Calling His Name
Herbert Plummer
It had snowed for three days & now
it slit the air in tiny arrows that cut the flamed skin
of our cheeks as we marched single file, the four of us,
through Pennsylvania backwoods,
until it was safe
to say we were lost. Four sort-of friends
of the same Boy Scout troop, on a Saturday morning
with nothing to do except leave home.
Around us the white elm & black oak
trees stood cold & unclothed
& we walked in awkward silence,
hearing only the snow under our boots,
looking, I suppose, for some kind of treasure
but only finding abandoned license plates,
littered Coke cans & the vermillion glaze
of crushed winter-berries like splattered blood.
The cold throbbed in our bones,
my small hands squeezed into fists inside my gloves.
We dissolved into the white emptiness.
We could be anyone out in this world.
The snow fell so softly it fused with the air,
& I imagined us rising up into it, loosed
from the telluric forces of the earth, four
floating angels hovering above our chilled bodies.
None of us spoke of our private wars at home,
or the trembling of our bodies now,
as if some great voice shook our fragile instruments
so that a few sounds might fall out.
After a breakfast of beef stew from a can
cooked over a bed of coals, we started back.
One of us got separated & our mission became a rescue.
We backtracked, searching the open white fields
& trails, calling his name, lifting each other up
so our voices might echo further.
It went on like that for what seemed like hours,
my lungs ablaze, the muted muscles of my throat
now thick with blood, alive and awake.
I can’t remember if we ever found him.
Herbert Plummer did his undergraduate studies at King's College in Pennsylvania, where he was an editor of the The Scop, the school literary magazine, and read poetry over the air for the school's radio station. He earned an M.A. in British & American Literature from Hunter College, writing his thesis on aesthetics of war in Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry. He has taken several poetry workshops in the NYC area with poets like Jacob Miller and Jenny Xie. He currently works for Columbia University Press, where he manages subscriptions to educational databases, including the Granger’s World of Poetry. His work has been published in Unbroken Journal, Aethlon, and Cutthroat Journal. He was also recently named the poetry editor of FishFood magazine. He lives in Hoboken and runs with the Central Park Track Club.