Hobble Creek Review
Hobble Creek Review
Jon D. Lee
beside you someone whose hand you'd recognize
in any degree of darkness holding your hand,
wristbone connected to the armbone,
and though you don't know how this world began
or how it might end,
you know the pathway that leads to repose

William Kloefkorn
August 12, 1932 – May 19, 2011
Jon D. Lee, After years of puttering away, published his first book of
poetry---Ode to Brian: The Long Season---in 2006. After an even longer
period of meandering, he received his Ph.D. in folklore from Memorial
University of NewFoundland in 2009. Jon currently lives with his wife,
Lynnette, in Boston, where he teaches literature in various universities.  
He is hard at work on a second book of poetry, as well as an academic
text on the role of narratives in disease outbreaks, both of which are
guaranteed to be published before the next millenium.

On my thirteenth birthday
you sent a lion
carved out of felled wood
gathered in your Nebraska backyard,
wood that I imagine you curled over
on your porch,
surrounded by curled shavings
falling from the sharp pocketknife
in your right hand,
the oils from your left hand
staining the carving
a yellow August sun.

A letter was paired with the lion,
and though that letter
has long since decayed
from the oils on my fingers,
I remember the words:
you, pausing
in the fifty-seventh celebration of your life
to help me celebrate mine,
a pair of birthdays,
man and child hand in hand
in these golden August summers.
“Every man a fucking Leo!” you said.
“Every man a fucking lion!”

Last summer
was your last birthday,
seventy eight-year-old body
made brittle by time,
felled by disease.
I could not make your celebration,
but you made mine.
And when the news came in,
I gathered our wooden lion—
now brittle,
but golden with age—
and cradled its weight in both hands,
man and child,
lest it too fall,
and I lose all the words
I have left of you.
Every Man A Lion