Christian Barter

Band Camp

We were so proud of our fifths of vodka
lying next to each other in Tom's trumpet case
like two long crystals harvested
from the dark cave of high school's first three years

and while less fortunate kids fingered
over and over through that one difficult passage,
Tom and I floated around campus cracking
jokes and chatting up the prettiest girls,

the prettiest, most serious of whom was Amy,
who came up to me after with her saxophone
draped around her tan neck and decreed
that we should all "drink beers" that night—

me having used that ridiculous line when we met—
and, lo, she had already gotten some
drooling 21-year-old from town
to stack them behind a bush, and when

after a day of careening back roads
in her friend's mom's car and belting with Tom
the Doors and whatever else came to mind,
the other kids were jerking uncomfortably

to that summer's teeny-bop at the band camp dance,
Amy and I strolled beneath those genuine
college campus trees, making out
whenever we felt like it. I see that I have

descended again to loving those days, though
when I woke up in the middle of the night
remembering those two bottles nestled in the case,
I was thinking what a waste I had made

of band camp, that but for drinking, and drugs later,
and all those tan necks, I might have been
a real musician in a real ensemble, wearing
an honest-to-God bowtie, gliding
through important passages. One of those
nights, before I went back to the cave from which
I was too proud to return letters,
I snuck her into my room where

in the moonlight on clinically white bed sheets
I revealed myself as a klutzy sixteen-year-old
and she as a good Catholic. After doing
nothing of lasting importance, exhausted, half-

crazed and half as someone woken up
after a long sleep, and having no idea
what a regretful, sober man I would be
at thirty-two, I said, "I love you,"

and she said, "Do you mean it?" and I, having
not yet learned the scales, the passages
of "I don't know," said, "Yes."

Can You

Can you love the dawn and hate the day? I do.
“Addicted to the beginnings of relationships,”
as I’ve been told. And told. And told. The new
light looks as something else when it first hits,
something more like Catherine standing up
across a strangered room, that promising look
she had before the promises, still stuck
with sweetness to her face in my notebook
of pre-day ecstasies. I love the feel
of gray seeping into black – what it represents:
the casting-out that could occur—and the real,
truant world opening, before it grows dense
with light and the need for endings, setting free
that inkling some lasting love might come to me.

Poem

With the hope yet of writing a poem this morning
I am sitting in the middle of the kitchen where
I can see from the window above the sink
the early winter light bringing the old oak
to magnificent relief and can hear
the radio’s classical guitar asserting
itself and struggling to reach
doubt, and I am reading from The Book
of Job: “Is there not an appointed
time to man upon earth?” and watching
a spider descend by virtue of his own
guts across that oak shining
as from another earth and touch down
on the sink divider and make
for some attractive crevice. Just
being here… There is no such
thing, I think as I hear now Bernstein’s
drifting violin above some kind of ground
that keeps giving way, a piece
inspired by Plato’s Agathon. Beauty
is a call to labor. With the hope yet
of writing a poem smoothing
like a coin rubbed faceless, I
watch a single crow pumping
the blue he is the absence of,
working it hard until the black
of the last trees takes him.