Tag: Jeffrey Alfier

The Ferry Captain

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“Captain in the Rain at Cleggan Pier, Ireland.” By Jeffrey Alfier

 

The Ferry Captain

By Jeffrey Alfier

 

The Ferry Captain

He is the hull, diesel and waterline that mark him,
ligature of fists on the wheel. He is bow wave
and sting of spindrift, inlets sprawled with waterfowl,
tidewrack, a mind drawing tangent lines no one sees.
The wheelhouse is his tabernacle in the wilderness.
He’s a bulkhead’s argument with rust, a pennant’s
argument with gales. Spend enough of your life
at sea and you can tell windward from leeward
by the taste of wind alone. At a small remove,
just back of the helm, passengers serry against
north Atlantic cold, their voices clipped
by gusts keening through antenna wires.
Sheltered waters far astern, he is the rote cadence
of the deck crew’s footfalls. He won’t worry how late
he gets home, how long he’ll stand with his back
to the seawall, a phone ringing somewhere without
his answer, the sea a rhythm locked in his heart.

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(This poem originally appeared in The Storm Petrel: Poems of Ireland (Grayson Books, 2014)

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About the Author: Jeffrey Alfier is 2018 winner of the Angela Consolo Manckiewick Poetry Prize, from Lummox Press. In 2014 he won the Kithara Book Prize, judged by Dennis Maloney. Publication credits include Crab Orchard Review, Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Copper Nickel, Emerson Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kestrel, Hotel Amerika, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review and South Carolina Review. He is author of The Wolf Yearling, Idyll for a Vanishing River, Fugue for a Desert Mountain, Anthem for Pacific Avenue: California Poems, Southbound Express to Bayhead: New Jersey Poems, The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems, Bleak Music – a photo and poetry collaboration with poet Larry D. Thomas and The Storm Petrel: Poems of Ireland. He is founder and co-editor at Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review. An Air Force veteran, he is a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

“Walking West on East 5th Street” By Jeffrey Alfier

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

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Walking West on East 5th Street
                         – Benson, Arizona

It is spring, and in a town that awaits
the luster of fairgrounds to come alive,

the doors of taverns open early, like strangers
with a promise. Flat-roofed houses yield

to groves of mesquite. Their limbs stretch
streetlight halos into frail shadows veining asphalt

that webs the neighborhood. The trundling
iron of the Union Pacific enters town at a late

hour. Its headlamp startles shacks to burnished
yellow as it floods for mere seconds the frame

of a drunken soldier, home on leave from a long
war. He shuffles through an unpaved alley

like an astronaut scuffing the dust of the moon.
A final blast from the locomotive seems to hew

the world into the past tense. It surmounts cheers
unreeling from a small crowd seated under

the ballfield lighting of a pickup game. A young
hopeful sprints homeward, rounds third, already out.

 

This poem previous appeared in Idyll for a Vanishing River (Glass Lyre Press, 2013)

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About the Author: Jeffrey Alfier is 2018 winner of the Angela Consolo Manckiewick Poetry Prize, from Lummox Press. In 2014 he won the Kithara Book Prize, judged by Dennis Maloney. Publication credits include Crab Orchard Review, Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Copper Nickel, Emerson Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kestrel, Hotel Amerika, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review and South Carolina Review. He is author of The Wolf Yearling, Idyll for a Vanishing River, Fugue for a Desert Mountain, Anthem for Pacific Avenue: California Poems, Southbound Express to Bayhead: New Jersey Poems, The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems, Bleak Music – a photo and poetry collaboration with poet Larry D. Thomas and The Storm Petrel: Poems of Ireland. He is founder and co-editor at Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review. An Air Force veteran, he is a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

 

Image Credit: “Main Street, Benson, Arizona” By Jeffrey Alfier

Farm Near a Bend in River Tummel

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“A Marsh Farm” Peter Henry Emerson (1886) courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

 

Farm Near a Bend in River Tummel

By Jeffrey Alfier

 

Farm Near a Bend in River Tummel

There was a shed here once. If you look close,
you can see grass ghosting its outline.

Any tool the day required could be found here.
Tack, as well: bits, bridles, a harness or two.

Never mind weather; some days I think decades
of dad’s swearing finally brought it down,

his voice burning beams like fire. Rust crumbling
from the ledges didn’t help. Neither did I,

backing the Landini loader against its worst wall.
My brother and I once set a drowned ewe inside—

it was our fault—we’d left a gate open. Never told
dad. He found out, of course. But that was the day

he got word his father died up north, a fall down
stone stairs along a Stornoway quay.

Look: there’s two planks left from the door.
You can still make out where the lock used to be.

 

(from The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems Aldrich Press, 2016)

 

About the Author: Jeffrey Alfier is 2018 winner of the Angela Consolo Manckiewick Poetry Prize, from Lummox Press. In 2014 he won the Kithara Book Prize, judged by Dennis Maloney. Publication credits include Crab Orchard Review, Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Copper Nickel, Emerson Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kestrel, Hotel Amerika, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review and South Carolina Review. He is author of The Wolf Yearling, Idyll for a Vanishing River, Fugue for a Desert Mountain, Anthem for Pacific Avenue: California Poems, Southbound Express to Bayhead: New Jersey Poems, The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems, Bleak Music – a photo and poetry collaboration with poet Larry D. Thomas and The Storm Petrel: Poems of Ireland. He is founder and co-editor at Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review. An Air Force veteran, he is a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.