Sam Harrelson

Last summer I wrote a series of 33 poems that I collectively called Magnets Open All the Same.  Over the next 33 days, I’ll be posting one poem a day even while Anna and I are in the great Northwest next week, thanks to the magic of the internets.

At the time, I had them arranged in a different order.  However, the order is not important as the poems all interact with different topics/memes which I tried to relate to a theme such as (obviously) the 33 years of Jesus’ life or the 33 years of Alexander the Great’s life or the Smashing Pumpkins song 33 or the 33 canto’s which are in each of Dante’s three parts of the Divine Comedy.  33 is also the atomic number for arsenic, an element which has had considerable influence throughout human history and plays into the mashed-up nature of sacrament and poison found in many of these poems.

According to Wikipedia:

33 is the largest positive integer that can not be expressed as a sum of different triangular numbers. It is also the smallest odd repdigit that’s not prime.

The first poem, Coming Home, was originally located somehwere in the middle of Magnets Open and is one of my personal favorites.  Written near Easter of ‘05, the lines are short but like my conversations with my dad (which is clearly the focus of the poem), it is the things not said or spoken which are the most important. 

coming home

Worn shin and penny smells –

     you greet me at the stove.

Words exchanged less than

     one might think

                                       for coming home.

Your happiness is measured

     in the strong direction

of the money you hand to me.

The differences are what I realize

     as I sit there on the throne

     you built for me

                               with oily brown grey hands.

On the stove waits the fattened calf,

     almost done for the buffet and again

     I’ve arrived

                                                 home

     just in time.

You never smile but ask how the pearls

     thrown are come along.

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