To do one thing well over and over

Eclogue

• Twenty-Two Months

• Rent in the neighborhood is dropping.
• Rent everywhere is dropping. Can you spare
• a little CHANGE,
• asks the sign where my bank,
• merging with the bank across the street,
• fails. I want to own land in my country.
• I want to make my place in this city certain.
• The fish in the bar next to the laundromat:
• do they know the limits of their translucent world?
• When my wife died I thought,
• All within us praise His holy name.
• His power and glory ever more proclaimed.
• Even then I knew that life didn’t really end,
• that it would fissure into two places,
• inside and out. The woman I love now
• distinguishes absence from loss.
• When there is no fog on a nearby hill
• we walk through her old neighborhood
• to the city’s highest point.

Zugzwang

Eighteen Months

• (n.) Compulsion to move. A chess term referring
• to a situation in which a player would like to do
• nothing (pass), since any move will damage his position.

• Not that it mattered in the beginning
• but there were patterns. I saw three moves
• to your bishop, six to your rook, nine to your queen
• and then a slow game of pawns. Almost at mate,
• I forgot the axes running to the corners,
• failed to anticipate your casual sweep of the lanes,
• one side of my board plucked clean like a branch of wild
• anything. You opened a window to let out the heat.
• We started again. It felt good to keep playing,
• to do one thing well over and over.
• Maybe that’s why I liked
• the pizza place around the block that burnt our crusts,
• why you could not wait to move uptown,
• away from the martinis, mochas, and Marc Jacobs.
• Our new home was several blocks from anywhere.
• Half a mile out the buoy lights shined like rosary beads.
• If we were quiet and mindful the trees around the lake
• shook when we walked beneath them.

Badlands

• Theodore Roosevelt came here to die again.
• Evenings, rain started from one
• side of the sky and crossed overhead.
• He named his wife in every miniature valley
• peaked with miniature stones.
• He slept on floors and under bunks,
• democratic, hanging back
• when the workmen rushed to work.
• Six or seven months he stayed ahead of it,
• his fingertips hardening into glass,
• the silver on his jacket
• translucent from a distance.
• He weighted down one name,
• then another until they disappeared
• from letters: excised, a tax on the work.
• He took to trading skins for furs,
• rattlesnakes for pop-guns, meat for rope.
• Whole afternoons of buffalo
• shook the empty ground he crossed.

John W. Evans is a Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University. His memoir, Should I Still Wish, is forthcoming in 2017. He is the author of Young Widower: A Memoir, winner of the 2014 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize and a 2015 Forewords Review Prize; The Consolations, winner of the 2015 Peace Corps Writers Best Poetry Book; and two poetry chapbooks.