Charles Freericks

In Search of a Voice Charles Freericks

This chapbook of some of the poet's earliest confensional work was originally published by the Plowman Press in 1989. The poems were mostly written at the University of Southern California and in the years following, although some date back to classes at New York University. Three sample poems follow: The Transfer I dreamt you had left and were laughing at me for still standing alone in a place reserved for two, but I woke and kissed your face and you rose with me to celebrate again, but you couldn't or I couldn't, and then we were on the road with your plane and your new school as your morning and my house and my job as mine, but you smelled the same as you did in Georgetown, still had trouble adjusting my car seat, I held your secrets for you, a promise, maybe always, and I wish I had known that that was the last time I would kiss you, hold you while you held me. I came to visit. You pecked me on the cheek hello, like my mother's aunt, then called to someone offstage, and I faced the audience alone. Watching the Jersey Central Locomotive Shunt Cars, February 14, 1977 for my father She stumbles over rail in ice slung air, a tilted shadow of Lady Liberty chipped in her cab and the spiked sun glazed on her hood. With a feckless load of rock hoppers, she knuckles the mud and burbles her aged diesel down the platform track. Rancid, rusted, near rot, she takes the Bound Brook Bridge and quivers the morning as ten a.m. calls from the Presbyterian church bell. My Lunch with God We'd had a date for lunch, one o'clock this afternoon, a back table at Morton's, but God never came. I'd had his word, he wouldn't stand me up again. I even ordered his favorite, sacrificed calf and chicken fat for him. But once more, as I guessed it would be, God broke his promise, claimed he'd gotten tied up, and apologized for the remiss. This is Hollywood, I should understand, phone calls left unreturned, another crisis on the set, but why lead your children into the valley of death when you know you?re too busy to lead them out of it?