Sound and Drink

I don't think brevity will ever go out of style.
June
Dangled above
the traffic's rasp:
a contrail
a crow
a nail gun's echo.
Sappho Hears
gossip
makes it
song
it won't be long
before everyone
hears
"June" is by Joseph Massey, from a new chapbook called Within Hours (The Fault Line Press) and "Sappho Hears" is by Gloria Frym, from a chapbook called The Lost Sappho Poems (Effing Press).

The delicacy with which these poets pursue their aims is tonic; next to them, almost anyone else seems garrulous. But the delicacy yields different results in each case: Massey is a solitary, hard listener of the environment, while Frym is always speaking to and about an absent lover (hence, the persona of Sappho). Massey tries to efface himself; Frym never lets you forget there's a person yearning there.
The poems I quote above are about presence as an ear; each poet has a comment too about sobriety. Frym:
Sappho Mourns
I drink spirits
men give me
substitute for
inquiry
*
the shelf empties
the vessel
smashed against
the stone
wall
*
she would still
be mine
had I followed her
way
... and Massey:
Autumnal Equinox
Sober for once, for what—
for the words to budge.
We spent summer propped up
by each other's stuttering.
There are seasons here
if you squint. And there's
relief in the landscape's
sloughed off cusps of color
fallen over the familiar
landmarks, the familiar
trash—things that last.
Both poets here wield irony as pathos; both recognize inquiry as that which we flee from, that sometime did us seek. Deliquescence vies with flintiness. Pick your heartbreak.