Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

Logjam

 

Say I was a man
who every day went out with his hooked pike

 

onto the wood-and-water road of the river
to scout the recalcitrant culprit, laggard

 

log lodged against other logs in that stupid urge
to stay put and lock the mass into

 

faux land that grows neither money nor trees.
Nimble in any weather, hale or hungover,

 

hadda unhinge them balks.
Otherwise, rot.

 

The river froze and steamed and I fell in often.
These are details. The rule was: make the river

 

serve. The way was to read the jumble,
the lines of motion and convergence,

 

scramble over a path
remaking itself step

 

by running step, over pushed-up momentary
peaks to the sticking-point:

 

wedge the pole down, lever up
at one angle and the next till it gives

 

under my feet, then pick my way
back, a way

 

only speed keeps up.
Once in a while the thought,

 

why kill all these trees?
But like Buzz says

 

to James Dean just before
he drives over the cliff, You gotta do

 

something. You live on land, you drift
free down the stream, or you build

 

on what accumulates and has to be kept
moving.

 

Charles O. Hartman has published eight collections of poetry, including Downfall of the Straight Line (Arrowsmith Press, 2024), as well as books on jazz and song (Jazz Text, Princeton 1991) and on computer poetry (Virtual Muse, Wesleyan 1996). His Free Verse (Princeton 1981) is still in print (Northwestern 1996), and Verse: An Introduction to Prosody was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2015. In 2020 he co-edited, with Martha Collins, Pamela Alexander, and Matthew Krajniak, a volume on Wendy Battin for the Unsung Masters series. He is Poet in Residence Emeritus at Connecticut College. He plays jazz guitar.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx