Poetry
On Po(e)tic(s)
Novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote, "What are all these pieces for, if not to be knit up finally?" I believe poetry, or any writing, begins and ends with fragments, small shavings from our lives, that when knitted together, shape our collective narrative.
I am particularly attracted to the prose poem; there's something about the friction and pressure exerted upon prose poetry that makes it delicious.
I also enjoy the way writers and critics, both fiction and poetry, polarize when confronted with prose that doesn't quite fit the expectations of living in either world. I suppose that's why I love the immigrants story; especially stories from immigrant children. I think often of Maxine Hong Kingston's "Woman Warrior," and how as a child she felt alientated from her "Chinese" and "American" worlds. When you don't belong, you learn to take your home with you wherever you go. Here are some pieces of shrapnel that call themselves poetry.
Tagmemics
In the last day on the farm, my brothers struggled with the pigs, their arms bulging like ropes, shoulders arcing
and straining under the weight. They stood ankle-deep in mud and shit, and flipped coins for the rifle and
chainsaw. Standing on my tiptoes, I watched from the window of my room.
My brothers stood over the pigs like twin gods, their muscled backs toward me, things tucked into a back moment
enough, flesh-colored and smelling like rotting wood and mold. Brittle bones like razor coral, some hearts and organs,
and later that day in town, the church’s steeple rising like a spear, and the thank yous to the Lord for his bounty, sanctioned
by measured nods, something about a mighty sea parting, significance and miracles.
And the things we lost by the end of the day; a one-arm hired hand with two children walking away from our house, headlights driving down the road, sloping light across our fields, one-hundred acres, twenty-three chickens, a few horses, a father, a farm, my life.
Rubicon
Near the green house bordered by laughter into weeds for fields where farm boys work, bare-chested, overalls
down to their waist, dust-blown boys laughing as they scythe against a blue sky, white teeth mirroring noon-light,
sweating with the work that fathers say turns young boys into men, and the young boys—children really—shine
in the youth of their bodies’ yearning, and the anticipation that summer brings; bonfires behind the barn, smoking
corn silk in their father’s pipes, swimming holes in the Kankakee, leaping from the trestle bridge where they fall flailing
into the river, where the sound of shouting boys disappears like a Sunday sermon, where the peace which passeth all
understanding abides, the shock of cold, and then, the struggle toward light, and always, the body in motion, itself
unaware as if in the effort of remembering, experiences pleasure, autonomic, that is to say, the push against gravity—of
boys into men—toward light and air.
Engram
When I was born, a stray gust plucked me from a broken web. I was an empty husk of a fly; exsanguinated but alive.
It was a miracle I survived. Childhood. In recollection, there are patterns we cannot wholly view at any height or vista.
There are fragments, there is a distributive system, a function, a framework with shifting boundaries like a topiary maze
where neurons dance as children who play hide-and-seek.
Here is my head, an overripe melon with a few marbles rolling around. Here are my skinny arms and legs pumping and
flailing in Bass Lake almost drowned; all of these remembered as a mother’s voice calling out from an unknown distance
and from all directions.
I wake in time, not place, to see myself not myself, but a collection of lint, a fly blown down synaptic highways, hanging on
by a frayed thread, kicking and screaming.
Folktale
On the path under water oak’s black branches, on a narrow buttonhook of land, flanked by cattails
and crimson-eyed mallow, wash of water pulled by memory and the moon, no one can say what lies
on the other side of the moon, has anyone seen it?
There is good crabbing here with a line or a trap, as when I was young, hiking in the woods, fishing
for white perch or croaker, accepting all that I could see as the whole world, deciphering glyphs of wood
beetles and termites etched into fallen pine, and the tremors I felt when I found the severed wing of a
robin in yellow leaves near Black Duck Marsh, as now, the rumble of Spanish horses on Chincoteague
Island, crossing over, season to season, island to island, no one knowing why.
Orienteering
(Click title to download )
Planting Time
Pails dangling, my grandfather and father make their way to the milk house, a small building about ten by twelve,
which clung like an after-thought to the side of the big red barn. And inside, the left-over stillness of the deep
reaches of night smelling of damp hay and fresh manure, where they contemplate the narrow gap through the
door and morning breaking on the horizon, like two men looking back on childhood, and out in the fields, the crops,
so insular, so quiet, resting beneath the surface, and in spring, when the light shifts, they know it’s time to plant, their
shadows standing on end catching time, as if they could.
Summer Vacation
Against the backlit curtain of pines, your static profile in the skiff
near where
birds at dusk dip down to the water, lift away again in a dance
the sound
the water made, lapping at the shore line receding away from us
that day
when you refused to come in out of anger or spite, it doesn’t
matter, for that
matter, any vacation ever after, unhappy and the first sign that
summer was
over, we could breathe again, the heat rushing away with the
coming blush of
leaves and the certainty we held that this couldn’t go on forever.
Dilation
Late in bed, after the voices quiet and the mesh of language dissolves in the brain, sleep punches the clock,
and he’s there again; my father’s ghost. His clock-like face bobbing as if on water, and my tiny boat to the stars
keeps drifting further from him until he’s one bright speck on a mash of sea, and I wonder, as a passenger might
wonder when passing another ship, who’s moving away from whom, as my own self dwindles to zero-mass, evenly
dispersed through infinite space, where there is no centertoward which I fall.
Malaise
for example, your hands, legs, and waist are tied to a table with salt crusted, thick leather straps, so much so
and to such a degree you are in pain, but it is a pain only your body feels, your head is elsewhere—disconnected
by the constriction in your throat. There are people who smell like ammonia in white coats with safety glasses
circling you, murmuring and nodding, scratching marks on their clipboards. You have the notion of something
crawling inside you, and the feeling that you must be seriously ill, you don’t try to struggle, it’s impossible to get
up from the table, much less look out the window to see if it’s raining (if there was a window), and your head is
a dead cloud, full of nothing but dark, like an empty walnut or a black hole, not a block of ice or a stone, you want
to grieve for this loss, but you don’t know how or why.
Manic
Disarmed, and certain you may be attacked at any moment, you should conceal yourself in a low-lying area.
Use whatever cover is available for your awkward shape that shouts, Here I am! A sniper could hit your bright
reflection from 1000 yards out with a scope, as if you had nine-lives, don’t use them, be safe, if no immediate
cover is available, dig a hole the size of a shallow grave. If you find that morbid, crawl on your belly in the dust
until you reach the safety of uneven ground, any depression will do.
Terminal
This has nothing to do with immunity, what white count multiplies, a call to arms for the infected host’s affliction,
it has nothing to do with a cry for help, a hand to hold, white sheets and sterile masks, nothing to do with thousands
of white robed spheres in a single drop of blood, nothing to do with T cells that migrate from bone marrow to thymus,
or how a plug of platelets enmesh in a network of insouciant molecules.
Most mornings the exchange takes place without fanfare, without notice, the slow steady hum of oxygen pumps,
the body more or less, weighed, needled, and changed, just the blue-gowned nameless way of living among tiled
corridors and distended shuffling feet. Most evenings, the invisible procession comes and goes with exquisite
hushed voices, heart monitor’s metronome, and what can be mourned is mourned, what luck one has is spent,
and plans, what’s become of them now, dusty mumbling and photo albums, and when there’s nothing else to
offer, take out your tattered ticket, listen to the low voices call out numbers in the dark, watch the clock and wait.
Easter
On Easter, the girls dressed up in white hats with pink chiffon ribbon, pretty dresses with daisies and sunflower,
and us boys with new patent leather shoes and freshly starched ironed shirts and off to church we would go
and after come home to look for our Easter baskets with the sun still shining and father and mother there on
the porch looking on and laughing. What good times. I hope God will bring me home so I can hunt for eggs
in the field behind our barn, listen to the low short whistles of screech owls as they dive after mice while fireflies
weave-and-bob like Lilliputian lanterns. But here there’s only the high pitched whine of sand flies in my ears, the
twenty-miles of switchbacks to hump before sundown and we have to make the northern hill and no one knows
why but when; it’s Easter and we don’t have any eggs but plenty of grenades and no white hats but Kevlar helmets,
and no starched shirts but flak jackets. But at night on the perimeter, when the rain clears and light from the moon
shines across a field, I listen for low short whistles and the skitter of field mice across my boots, and the
phosphorescent glow of tracer fire streak red and orange through frozen air, like spring bonfires with winter wood,
or Easter lying prone in the mud, marking time, with nothing to do but wait for the sun.
Foxhole
Ash rain lit by the green glow of lightning cracks against the windows like a fallen tree, my heart harumps, skips a beat,
remembers when a short range Frog missile hit the perimeter in rain at night, struck the same chord of fear, and in the
morning we found the scattered remains of a camel but animals do not grieve, or if they do, it is not in any observable
manner, although elephants mourn. They visit the bone-yards of the savannas again and again, grasping their relative’s
tusks with the gristle of their long wrinkled-gray-trunks, as if to say, I am here, I remember you, I will never forget you.
And behind all of this is a spreading sorrow—for soldiers like myself—who hide and tremble in the dark.
Veterans
on crutches, in wheelchairs, on walkers, more old than young, waiting in lines more long than short, with respirators
for orange lungs, catheters for bladders in men like peas in plastic chairs, snow on television, magazines from last
year, with clouded eyes borrowed on patriotic loans, on shrunken spines they hump their aggrieved past through rice
paddies, up mountains, through deltas, through the shit of the dead, bent and bloody, the revenant, the wronged, the
lost, the righteous, the wicked, the doomed, the numbered, no names, the bodies—broken.
Bombardments
As a hedge against dying, our Commanding Officer issued everyone a red poker chip for good luck. I took two chips,
as if
the Eucharist and my C.O. a priest. We flew over the Nile and the temples of Luxor, finally crossing the Red Sea
in a
diamond formation. We were thirty minutes out from pickling our bombs when Anti-aircraft shells took out our
right wing.
Not even Moses could save us. And later, a Bedouin would find strewn across the desert: some boots,
a medal, a map of
Iraq, partially charred sketches of a flying fortress, a pocket watch stopped at 7:36 A.M., and two red poker chips.
