Howard Faerstein

Howard Faerstein’s debut poetry collection, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, was published by Press 53 in their Silver Concho Poetry Series, edited by Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root. His work can be found in numerous journals including Great River Review, Nimrod, CutThroat, Off the Coast, Rattle, upstreet, Mudfish, Gris-Gris, Peacock Journal, and Connotation. He is presently “adjunct emeritus,” having retired from a teaching career at colleges throughout the country. Associate Poetry Editor of CutThroat, A Journal of the Arts, he lives in Florence, Massachusetts.

Sample Poem from Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn

The Extinction of the Black Rhino in Our Time or
Older Man Emerging from Flowers

            I have not understood the world, and the world has not understood me
—Pope Gregory XII

The sun is white and Earth so incomprehensible, so remarkably
obtuse, sunrays refract off muddied homes half in the river.
Until Nancy died, I hadn’t grasped the significance when the flesh
of our feet turns mottled. Minutes after the hurricane
passed through, an inchworm yoyoed from the clothesline.
I heard a man being interviewed say Integrity is an algorithm.
Is that like saying human beings are resilient? That’s so repetitive.
Besides, teratogenic products are widely available in every strip mall
and male frogs convert testosterone into estrogen, spawn
fertile eggs thanks to herbicide-generated enzymes. More news,
the tropopause continues to heat up. Rivers run brown with good dirt.

But other times, say when night clangs its heavy gate
or when morning’s another step up dream’s lighthouse,
it is possible to understand this world. Except for Herbie,
every man I’ve known remains a man, every woman a woman,
every bull a bull and every cow a cow. Eleven thousand years
into the holocene, summer lasts longer. And still it ends
too soon but even as memory’s rusted chain snaps
we continue to learn. Once, in the cemetery of the abstract
expressionists, a fireball streaked the sodden sky, painting
you into being. I knew then you were promised but not how
long it would take to find you. Even though magnetic north
is wildly unstable, sometimes I try recalling sheep in the middle
of a road, gaunt men wielding wide sticks, high-stepping
through the flock—what the air outside my car smelled like,
how loud their bleating shudder. Within my small circle,
each of us talks in our own way, just as sparrows’ flight differs
from swallows’. We ask more than life will give.
Seeking the story of my life in others, what we look for,
through love and delusion, is ourselves.

Above this unlikely page hovers a fugitive from summer’s finish—
a six legged fly with crossed translucent wings, bluish shell,
narrow reddish head and barreled at the other end—
earthquake of jeweled flight, dazzle of deepest wonder.
Tomorrow will most likely find it dead. All I want is to recreate it
so you hear its buzzy song amid the plash of rain.