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Night Watch excerpts

Neighbor

You can always borrow

a cup of sugar, a garden hose,

a drill bit or some turpentine.

But if I went next door and

asked Fred for a little help

with this damned poem, he'd say:

"There goes the neighborhood."

'Mikrokosmos'

Bartok wrote it,

he said, to teach

piano to the young,

but his own son struggled

to master the music

as its complexity grew.

One hundred fifty three pieces,

left hand seeking to know

what the right hand was doing.

Maybe the boy preferred

baseball. Maybe his gaze

wandered to the window.

Maybe now, six decades

after his father's death,

he dreams in harmony.

Lampblack

After Halloween,

November taps the panes

with bare-knuckle branches.

On the doorstop, the

jack-o'-lantern watches for winter

with charcoal eyes.

"John Mark Eberhart's poems meld a sense of place with a passion for music, creating a varied lyrical map ... There's a high co-efficient of laughter, and insight-filled understatement in these songs. After all, our Midwestern bard reminds us, 'This isn't Camelot. We've got our own way of doing things.' "
Marilyn Kallet, author of Circe, After Hours