Volunteers

Absence wandering 
with night-consuming stars, 
moonlight and its promise of dawn, 

like the cold blue hands of the clock. 
You are, of course, 
not there at all. 

So how is it, 
at high tide or low, 
your dark flow remains?

I know how you consume space itself, 
like the surgeon’s miniature arms, 
hot and cold, leaving scars on the inside of my heart,

where there is no light, only traces, 
beacons on a radar screen 
when land is near.

In the chambered world of my art, 
no words at all: 
unsaid, unheard, unknown,

not yet seeds in the red flood.
How is it that such random fruit can grow, 
untended, volunteers misplaced? 

Too late to be moved, 
green fruit, slow growing,
thirsty and hungry, 

holding on in a stiff wind, 
yet doomed to fall without more rain 
and a bit of compost.

JIM KRAUS

Jim Kraus is Professor of English at Chaminade University in Honolulu. His essay “Poetry and Anti-Nuclearism” was recently published in Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures. He is published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Bamboo Ridge, Neologism Poetry Journal and elsewhere. He recently taught poetry at Honoluluʻs Halawa Prison.