Words by Steve Klepetar

          “Words bounce. Words, if you let them,
          will do what they want to do and what
          they have to do.”

          -Anne Carson

Dangerous, those little puffs of air
shaped by tongue and teeth and the soft
clicking of the palate,
how they leave the mouth like moths
and find the lamp of another's ear.
My mother kept her words in a drawer
beside the good spoons, brought them out
for company, polished,
a little tarnished at the edges.
The rest she swallowed, and they settled
in her like stones in a riverbed,
smoothing slowly under all that water.
I have said things that still circle the house,
slipping under doors, tapping the glass
on windless nights.
I have said stay to a closing door
and go to an open one,
and learned the grammar of regret,
which has no future tense.
Once, a child's name dropped
from my lips in a crowded station
and a stranger turned,
her face opening like a window
in a long-shuttered house.
Now the old poets are mostly breath,
a few dry syllables pressed in paper,
and still they rise from the page
to set a kettle singing
in a kitchen that has been dark for years.
Dangerous these small winds we make,
that bend the candle flames toward each other
and, once in a while, blow them out.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.