The Excursions & Ephemerals of Poet John Lane
“The me that is me eats cheese and wishes there were more chocolate in the gorp. The you that is you fixes on the only point you cannot reach, a messy hike over yards of seaweed. The gulls have mined the ebb for crabs and oysters. All the shells are broken. The granite resists even gravity. The dead do not see their mistakes, but the living live through them. I thought the lighthouse was a grove of Jackpine higher than the others, but you knew. I never grow tired of the imagination. There is no brick or crumbling mortar there. The imagination is all vegetable and subject to the tides.”—by John Lane
Speculative Friction
By Claire Bateman
GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—March 2025—Poet John Lane has been writing and publishing poetry for some 50 years. For over 30 years, he taught writing at such places as UVA, the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts, and, for over three decades, at Wofford College.
Lane was born in North Carolina but Spartanburg, South Carolina, his mother’s ancestral homeland, is where he has lived most of his life. Soon after college, he was a Hoyns Fellow at UVA and later completed an MFA in Poetry at Bennington College.
Lane has published poetry, fiction, essays, and book-length narratives he calls “excursions.” His Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems won the SIBA (Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Poetry Book of the Year prize in 2012 and his Southern Range: Collected Longer Poems comes out in April 2025. Lane was a co-founder of the Hub City Writers Project.
In his work, he explores place, relationships, and wildness. An obsessive journal and note keeper, Lane says much of his work grows out of daily contact with the page. Over the last three years, he has gathered forgotten or neglected poems (never pulled free for submission or critique) from his journals and printed them for his friends in small, mailed batches. He calls this his “ephemerals project,” and plans to keep this up. Some of the poems published here are ephemerals.
Dichotomies
By John Lane
A rain crow calls to the west since dawn. And to the east, another answers. A one-note conversation. The weather? Or a simple statement, “my heart aches.” The dog forgets the difference between in and out, passes his amnesia on to the frogs. One hopped into the mud room when I open the door and flipped the light. At the grocery a clerk asked if I wanted the food separated from the cleaning products. I still make distinctions, so the chemicals rode home separately from the yogurt. On Judgment Day God separates the saved from the damned. In my theology everything dissolves into one. Call me a Buddhist or repeat that old joke about ordering a hotdog. Either way the soul gets fed.
Fat Boy Fishing with a Chicken Neck
By John Lane
Crab-catcher with string twirled round a dune reed. Me decades ago. Not jellyfish, or jets of warm spume, nor shark-fear more real than Mama screaming from under a striped umbrella about not going out no deeper, nor the black-headed gull, gullet rusty with squalls, nor the waves breaking crosshatched over the boy’s hidden feet below both planted dimpled doughy soaked knees. Rewards? Blue crab, thrown back, the surf’s soul.
Slimmed down now, shaped up by decades of diet and desire to be different. That boy is seriously keeping something at bay, fishing below the waves. Some things never change on this proletariat beach. I’m still wading in, knee-deep.
The Old Poet Has Made Another Poem
By John Lane
The old poet has made
another poem no one else
will read. And he’s happy,
happy as the gull on the sidewalk
with the waffle stand ready to open.
The Railway Trail
By John Lane
The island has been flailed
With the cat of nine tails
Called history, so I get in
A swing or two. The past
Is a shipwreck and where
Better to spot the
Colonial wreckage
Than the top of a rail grade?
I’m thirsty and the sun is hot.
My composure consists
Of an empty water bottle.
Walking the brush the ribs
Of limestone are what I once
Called nature. They protrude.
That was Nature with a big N.
Under my feet this earthly
Body still
breathes though
Four hundred years
Have passed since
The ships of conquest
Floundered offshore.
The rats swam here,
Followed by the insurance
Companies, followed by
The Reinsurers. Shakespeare
Visited too but he couldn’t
Find a Starbucks and went
Back to London to write
The Tempest, still running
In tourist narratives,
Second only to The Triangle.
A seamount erupted
And twenty-three
Million years later
Erotic roots pry
Slabs of elemental stone
From the rail cuts.
Commerce now builds in the dust
Where the doves scratch.
Who would believe
An airport would follow
In transportation history,
With a single runway
Long enough
To land the space shuttle?
If someone had told me
This culture trail would lead
Directly to a PGA golf
Tournament I would
Have taken a bus.
I convert the miles
To kilometers and
I pass a small
Garden along the trail
Full of tomatoes not
Measured by standards
Of grocery stores. These
Vegetables are mythic,
Ripened by the same sun
As Prospero’s, only to be eaten
Year’s later at the end of
His play, when the trapdoor
Opens, and poof, the bus driver
Disappears for lunch.
The trail stalls at the shore,
Once an entry for the military.
An hour early for the ferry,
the shallow embayment entertains,
But this is no Shakespearean
Comedy. Near sunset,
Troupes of fry wait
Out the applauding gulls
Under a greasepaint sky.
I salve my feet in blue water.
Time takes an intermission
For those with luxury
Of speculation.
The present summons
Countless Elizabethan
Themes to give gravity
To my walk’s denouement.
Spacious wonder for one,
Though the present ends
At the ferry dock with golfers—
The plot thickens there
With galleons of surplus sky
Sailing safely east
Like a pilot episode
“The Railway Trail” was previously published in the chapbook, Poems from Elsewhere, Holocene Ephemerals, 2024.
Looking Across at Mistake Island
By John Lane
If endurance is other than rock it is unscripted except by time. The ocean pitches against the shore and it’s the shore’s howl that is silent. There is no sympathy from the sky, a pure blue bowl shunning all but contrails. The me that is me eats cheese and wishes there were more chocolate in the gorp. The you that is you fixes on the only point you cannot reach, a messy hike over yards of seaweed. The gulls have mined the ebb for crabs and oysters. All the shells are broken. The granite resists even gravity. The dead do not see their mistakes, but the living live through them. I thought the lighthouse was a grove of Jackpine higher than the others, but you knew. I never grow tired of the imagination. There is no brick or crumbling mortar there. The imagination is all vegetable and subject to the tides.
“Looking Across at Mistake Island” was previously published in the chapbook, Poems from Elsewhere, Holocene Ephemerals, 2024.
To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books, Wonders of the Invisible World, Scape, or Coronology from Amazon, click on the book covers below.
Claire Bateman
Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)