Dennis Hock teaches creative writing at Cosumnes River College. Instrumental in developing the Sutterwriters program in 2003, he continues to work in hospitals and retreat centers with groups that use expressive writing as a healing process. An accomplished poet, Dennis is the author of The Secret Cup: Poems of Grief and Healing.
Dennis’s work often offers the reader a choice – find meaning in the image – or not. He shows us that not every moment is transcendent. At times, nature or a human connection can bring a kind of salvation, but in Mockingbird, he questions the easy path to such revelation of meaning:
See how complex
and varied
and multitudinous
I am, I warble.

Yet I don't feel audacious at all.

Mr. Hock will be reading as part of the Confluence of Poets – a four-day poetry event that begins September 14 at Folsom Lake College, and continues through September 17 at Solano College in Fairfield. For details visit sacramentopoetrycenter.org. I hope you enjoy the poems of Dennis Hock.

Perspective

At dusk
a snowy egret
in a bruised field
of water and stubble

is what it is

not some white question
about to wrinkle into flight.

Mere bird
and grows less sentimental
the nearer you approach.

On the other hand

if you keep the distance
the emblem glows
in the dying light.

And your body might tremble
as you make the bird
more than feathers

something closer to belief

that ephemeral becomes eternal
in a world beyond stubble and water

a world inferred by
the egret's incandescence,
an incandescence created by
the dimness of distance

a distance by which
the bird shimmers into
an avatar of the latent soul

about to lift
from the muck.

Mockingbird

Each morning I waken to
a mockingbird's plagiarized notes
breaking over my window sill.

Why do I like his audacity?

All day I move through a range
of my own imitations
pretending each is an actual me.

See how complex
and varied
and multitudinous
I am, I warble.

Yet I don't feel audacious at all.

Where's he get his self-assurance
that little thief?
By what dispensation his right
to be a singular and bold fraud?

Another question nags me:
at what point do we become what we steal?

To stopper his shameless impersonating
I try closing my window at night
but then he awakens in my head,
at precisely 5 a.m., to remind me
another day awaits more petty forgery.

How easily
I submit.

I open my mouth,
then my throat.

Abrazos

I lie here shrinking
yet growing
huge in the bickering
of my sons’ deathwatch.

As they sulk in arguments
over my dignity, I resist
a tired urge to disown all three.

Instead, I kiss their hands
and use the old familiar---mijo,
each from a different father.
(Oh, what the world does not understand!)

For the doves came again last night,
two the color of moon,
the third of a darker star.
They perched on my headboard,
mute emissaries from the future.
So now I am finished speaking, for good.

My boys do not notice;
they have not been listening.
But in a moment death’s prank will jolt them---
how it suddenly flips the telescope around---
and they’ll be looking through the wide end,
down the long cylinder,
at their mother’s tiny image, snared
in the perfect entrapment of the smaller lens,
the size of a dime and so distant.

It might take months, perhaps years,
for them to know I’m not really there.
I have gone across, my bags packed
with love and compassion,
and have entered their corazones.

Here, I will unpack my bags,
rearrange the furniture,
then settle in to wait a mother’s
final delivery---
eventually, with death their common father,
my sons will be born anew…
brothers at last.