Early Review

By Nels Hanson

Why not revisit those childhood
fears, quick omens of destruction,
forgotten skies with thunderheads?

In the narrow valley, a little town
below a dam and green reservoir,
skyscrapers in a city, inhabitants

living suspended above the Earth.
After school a line of ancient cars
of the poor waiting for my friends

and me, new Buick God’s chariot.
Blue ocean without farther shore,
the gray day from the mist strange

waves breaking, descended from
another planet. A scallop’s shell,
pebbles smooth as pearls, stranded

jellyfish a sunken starry astrolabe,
the fallen star, other stars that still
flickered. And the coyote barking

by the road for a week, unwilling
to approach the farmhouse, closet
with an olive drab shirt, shoulders

with epaulettes thinning on a bent
hanger. In the end, I think it was
time, and change suggesting loss,

and someone calm, close and far
away, who knew the future and
watching silently wouldn’t help.

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.