JONATHAN CORLE (JON) - POEMS

Jonathan Corle (Jon) is a poet and lifelong resident of Pennsylvania living in Chester County. After retirement from the financial firm he founded, Jon became an adjunct professor in the Close School of Entrepreneurship at Drexel University. His interests include reading and writing, cycling, golf, and travel with his wife, Diane.

CAPRESE
 
                            for the Contessa of Mozzarella
​

​We learned about the weekly farmer’s market
from our new foodie friend, Deb, at the pool.
So early Saturday morning we head over,
find a parking spot near an old Banyan Tree
at the Promenade where vendor’s canopies
line the asphalt surrounded by palm trees
and hibiscus making a fragrant garden mall.
 
I stop at Doug’s Seafood and fill my bag
with fresh Tripletail, Corvina and a pound
of Sea Scallops beautifully white and plump.
My wife talks with the Latino at the fruit
and produce stand buying some items before
moving on. The tomatoes she purchases will
become part of the il Tricolore salad at lunch.
 
As we make our way to DeRomo’s, I buy
sweet basil, roots damp, green leaves lustrous
ready to pair with the vine-ripened tomatoes.
At the back of the store, Jessica stands regally over
a white mountain of curd and rubs handfuls
through a stringed implement into riced pieces.
Then she sprinkles handfuls of coarse salt on top.
 
From the steaming stock pots on the burners
behind her she scoops hot water on the cheese,
this melts it and allows it to be worked smooth
by a wooden paddle, a scepter she so deftly moves
in a pattern practiced every workday until automatic.
When ready, she raises some cheese from the milky
brine stretches it and squeezes it to a balloon shape.
Then the plunge into the ice bath to cool the orbs.
When the whole batch is finished, she takes the bowl
places it on the back counter and wraps each ball
weighing and pricing it. She offers me the first one
and says, If you will be eating this today, don’t put it in
the refrigerator just leave it on the counter. We did.
So delicious the fresh green, white, and red layers.
 

SALTINES WITH APRICOT JAM

​Years before the eponymous telescope orbited
my friend, Bill, lived in San Marino
and spent afternoons on the porch
with an astronomer.
 
Each night, the man went to the observatory
on Mount Wilson to make a timed series
of photographic plates of the same sky section.
 
On those afternoons, they would eat crackers
and jam and look at the 3x5 foot plates on a light
table where the stars appeared as pinpoints.
 
By scientific comparison, the man discovers the stars
are moving away from us: REVELATION!
The universe is expanding.
 
It’s not every day someone corrects Einstein.
When I eat saltines with apricot jam, I think of Bill’s story
and one degree of separation from Edwin Hubble.
 
 

JUST OUT OF REACH

​I have decided to free the line.
The sky is cobalt, the grass emerald
fingers of the Magnolia tickle the wind
its white cupped flowers hold sunshine.
I sit this late afternoon under our new sunshade
and this is as far as I get before the line seizes
like the fishing reel that drowned in salt water
months ago that I tried to fix without success
this morning by watching a YouTube video.
Who knew reels were carburetor-complicated?
Back to freeing the line—going with the flow
here comes Mr. Judge with his word gavel
like he knows poetry any better that I do.
Hemingway once said, “Write as best as you can
and finish what you start.” I write crap and never
finish what I start. Instead, I escape into the fine
poems of others like a druggie to get a high
disheartened by the potency of their lines feeling
defeated by my own unfinished work and afraid to try
the process of sober revision; too often I sulk at not saying
something true worth remembering that someone else
has not already said better. The fat line, like the fat golf shot
goes nowhere. Now my voice only slurs my words.
 

SOMETIMES A RIVER BRANCHES  
                                              For A.M. and D.D.

​This mighty river has a New England genesis.
Time-honored and just, it has branched before
and will branch again—yet be the same river.
Branches with Dragon and Wildcat names carry
rostered seedlings from family trees on its banks.
In the pick and roll of time these will mature and be
remembered beyond season record books and legend
by those who got in the flood and coached and those
who cheered gladly keeping pace on the river’s banks.
This grand river flows in many interdependent branches.
At times they come together in eddies of respect to test
skill, strength, and resolve in forty minutes of competition.
 
 

​THE LAYMAN’S GUIDE to INKBLOTS

​In the beginning there was the Swiss maker
ink on folded paper: creation received.
Standardized images made almost a century ago
fantastic symmetrical ambiguities.
 
Ten Rorschach cards shown in order
by an observer, a clinical psychologist, sitting
next to the subject asking the same question,
What might this be?
 
Subjects from soccer moms to serial killers
see the plates as they are but respond in words
and body language coming from who they are
noted by the observer.
 
After the session of stimulus and response
the clinician analyzes his notes, using experience
and the ever-present bell curve seeking
the subject’s psychological state.
 
Spend time with inkblots, even make some
and a Tetris effect takes over, you will see
symmetry everywhere, like the monochrome
underside of an osprey floating on a cloudless
azure plate of sky.