng.
Hoping they’ll return, she puts out cashews,
which is what she has.
I tell her there’s a reason why they chose our railing—
scouts maybe, lovers stealing a moment, the virus,
the warming—and cashews could bring gulls,
so just leave things as they are;
whatever drew them might draw them again.
Susan, from the Midwest, keeps on with the cashews,
having taken in red crowns, indigo eyes
and opalescent beaks. Mostly, she says, they sat
and looked away; sometimes, though,
they nuzzled, danced, hung upside down.
From back East, I never see them.
We welcome the new year. Everyone does.
A week later, she tells me they came back for a spell.
I say no cashews this time, Sweetheart.
She says, no, no, of course not.
New Year’s Day
Sleep without you isn’t sleep.
As I bathed in the dark last night,
the Lovin’ Spoonful song you hummed in that same tub
while I lectured on coincidence rose brightly.
It must have been a neighbor who left on our doorstep
in the dark a potted amaryllis bulb, which I lifted and carried
on my dawn walk around the park. Halfway through,
where we always stopped to watch the fog give up its ghost,
the fugitive conures only you had seen on our railing
sailed overhead in a sky without sky.
I imagined the nascent amaryllis full-flowered,
with billowed pink sepals and crimson veins,
but, unwilling to watch another mortal become beautiful
and mortal, I placed it beside the rusted shopping cart
of a woman waking in a doorway
wearing the plum wool cardigan you had given Goodwill,
her mutt nuzzling its brown leather buttons.
I needed ice cream for breakfast, cherry vanilla,
the newest and coldest plucked from the rear
of the grocery freezer, as you know I do,
though at home it turned out to be strawberry,
which I ate and ate until it tasted almost like strawberry.
So this is how it will be.
Unreasonable tunes, unseasonable blooms.
You, still loving.
Every bird a parrot.
Every berry wearing seeds on its sleeves.
Heaven
My parents are surprised to see me.
Uncle Jack has a deal on siding.
Grandma’s baking a birthday cake I can’t
smell or taste and, as I reach to peck
her cheek, my lips pass through,
though I hear her bravely humming.
The specialty of the house is losers
with nothing left to lose. The mismatched
earrings have run off with the certitudes.
And, despite rumors, there is nowhere else.
Everyone here has had enough misery
and ice cream. When I disbelieve where I am
or if I am, there’s a line to wait in line to cross
a line, where the man behind me whispers
nothing is my fault. Which, he says, I will get
used to, like long ago I came to regard the sun
and barking dogs as ordinary. None of this
is what I had in mind. Maybe my dreams were
wrong. Or they changed as I disappointed
myself. I could have held her every day,
not only most. So, forsaking all tedious and
heroic scripts, I begin by urging the sentry
to let her in. There was nothing, I say,
she left undone, nothing she didn’t nurture,
nothing that didn’t weep when she passed.
The gatekeeper points to toeprints
on flip-flops, teeth marks in a mango,
claims she’s already here, only I can’t
see her yet. Until then, what I can do
is tell her story. This will take forever.