Hastings Hensel is the author of the forthcoming Winter Inlet, winner of the 2014-2015 Unicorn Press First Book Contest, as well as the chapbook Control Burn, winner of the 2011 Iron Horse Literary Review Single Author Contest. His poems appear in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, 32 Poems, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and other journals and magazines. He lives in Murrells Inlet, SC and is a lecturer of English at Coastal Carolina University, where he serves as Poetry Editor of Waccamaw. Each summer he heads up to his alma mater to serve on the staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Visit his website here. ---------
Having Remembered an Ice Storm
Stir-crazy, staring out like cats at
that view to die for, which, encased,
seemed to have died—
the oak trees, frozen, never stirring
when the wind came, nor any music
from the chimes.
Everywhere the smell of fresh pines
where their limbs had splintered,
and jays zipped by.
And before the thaw what we thought
was snow, though it was only whitecaps
that lifted into gulls
pulled into a sky full of cumuli
that, you said, looked like old
tortoises…slow
and purposeful in their changes.
What else but memory rearranges
a year, a day
on the near shore where a kite
plummets to become sail, then
a heron, breeze-
blown on the back lawn, then
a moth I find rummaging among
your summer things?
Playing Cards with Mark Strand
— Sewanee Writers’ Conference, 2012
Of this I’m sure:
I wasn’t sure.
Perhaps he had
what he didn’t—
two of a kind,
a kind of rhyme,
something that might
suggest the world
less random than
the world of which
he’d lectured then
suggests: something,
yes, metrical—
a straight or flush,
but I’d guessed
to call his bluff
because? Because
he was an existentialist?
Nothing. No thing.
Or nothingness?
I have nothing,
he said, then laid
his cards face up
so that we saw
he told the truth.
That’s what they said
of poets, too.
They told the truth.
So funny, yes,
How he said it:
I have nothing…
And now we laugh
because? Because
that was something.
Plot Summary
Back then it could have been
what it isn’t,
and now the years are less
than sentences,
and now how quaint it seems,
the little street
on which the house once stood.
So easy to think:
the children have fled the streets,
all joy is gone.
One might as well speak of storm
clouds gathering.
To make a long story shorter,
I’ll start over.
From my window it’s very plain:
No children. Clouds.