Sample Poems by Ken Pobo
Antique Shop
Passing apple-heavy gnarled orchards
along a twisting western
Pennsylvania highway, we crackle
up a stone driveway,
Route 30 Antiques, squint
at a pitcher checking for a crack,
a nick, a chip. Some buy back
childhoods—grandmother’s washer,
iced tea glasses. Others hunt
beer trays, snap up a coverless
Kate Smith album. Our anniversary’s
next month. I buy the transistor
radio car you sadly returned to the shelf—
while you admire aluminum cups,
I sneak it under the driver’s seat.
We finish, half broke,
trunk loaded—in the morning
we drive home, choose
just the right spot for each find—
happy but not satisfied:
what we collect craves another.
Antiques call their kind.
Treasures
The barn houses antiques,
smells like a damp basement.
A quarter gets me a cardboard tube
of Pick Up Sticks. Two green
8 X 10 frames, a buck together,
will hold my 45 picture sleeves.
In another room, two bud vases,
$7.50 for the pair—a Desert Peace
rose for one, a Mirandy
for the other. I walk back
to the car—I found you
by looking too, placed an ad,
took your call. Eleven years
bloom
on our kitchen table.
Glass and Oak
The store looks ramshackle, yet
my grandmother, dead fifteen years,
waves from the rim of a blue
Fenton plate. And that ruby
pitcher with six tall glasses!
After boxing up beauty
in the back seat, we leave the store,
walk in Ohiopyle State Park—
oaks drop glass leaves,
yet not one breaks.
Cobalt Blue Vase
As I peruse creased copies
of Life, a cobalt blue vase grows
hands, taps me. I take him
off a shelf he gladly leaves—
no more waiting
behind inferior glass tumblers,
awful melmac cups. Home at last,
I carry him across the threshold,
dash out into the garden,
pick two Blue Girl roses,
six Pouffe bellflowers, and
an uppity penstamon, pour water,
stick in stems. How handsome
he looks in the sun. That was
eight years ago, and now
we’re the neighborhood’s
happiest couple--my glass vase
shines as I do when I hear
his blue heart beat,
see his open blue mouth.
Beginnings
A blue Hazel Atlas pitcher,
400 bucks.
When I pick it up,
it almost slips--glass
breaks so quickly! We
walk on splinters,
yet keep reaching. Later,
bodies wet after love,
we dress,
garden. You crack twigs
ambling over to see
this year’s first salmon lobelia.