Refusing Poems

So many hearts.

Each painful

as a tooth being picked at

by a specialist

whose ingredients for cure,

if there is one,

include

bright light, numbing,

and noisy silences.

What I want is the thrust

of endings and beginnings

that show you

it will never end,

this  suffering

that somehow

encourages green

to flow up the trees,

blue to flood the sky with time,

and the darkening storm

to cover the beach

as if that was the missing thing.

The historic park

of myself, brothers and sisters,

an Arctic of unmapped hazards

locked in ice.

A few spurting campfires.

Rest easy.

You will never come here.

Stan Sanvel Rubin’s fourth full-length collection, There. Here, was published by Lost Horse Press, his third, Hidden Sequel, won the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. His poems have been in many journals including Agni, The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, and One. and two recent anthologies: the 25th Anniversary issue of Atlanta Review and the prizewinning For Love of Orca. He lives on the north Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.