Jeff Encke

I. Hitchhiking
II. Solitude
III. A Study of Maps
IV. Descending Spirit Lake
V. About Jeff

Hitchhiking

As a child, soon after
you left the commune,
before your mother

absconded to an asylum,
first biting off the tip
of your pinkie, which now

seems as it did, sewn back on,
two years old, you thumbed
your way through the Bible Belt,

a lesson from your father
complete with a fractured fibula,
now strangely bold.

You strut down the island
thoroughfare under swaying
palm fronds, as taxis whiz by,

and I wonder if we
are being chased, my long
stride no match. Speed

is inelegant, I think, and is
that not a peculiar thought?
but your pendulant elbows

keep battering some unseen face.
Suspending our hike, you
parade into the water naked.

As we arrive at Coral Bay,
two wild donkeys wrestle
one locked to the other’s neck

dragging him with his mouth.
The gas station attendant
shows us the sensitive plants.

At a bar, awaiting
the campbound bus, your eyes
mimic a sunset. We drink cokes

by a glassless window,
as a man sitting roadside
attends anonymous passage.

Solitude

Alone and asleep
I forget my selfishness
that our only solace

spent now and again
empty moments opened
up into the darkness

through the bedroom
I walk beside small
torn forms brushing

my skin as if a breeze
without a sound
shattered the silence

A Study of Maps

To the left of the door on a window ledge by the garbage chute. Flaring matches in movies the symbolic action of combined willed endings.

     So inevitably a poem about endings.

What always comes the plug at the end of the cord the claw-wounded wall. The six-foot parrot in a white-wall cage, the marsh in the middle of the shelf.

          Everything’s green.

The feathers blowing little mouths impossible dried milk bubbles from the fountain of the uvula,

     a place where tourists gawk and take pictures

never touching the natural formation always admiring, yes the stalactite organ of mouth, the appendix, the afterthought, the watery up, the dry down.

Descending Spirit Lake

Turn off the path, a lunar playground at your feet,
a movement down inside the scars,
and you will not hear the crash of waters,
carving tears in nature's plump cheek,
or the moss blooming red all summer long,
which is its faint voice, or the lover,
breathing your presence with its rough edges.
But if you follow those scars to their end and move
                                                    alongside the lake's edge,
the waters will welcome you, so will the moss, and so will the lover,
and you will witness another nakedness, one you will find
born and reborn until it is perfect.

                                                            (for Steve Burke)

Jeffrey Encke has recently published Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse. His poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Octopus Magazine, Salt Hill, 3rd Bed, and Quarterly West, among others.