God's Loneliest Men or (Writing Chapter Two)

Recently I heard a film critic use “God’s Loneliest Men” to describe the Hollywood action heroes of the 80’s and 90’s.   

Those grizzled, whiskey-shooting lone wolves were my patron saints: their split knuckles, my zodiac. I taught myself martial arts from library books, practiced one-liners while falling asleep, and learned how to say goodbye with nothing but a look. 

Those were my impressionable years.

After a summer love turned winter, so did I.  I joined the military, hoping my secret failings would be burnt away in its fires; and what remained hammered into a cold hard silence.

My heart was a machine whose purpose was to push the body forward; the body would be the instrument that would "diffuse the bomb" or "vanquish the ancient evil."  The reality is the opposite: the body is the machine -- the heart the instrument of salvation.

I wasn’t saving others.  I was saving myself from the human ache.

© Dan Kosmayer

The poems in the second chapter of My Father’s Hand Is a Mountain Range are about loneliness, loss, and how seeds do their work in the dark.

They are a small collection of long walks through bad weather, and dances with rain.

The oldest poem was written seventeen years ago for a soldier who was swallowed by a solitude.

Another poem questions the weight of fingerprints, how those whorls and loops foreshadow the mazes we carry inside.

There’s one that addresses the body's inevitable betrayals.  Another where a bruised apple demands the intimacy of a wounded lover. 

In the most recent one, the poem is a lawyer who visits the reader in a self-made prison.

When it has come down hard enough for long enough, even rain can look like bars.

I say all the above, and every post that follows, with this caveat: Maybe.  Maybe that’s what these poems are about. 

These musings are the wreckage dislodged by passing storms from my drowned cities.  I have no idea what they might stir in you, if anything at all. 

To paraphrase the poet Stephen Dunn: It is the reader who completes the poem.  That being said, I look forward to hearing how you finish them.