Charles Hensler

by Charles Hensler

Someone was playing Clair de Lune
all night. Large flocks of small birds
today, heading west. A silhouette
at the door. An appointment
to make a portrait of every bone, each one
to be revealed, brought blinking
into the light. Under the blaze of August
the car simmers in the driveway. The late sun
ricochets off the pearl-grey hood, through
one eye and out the other, finding every seam.
When I was a boy I melted the hands
of my plastic glow-in-the-dark watch
under the small sun of a hot lamp, believing
I could burn endless light
into every hour.

Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Epiphany, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, The Shore, Parentheses, One Art, Stone Circle Review and others.

by Charles Hensler

Every day you fall
from the same bridge. Each night
you swim farther upstream.

Houses and gardens in silhouette, the scent
of wood smoke rising, the water heavy
between the trees.

Was that a heron or a flag pole; a shimmering
willow or someone waving from shore?

Is it only the senescent light of stars
arriving weary, or a fragment of frozen moon?

How were you able to weather the guests
who came early, and stayed? There were too many to know—
their urgencies and trembling hands, their clarinets
that wouldn’t play.

So far upstream in the feathered dark
past the shore, the fences, the cottonwood—

is the house you find the house you knew,
the light your light in the window?

Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Shore, One Hand Clapping, West Trade Review, Pidgeonholes, Parentheses, ballast, boats against the current and others.