The Art of Deference
I step off the sidewalk as you approach,
averting my eyes from your superior mien,
holding my breath as you pass, so as
not to disturb you. Thinking not to place
myself above my old station. I prostrate myself
in the gutter, allowing your honorable
feet to tread safely and dryly upon my back, above
the dim water. Wishing you nothing
but the best, I resolve to do more to trim
my wants and needs. Perhaps a smaller house?
Perhaps fewer children? What can a person like me
possibly want with a wife, with a life, with a knife?
14 Interventions
- He turns the sky
into an enormous
equation - With obvious ease,
clarity - Mythology
and biology
of the double helix - Files,
hiding them
from foreboding - Heart rotted out
the old leaves turn to
reservoirs of life - Within a field of
probability—
a horse - Poem grenades exploding
on the fields
of Normandy - Keys already made
sound spirited - It is but a pair
of scissors,
my morning newspaper - Picasso’s thoughts
their languor - If the law is a good one
we’ll gladly
obey it - Please take this down—
My love grows
like hair. - Angels of hot water
in hot water
by hot water - Reality—
not what we thought
after all
Halvard Johnson was born in Newburgh, New York, and grew up in New York City and the Hudson Valley. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Baltimore City Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has lived and taught in Chicago, Illinois; El Paso, Texas; Cayey, Puerto Rico; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland; and New York City. For many years he taught overseas in the European and Far East divisions of the University of Maryland, mostly in Germany and Japan. He lives with his wife, the prize-winning writer and visual artist Lynda Schor, in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.