Connecticut’s 2015 “Poetry Out Loud” champion, Owen Elphick competed in the National Competition in Washington, D.C., placing among the top nine.
Hailing from Storrs, he is a student at Emerson College in Boston, recently returned from a semester in the Netherlands. As a winner of Hill-Stead Museum’s high school poetry competition, he read in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, and has performed at many other venues, including the State Capitol.
His poetry has been published in several journals and in a chapbook, Fresh Voices 23. Owen is also an award-winning playwright/actor and has already had considerable experience as an editor.
— CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin
Fish Poem
for Ethan
He asked if I could write him a poem about fish
and I wish I had told him the truth:
that it doesn’t work like that, that you can’t
just write a poem about fish, can’t craft
poems to exact specifications, like furniture;
that the poems do not let you decide
what they are, or will be.
I wish I had told him
that they dart beneath the surface of the air,
small, shining wonders swimming through
the waters of the subconscious; that you can
watch and watch for the flash of a fin,
or the flick of a tail, or the rise of bubbles,
and all you will see are the endless ripples
of your reflection, staring back at you,
seeing nothing but itself;
that to write a poem you must catch it,
bait and cast the glistening hook
of your pen into the blank ocean of a page
only for it to float there for hours,
nothing biting, as you sit there, waiting, waiting
until it starts to move, scoring
its path across that humming liquid,
a poem latched to it, struggling to break free
of you, bloody ink
pouring forth. I wish I had told him
it is a battle each time, to reel it in,
to lift your lines out of the water
and lay them out, the poem
spread before you, still humming
and flopping slightly, ready to be devoured,
or thrown back into oblivion.
And I wish I had told him
that there’s no way of knowing
what you’ll get, that no specific catch
is guaranteed, no catch guaranteed
at all, that every time, it’s a risk,
a gamble, that sometimes
you come up with nothing
and that you have no control over anything
but whether or not you try.
But I did not tell him these things.
Instead, I told him, Yes,
I can write you a poem about fish.
Learn From You
Flesh-sunk, I
blaze, and sing
the odes of your skin. Sound always feels
like a confession, silence like a chain,
and when I burst my shackles,
the wildness of my roar
scares even me.
How the taste of you
inspires violence in my blood, makes
it scream primal, and course
through me even faster than I
do through you. I
can’t always keep up
with myself, can’t always believe
all that pours out of me into you,
and if I start to think about it
too much, it all shuts down, my brain
the deactivation switch to my body’s
pistons, gone into overdrive
at your touch.
I have never been good
at not thinking, at
keeping my eyes closed when
kissing, at detaching myself
from my mind. But I am beginning
to learn from you.
The Physics of Home
after Ekaterina Popova’s “Summer’s Evening”
The closer I get
the less I like it.
There, I see
how it is made,
the illusion shattered,
the brush strokes visible,
the streaks of paint too
vivid, a mess of greens and blues,
pinks, whites, yellows, and browns,
inconsistent purples and lazy, in-
complete darkness,
simple, easy lines and one-
dimensional shapes, un-
formed items, images
too literal to be real,
not well drawn enough
until I step far
enough away.
Then, I long
to go to that place,
come into that room,
rifle through those drawers,
check that little plant, sit
at that table, finish that tiny cup of
tea as I stare outside at the explosion
of hedgerow, the blue sky, the
slowly dying light
of this summer’s evening,
slanting in through the
window, the emptiness
of this home and me
filled up by each other.
The farther I am,
the more I want it.
Under Repairs (State of the Union)
Washington D.C., 29 April 2015
I spotted it first
through trees green with springtime,
its terrible wonder backlit
by the early morning;
and then again, from across a busy
intersection, the white sun
now high in the sky, the shadows
gone, everything visible;
and then again, rising into my
sight line through the cherry
blossoms—pink and white
petals giving way
to stretched, plastic
sheeting, wound around
the base of the dome like a
skin-colored bandage,
the bleached-bone white
of the walls and columns below,
the shining metallic silver of
the spider web scaffolding crisscrossing
across the entire top half
of the building’s skull,
cocooning it in construction,
and, of course,
the red, white, and blue of the flag
fluttering freely in the breeze—
so different
from the last time I saw it,
the smooth, solid purity replaced
by a support system indicative
of flaws needing to be fixed,
the facade stripped away
so as to see, to seal
the cracks beneath.
The Birdwatchers
For my father
There is only one group of people
I can think of
to whom, for instance,
going out into a cold, barren field
at five o’clock in the morning
—or perhaps earlier—
and standing there
for the next
several
hours
has any appeal whatsoever,
and that is the birdwatchers,
with their heads tilted back,
their sight soaring into the sky,
shooting out of the barrels of their binoculars,
like bullets
that never hit,
and so never stop;
with their thin notebooks,
where all they need to remember
is recorded;
their thick guide books
where all they need to know
is stored;
and their thicker coats,
where all the heat they need to stay warm,
radiating from their hearts,
which are mindless of the cold,
is trapped;
their sharp, keen eyes
and their keen, sharp ears,
missing nothing of the moment
that stretches around them,
only of the world beyond the field,
beyond reality;
and their studied calm and soft patience,
keeping them in that field
until they decide that perhaps
they should try going
into the woods
to see what they can find there,
hidden from plain sight,
hanging between the world
and the sky,
like them.
There is no group of people
I can think of
who are quite like the birdwatchers,
because the birdwatchers know
exactly what they are looking for;
and, even when they do not,
can always find it
all the same.
Smarter
I used to think that being smart
meant what everyone told me
it meant.
I thought it meant
your hand hitting the air, Hermione Granger-style,
before anyone else’s
had time to consider ascent.
I thought it meant
knowing all the answers immediately
and not showing it if you didn’t,
raising your hand even
if you had nothing to say.
I thought it meant
reading like a speed demon, needing
the next book before others even
finished the first chapter of theirs.
I thought it meant
writing more than anyone else, fighting
only for yourself; solving complex equations,
memorizing the dates of invasions, and
prizing the grades I made with my wealth
of knowledge more than I did myself.
I thought it meant
Enrichment and AP classes,
straight As and amazing grades,
stickers and stars, and not having
to try hard to get them, being automatically
ahead of everyone else in a great race,
having a quicker pace; never mind
I burned through pages and words
and numbers and thoughts
too fast to grasp their meaning,
to ask myself what I was seeing before it
shriveled away to ash in my mind.
I thought being smart
meant not needing to be kind.
I thought it meant
being blessed and cursed
in the best and worst possible way,
I thought it meant
being hated, picked on and teased
by the small-minded and weak,
those too stupid to matter,
pathetic fools just chattering,
pretending to not be jealous,
pretending to be better than they really were
and pretending that those who really were
better were worse.
I thought being smart
meant being better.
That was all I’d ever known.
I thought being smart
meant being alone.
And I thought that was okay,
because I thought being smart
meant you didn’t need anyone
anyway.
I used to think that being smart
meant what everyone told me
it meant.
I’m smarter now
than I was then.
Walking Across the Wesleyan University Campus One Summer Evening in a Dress
Darkness is a black wrap dress
pulled about my warm, white body,
disguising me, exposing me, to the night.
The air is laced with sweat,
but I am chilled in my second skin,
smooth to the touch as silky underwear,
sticking to me like liquid
ink, the sky minus the stars.
It is all too new. I am not used to this
sensation, skirt swirling about my shins,
swishing as I stride away from the party,
through the treacherous waters of streetlight.
Everything feels different, my center of gravity
shifted, my awareness heightened to the poised
orchestrations of my skeleton, every part of me
tingling. I feel bare, not clothed,
but naked in a dress, dressed in nothing
but the night. I imagine what would happen
if someone spotted me
and mistook what was
hidden beneath these shadows.
Is this what it’s always like? I
wonder, as I clutch my phone tight, realize
I have no pockets to place it in, no utility or security,
just this body in this dress in the dark,
where I am not what I am, but an illusion of
myself; where, to anyone seeing me from a distance,
I am a woman, walking across
a college campus at night.
And I am afraid.
Imagining California
There are days when I think about you
so much it’s amazing I ever forgot you.
Your name resounds within me when I
think of it, like the echo in a hollow chamber
of an explosion that never happened,
and where memory fails me, I imagine.
I imagine playing pretend with you, tumbling
around a green backyard.
I imagine the turn of pages in the dim
of naptime, stories coming alive around us.
I imagine your kindness, your milk-imbibed coffee
skin shrouded by soft, delicate curls,
your tiny nose and sweet laughter.
I imagine what you must look like now,
who you have become.
I imagine you in California, with the sun,
while I am here, shackled in East Coast winter.
I imagine you imagining me as much as I
imagine you, imagine you remember me,
the friend you had to leave behind,
as you lie on hot sand,
the waves scraping your toes.
I imagine the day you disappeared,
imagine everything splintering, asking,
asking where you were, where you went,
if you were okay, why your cubby
was never even cleaned out, questions
I’m still asking, even though
I know the answer—
you went to California.
So I imagine meeting you there
one day, recognizing you instantly,
and you me, each of us the deepest
missing piece of the other.
I imagine talking for hours, seeing you
every day, as we re-learn who we are.
I imagine it being
so easy.
I imagine staying in California with you,
falling for you like I didn’t know
how to then, like I can’t now when all I have
of you to love is what I can
imagine.
Every night, I go to bed with you
in my mind, dreaming about California
so much that sometimes I have to wonder
if it even exists, dreaming about you so much
that you stop becoming real, but
I save myself. I imagine—
a past that I can’t remember,
a future that will never happen,
that my best friend is not gone
forever,
that you are just in California,
and that I will find you there
someday.
Poems copyright (c) 2018 by Owen Elphick
CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin selects work for CT Poets Corner by invitation.
