Sample Poems by Barry Spacks

Little Things

                 for Stephen Tapscott

The great professor, quoting us Rilke:
“You must change your life,” and the weight
of tears wrenched from his listeners.

Afterwards, in winter dusk,
a pregnant woman asked for my arm
to cross the square. “Such slippery snow!”

She must have seemed my mother then,
my lover now, so long it’s been.
Little things...little things...

audible sobs in a lecture room
and all of us, for a time, at least,
all of us, totally changed.

Litany
                         
We dwell with those once touched by hand or mind:
a marriage, some long misery of lust,
a chance remark, a moving smile survive
—a gentled face, a funny sigh—
perhaps of someone never seen again
on this mere earth
where everything begun
continues, a sort of litany.

A kindness, a brief glance along the street,
keeps speaking down the years
and years and miles away
still stirs another life
to make reply.

In a Funky Motel

A basketball bounces at 2 a.m.,
pings off the hoop...again...again....
Next door a girl with two—at least—men
grunts, is chased, giggles...sad.

I save up the sounds of funky motels:
cricket-whirr in country places,
honest laugh now and then, pour
of a hard-earned shower...mainly it’s semi’s

pounding the highway...slam of car doors...
click of high heels on paving, angry
voices; later the creaking of lust-beds,
TVs selling themselves to sleep,

farting, flushing, blasts of so-called
music—“Sound,” said a Holy Man,
“all of sound is mantra,” not
to be praised nor blamed, bemoaned, the seethe,

roar of want and counter-want,
yes, okay, but I‘ll think a while
on the basketball, is it safely in bed
with its night-blooming bouncer by now? and of

the stifled pain of the woman weeping,
trying not to be heard through this thinness
of wall as morning aspires toward light
near Greenville, in a funky motel.