Two Poems By L. Ward Abel

Wide as the Summer Dusk 
 
A blur of worlds 
at elevations where 
heaven starts, indistinguishing 
space, clouds, rain 
and the very tops, 
land and tree, all in this 
blue air. 
 
Places with views of the 
weather clear the deck 
of distraction; like the false 
security of radar, seeing- 
is-confirming, looking for 
probabilities where no 
certainties survive the winter. 
 
Steering wheel wide as a  
summer dusk, the farther 
back I stand the more 
the circles merge and all 
direction erased. As the sun 
rises it sets somewhere 
in a tandem dance. 
 
Bells chime as the curtain 
comes down the gap 
and across lesser hills 
to where I am, flummoxed 
into believing that change 
is almost always good. 

Philosophy 
 
When the air stops there’s  
nothing to surf. We wait frozen  
almost lifelike. How the still cloud  
drapes us in wet, but the creeks— 
the rivers— don’t flow. What was once 
the ‘quarantine spring’ became summer;  
now forbearance has become philosophy.  

L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in Rattle, The Reader, The Istanbul Review, Snow Jewel, The Honest Ulsterman, hundreds of others, and is the author of two full collections and eleven chapbooks of poetry, including Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006),  American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012),  Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (erbacce-Press, 2016), The Rainflock Sings Again (Unsolicited Press, 2019), and his latest full collection, Floodlit (Beakful, 2019).