{"id":5643,"date":"2020-02-04T16:14:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-04T16:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/?p=5643"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:41","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:41","slug":"the-hummingbirds-apprentice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/the-hummingbirds-apprentice\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hummingbird’s Apprentice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\r\n\r\nGregg Glory\r\n[Gregg G.  Brown]\r\n\r\nUnder the first stars, there by the back gate, secretly, I\r\nWould relieve myself on the shamed and drooping hollyhocks.\r\n~~ Don Justice\r\n\r\n...an irritation of pearls...\r\n~~ Emari DiGiorgio<\/em>\r\n<\/pre>\n
Roadside Wine<\/h2>\n
\r\nPull off 71 suddenly, onto\r\na wide shoulder of dust and grass.\r\nYellow loads of honeysuckle\r\nweigh down a length\r\nof brown barbwire fence\r\nlike a wave of honey breaking.\r\nExcited, splash ankle-deep \r\ninto the unhurrying surf\r\nfull of velvety bee sounds, and select\r\none perfect blossom.  It is\r\nso sweet in the slow afternoon.\r\nAnd, where you've cut your thumb,\r\na thrill of air catches.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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COUNTING THE STONES<\/h2>\n
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Summers Ago<\/h2>\n
\r\nOur house was not a house until we built it--\r\nCobbled together like lincoln logs,\r\n\tPegged, dovetailed by pain,\r\n\t\tBy tragedy\r\n\tWhere the corners stain\r\nAnd the past gets lost, frays to fog\r\nSurrounding nothing until the house was built.\r\n\r\nHere, eons flit quick as mayflies--fireflies\r\nFlooding summers ago the orange-rusted screens\r\n\tWith night light, untouched\r\n\t\tBy tragedy....\r\n\tOr so we had thought\r\nAs we looked upon the shining scene,\r\nOur faces lit with the glow of new-born bodies.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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A Batch of Blackberries<\/h2>\n
\r\nBlossoms along the briars, then waterfalling \r\nBerries the barnstorming birds beak up, berry \r\nBy berry, like jugglers swallowing beachballs,  \r\nEating ripeness to the core.  We picked    \r\nAnd pawed through hooping crooked aisles, picked \r\nPecks and bushels box by box, till the cart up-  \r\n\r\nEnded its gorgeous, uneven load.   \r\n\r\nHands speckled purple with theft and blood, \r\nWe said grace in the evening kitchen,  \r\nMom kneading, then flattening, the dark pies fresh,  \r\nCrimping crusts and stabbing little V-birds  \r\nNeat as her needlepoint stitches  \r\nAbove the hot talkative core of berries inside.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Counting the Stones<\/h2>\n
\r\nAlways I count the stones\r\nFlagging the mausoleum walls\r\nSmooth-bore as a musket barrel\r\nTo find where Mom is housed.\r\n\r\nFlowers poof from trumpetlike tubes\r\nScrewed in along grey walls;\r\nHere errant bees half-drowse\r\nBeneath one skylight's encasing blue.\r\n\r\nMy sneakers squeak weakly.\r\nI'm almost ready to go home\r\nRight away.  To sit upright, alone\r\nOn my red, narrow balcony\r\n\r\nUntil the eerie eaves at sunset\r\nFlare tears from eyes they castigate\r\n--And I go inside to escape\r\nThe scattershot dusk.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Grief House<\/h2>\n
an unfathering<\/em><\/p>\n
This is the house that grief built:\r\n\r\nMute and shuttered in morning sun,\r\nPainted in place, dead end of the street--\r\nA still life dark-shingled with welts.\r\n\r\nThis is the house that grief built:\r\n\r\nOld closets half-full;  old belts, hung ties.\r\nKids elbow the sill, close oil-laden eyes,\r\nAsleep in a house asleep in the silt.\r\n\r\nThis is the house that grief built:\r\n\r\nAn ordinary house if anyone looks,\r\nNewspapers in piles, the phone off the hook--\r\nUnfinished, uneased from easel and stilts.\r\n\r\nA portrait uneased from easel and stilts.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Tough Cutting<\/h2>\n
\r\nTough cutting the thorny rose-shrub stems\r\nShort to fit a pouting vase while mouthy blooms\r\nPut their tongues out to the empty room.\r\n\r\nYour absence pricks, a resisting briar.   \r\nI suck the blood that comes--to quiet fear,\r\nAnd taste myself what heart to lips may bear.\r\n\r\nIf green thorns toggled must auger hate,\r\nWho's to say love's rose is not as great?\r\nTears release from me what would hesitate.\r\n\r\nEach rose is soft as skin, nodding sure\r\nAnd warm as a love-wiped tear,\r\nClose as you yourself once nodded near.\r\n\r\nDaily we twist stem and stem more twin in love,\r\nCultivate a trellis beside a sunny grove,\r\nAnd train our cultured roses to rise above.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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On the Porch Swing
\n(With My Widowed Aunt)<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhat I remember most\r\n(Beyond the rack and creak)\r\nWas how the sun got lost\r\nIn memories of ghosts....\r\n\r\nHer voice had the shake\r\nOf wind in a weathervane,\r\nTrees isolated by a lake\r\nBefore the rake of ice-storms.\r\n\r\nFather gone and brothers, then\r\n(As if such conversation were the norm)\r\nThe dark years of pain\r\nIntensest before morn.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Just Once<\/h2>\n
\r\nI don't know exactly what to make of it. \r\nOut in the early frost, a yellowish, dull  \r\nfemale cardinal hops, eyes black as coffee, \r\nher feathers patchy with winter hunger. \r\nShe hunches at the feeder as at a fire \r\nand snaps whatever bursts from the dark seeds-- \r\nthen wipes her beak on her stale overcoat \r\nand takes off.  Just once, I'd like to jump \r\noff my porch and out of my own life like that. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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The Lost Sun<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt seemed dawn was coming out of glimmering black,\r\nLike music lifted from a scattered page of notes\r\nAnd a few straight lines to help the lost sun back.\r\n\r\nNo, I don't think the sun particularly like Hamlet,\r\nToo much itself, and, so, blinded and lost.\r\nI think the end of night deserves its little speeches yet:\r\n\r\nHere and there a lover's alba, cracked and strained\r\nWith adolescent rage, a cheater's charley-horse.\r\nSong anyway is all of a piece with pain,\r\n\r\nThe vertigo of a wildly spinning top\r\nThat brings the blood to our fingertips, makes voices hoarse.\r\nWe want it to go on and on, or desperately to stop.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Hangovers<\/h2>\n
a middle-aged alba<\/em><\/p>\n
Lace lifts like ladies' hems\r\nUp sunlit hillsides--\r\nLast of the evening chill.\r\n\r\nA muffled alarm, then\r\n\r\nLight's beaten \r\nStark along spindly tree spars,\r\nMasts of burning bark.\r\n\r\nCoffeeless, craving, sore\r\n\r\nOut of sleep's black seas\r\nEyes wrestle to shore,\r\nUnsaved--\r\n\r\nThe tears, the light, the loss.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Evening at Last<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere was less there<\/em> there\r\nThan there seemed.  Diminishment's\r\n\r\nThe word, maybe, for how\r\nSailboats on the Navesink\r\n\r\nButterfly along lemon rinds\r\nOf Sol's oracular light.\r\n\r\nI and my mortality\r\nDiminish with the harbor-bay;\r\n\r\nI remember how tender acne\r\nAched where now I'm grey.\r\n\r\nAll the day I'm left with\r\nFeels brief and hot as breath.\r\n\r\nHow half-sides of buildings, at sunset,\r\nDarken and congeal--\r\n\r\nAs if dark rain poured forth\r\nFrom torn gutters, red, and real.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Where I Sit<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe quiet accumulates\r\nVisibly.  Invisibly, I mean--\r\n\r\nLike a weight of dirt\r\nDeep in the heart, moist.\r\n\r\nOn my lap the embossed album,\r\nBound and fading, of Polaroids.\r\n\r\nDad had clambered here, as a\r\nKid, on this ticking porch;\r\n\r\nLike a weight of dirt,\r\nThe rocker's metronome, now.\r\n\r\nRipples of time accumulate\r\nToward the lake-rock where I sit:\r\n\r\nMostly it's memories, the quick\r\nEyes of the dead ones, now.\r\n\r\nThey look at me with all the slow,\r\nAwful power of sunset.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Aquatic Life<\/h2>\n
\r\nAll night the hum of the aquarium \r\nbreathing, the soft babeo<\/em>\r\nof the electric respirator \r\nhitched at the back of the tank, \r\nthe last fish in there a widower. \r\nHe swims around his sand castle \r\nday and night in circles,\r\nnibbling flakes of manna that fall \r\nin slow gold from a mercury ceiling,  \r\nspinning like a mad flamenco dancer, \r\ngills flaring in aggression displays, \r\nrushing the mirrory walls of his life.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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The Enormous Teacup<\/h2>\n
\r\nI slip into an enormous teacup \r\nbroad and smooth as an Olympic pool, \r\nsimmering, minty and tinted. \r\nFaint greenish steam curls \r\nmy heavy hair as I backstroke  \r\ntoward the regulation diving board \r\nwhite as a horizontal monolith-- \r\nI am impatient to be perfect, \r\nto lift from the dazzling waters \r\nand jackknife and disappear \r\nbeneath its opaque surface.  \r\nThe tannic tea surrounding me\r\nis warm, like blood, like I am\r\nswimming in my own blood. \r\nI open and shut my body into the flow \r\nlike a diamond, like one of those \r\norigami fortune-tellers \r\nkids knead in easy fingers, \r\nhappy with random answers. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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The Hummingbird’s Apprentice<\/h2>\n
Stand still like the hummingbird.
\n         ~~Henry Miller<\/em><\/p>\n
If only I could stand \t\r\nstill like that hummingbird \r\nlooking carefully into one honeysuckle \t\r\nblossom like a bargain shopper, \r\ntipping the small blossom forward \t\r\nuntil it, too, was bowing. \r\n\r\n(If only I could be \r\npatient, patient!) \r\n\r\nJust that one, \r\nas if those thousand other flowers weren't \r\nbursting like gunfire all around--\r\nas if the hummingbird itself \r\nhad nowhere else to go \r\non invisible wings. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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The Years<\/h2>\n
\r\nHis mind is bright and empty as the sky. \r\nHis head is shiny too, as are the shoes \r\nHe polishes each and every Sunday. \r\nLife makes sense in the Great Accounting. \r\nWhen, one day, the ambulance arrives  \r\nTo ferry him prone to the hospital, he notes \r\nIn one corner of an almost clear sky \r\nA crow whisking the clouddust. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Apple, Bowl, and Book<\/h2>\n
\r\nArranging a few, nude things (apple, \r\nbowl, and book) on a flat table \r\nin the flat light of Tuesday morning--\r\none way one day, and another way \r\nthe next (bowl, apple, and book), \r\nand pushing his paint against them \r\nsteadily as sunlight over everything \r\n(book, apple, bowl), the painter's \r\nirreducible poverty (self, self, and\r\nself) intrudes on his objects (bowl, \r\nbook, and apple) and saves \r\nrags of them on a rag of canvas. \r\n\r\nWhen done for the day, having run \r\nout of evasions, he wipes the sunlight \r\nfrom his sticks with a rag, and drowns \r\nthem in turpentine.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Afterburn<\/h2>\n
\r\nTired of my own thoughts \r\nI turn out the light \r\nwatching my wrist disappear \r\nwith a hairy flicker. \r\nThere's that afterburn at first, \r\nthe wire inside the bulb \r\nstill burning with self-importance \r\nkeeping me light-blind \r\nfor forty blinks, and then \r\njust as I settle in for sleep,\r\nI spot through the window slats \r\nthat scintillant blue bowling ball \r\nthe moon. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Far in Winter<\/h2>\n
\r\nI have gone as far in winter as I care to go.\r\nHard frost, harder than a farmer's hands,\r\nIs swirling in from far northern lands--\r\nHarder than my dim intent to pace\r\nFar afield through empty winter spaces.\r\n\r\nI have gone as far as wind and feet allow.\r\nI have slid alone down frozen hillside lanes,\r\nPassed pond and ditch spidered by icy panes,\r\nSpyed clouds' unearthly faces blanche as snow.\r\nI have walked until all walking lost delight--\r\n\r\nFar, far, until clabbered skies blazed skin-white,\r\nIndifferently applied as universal night;\r\nToo far for hands to reach and rest in touch,\r\nOr tell if they themselves are smooth or rough.\r\nI have gone as far in winter as I care to go.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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December Woods<\/h2>\n
\r\nI stop and wait in winter's wet mid-night. \r\nSnow-dust is sifting on upturned face and pine. \r\nA desolate wind sweeps up sleep and haste\r\nAnd confronts me with the waving woodland waste. \r\n(How sighs magnify to owls when you are lost!) \r\nDecember owns these winter woods alone: \r\nHer zero laughter gives dead leaves a shake, \r\nHer cold moan shivers choirs of stunted cones.\r\nI weep, and wait for her in secret delight. \r\n\r\nSlow as the passing of some hypnotic wand,  \r\nI watch inching ripples of the lead-dull pond \r\nHuddle dark waters to a solid field of white.... \r\nHow one touch of ice turns our world divine!\r\nDecember knows the bones in molten water's core.\r\nKnows the ice in water.  That tears are nothing more.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Duck Pond in Winter<\/h2>\n
\r\nNow set in winter brown, the old pond in spring\r\n\tLivened these reedy woods gone flat,\r\n\t\tScuffily ensconced \r\n\t\tIn frozen leaves that once \r\nGreened the summer skies with leafy wings, \r\nAs if wild ducks in lush squadrons circled it.\r\n\r\nYearly a new mother lands and incubates her brood\r\n\tUnder a dun feather muffler warm as suns\r\n\t\tUntil her breaking eggs\r\n\t\tToddle on webbed legs--\r\nA duck who loves, and whose love does good\r\nBy being mother to what gold pufflings come.\r\n\r\nNow, a splotchy Fall has sent them flying\r\n\tOff in maiden flight to scenes uncertain--\r\n\t\tTo southern ponds\r\n\t\tComfily ensconced\r\nBeneath balmy constellations.... At home,\r\nHer crosshatch nest uncoils, hurriedly abandoned.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Hunter’s Lament<\/h2>\n
\r\nAm I to lie \r\nashamed among cattails\r\nif, before ducks\r\nV away in winter\r\nwith their rising\r\nscale of notes\r\nand scattershot\r\nchoral creaking\r\nof wet goodbyes,\r\nif I\r\nwant their small\r\nlong-nosed faces\r\nto stay?\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Advent Calendar<\/h2>\n
\r\nDeparture, now, instead of arrival.  Dad's \r\nVaulted the ICU's sterile rungs, \r\nWhere December visitations had dragged us \r\nTo watch a father drowning in his lungs. \r\nBeyond all this stubbled haste of Jersey freezes \r\nHe's climbed into a greyness of light-polluted stars \r\n--Each pin of past light striving to stay sharp \r\nAnd remain named.\r\n                  \"Me!  Me!\"\r\n                            Two nieces  \r\nBattle beside their first advent calendar--pulpy,\r\nSaw-toothed, oversized, glue-glitter daubed \r\nAnd draped with ropes of hopeful popcorn \r\nLaddering a stylized Christmas tree.  A light-up  \r\nStar crests dark waves of evergreen, \r\nTwinkling as if that battery will burn forever. \r\nEvery day, two breathless nieces applaud  \r\nA new surprise behind a hidden door. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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MUSIC FOR BEGINNERS<\/h2>\n
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Being Born<\/h2>\n
\r\nYou wake up in a coffin, at night, \r\nSliding downhill one hundred miles per hour. \r\nThat's how it feels.  It's dark, the air sour. \r\nThere's a vague sense of friction.  After \r\nSome fumbling around, you discover \r\nOne box of matches. \r\nHow many do you get to light? \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Music for Beginners<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe baby grand, bulbed\r\nLike a black, half-cracked\r\nHeart, throwing the throb\r\nAnd beat of exposed strings\r\nReverberating....\r\n\r\nV-thighed on the long black\r\nBench stuffed with squiggled sheets\r\nOf Music for Beginners,<\/em>\r\nImpressionist drips of quarter-notes\r\nArching and arching....\r\n\r\nHow the swaying metronome\r\nDanced (neither slow nor swift),\r\nMocking ambition patiently....\r\nMy small thumbs at rest\r\nOn G and middle C.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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The Go-Round<\/h2>\n
\r\nAt recess we raced to the go-round\r\nPainted color-wheel slices of color,\r\nPushed galvanized handrails hard\r\nUntil our schoolyard world was blurred.\r\nLaughter rang out like lightning\r\nAnd wind in our ears was shards\r\nAnd only the circle stood still, and\r\nWe longed to enter that stillness.\r\nOur feet ran out of our shoes,\r\nImpatient to rise from the ground....\r\nAnd in that grace of levitation \r\nWe each took turns at center,\r\nLeaping like flags for the heart\r\n--To be the source of all colors,\r\nOf the go-round's big pinwheel, the pin--\r\nSkies spinning like carnival art.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Counting Stones (2)<\/h2>\n
\r\nCarefully we counted stones\r\nNo bigger than their eggs--\r\nWe aimed to break the bones\r\nOf sparrows\r\nWing by wing.\r\n\r\nFeeling brave and hurtful\r\nBeneath the swinging tree\r\nThree brothers formed a circle,\r\nNesting\r\nKnee to knee.\r\n\r\nThough pity shook my hand\r\nI took good aim to knock\r\nEach sparrow's nest to ground,\r\nOne by one\r\nWith careful luck.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Going Long<\/h2>\n
\r\nHelmet to helmet in the high school huddle\r\ntight as a nest of snake eggs, the quarterback \r\nsaid \"Count ten and turn around.  Trust me.\"\r\nAfter the snap, everything went silent,\r\nthe small stadium crowd that surrounds us\r\nuniform as a tub of popcorn, silent.\r\nOther players grew mute, dull as a blur.\r\nI went deep into grass, grass silent as snow, \r\nrunning down a long and lonely plank \r\nthat narrows as it goes, all life's details  \r\nshifting off the pounding plank like sand\r\nshimmering into silence, my leaps \r\nall one pounce of now.  I passed line after \r\nline of quicklime, looking only ahead,\r\nmy heart sounding out the seconds to ten,\r\nuprights bright as a tuning fork before me,\r\ngoing long.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Yard Work<\/h2>\n
\r\nLeave your yard to weeds \r\none summer, till grass \r\nsprings higher than your armpits \r\nand woodchucks go boldly by \r\nright up to the porch. \r\nHave dandelion wine in barrels, \r\nand violet and primrose stew; \r\ncut flowers by bushel and peck:  \r\narrowhead, aster and balsam, \r\nbayberry, beardtongue and wild \r\ncarrot like cartwheels of lace. \r\nCardinals and swifts in trees \r\nwill whistle your days unsilent \r\nand saw-whet owls sweeten each eve \r\nas switch grass and creeper appear \r\nin your sideyard gone over \r\nto meadow and downs. \r\nWhere now you have footpath \r\nand pavement, let wildness \r\ncome up from the root. \r\nMay shy Adam-and-Eve orchids \r\nvisit the shadows you've sown, \r\nholding hands in forsythia shade-- \r\nand where now you walk  \r\non owned acres, by August \r\nyou'll be swimming to noon. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Black Keys<\/h2>\n
\r\nA proposition on the keyboard \r\nComes back inquiring, a minor E, \r\nOr resolving major chords, giving thanks.\r\n\r\nThe afternoon enlarges sash and cord,\r\nAn intimate of misery and of me\r\nAs yellow loneliness falls and fills my lap.\r\n\r\nWhen I look at nothing, I feel adored--\r\nAn expansive Narcissus of the sea. \r\nI hear only, in my hunched piano's plunks\r\n\r\n(After the final heightening of a pause), \r\nThe ocean's application of applause.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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On the Open Prairie<\/h2>\n
\r\nRice grains of rain pattern feathers on the dry\r\nSides of silos here, red and full of rye.\r\nIn the open prairie, all we know is sky.\r\nYet live on we must--on earth alone and dry.\r\nSomehow you know the whole thing's a ball\r\nBeneath your feet, and you can feel it roll.\r\nEvery day I travel on, waiting for a wall.\r\nThen night comes, that shadow there, and its hole.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Road Trip<\/h2>\n
\r\nWe traveled in our car\r\nWhole school summers\r\nForgetful of the calendar\r\nFrom wonder to wonder:\r\nThe Natural Bridge's catlike camber,\r\nSpelunking Crystal Caverns with lanterns,\r\nSinging in chasms together,\r\nSwimming in Delaware rivers,\r\nSleeping in camp by those waters\r\nEnchanted and nimble as laughter;\r\nDucking impossible weather\r\nIn the concrete lee of an under-\r\nPass, Dad smoking as he leaned by the car;\r\nWe spat from speeding windows, \r\nBalanced flat rocks to slide off the fender\r\n(And full sodas forgotten on T-bars),\r\nScreaming through tollbooth and tunnel;\r\nCounting crazily crippled deer\r\nAnd license plates stamped Nevada,\r\nSwinging past capitols in order,\r\nKentucky, Tennessee, Carolina;\r\nShopping at \"South of the Border\" \r\nFor Ace-Safety firecrackers\r\nAnd double fistfuls of sparklers.\r\nNever was summertime lovelier \r\nThan those summers we wandered together.\r\nWe kids got happier and happier\r\nWhile Mom's matchstick face, dumbstruck,\r\nFlickered\r\nDarker and darker and darker.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Momlets<\/h2>\n
\r\nI can see my son, aproned, up early, \r\ntraining among his chef tchotchkes,\r\nselecting eggs with effective fingers \r\nand rolling the oval winners into a bowl. \r\nNext, he gathers his spices, pinches \r\ntipples on his tongue to test them quick, \r\nand says \u2018oh' or \u2018no' to each. \r\n\r\nTwo real-life princess dolls bowl in, \r\ndandelion-headed and sleepily slippered, \r\nstanding suddenly seriously silent as totems. \r\n\"Dad's kitchen is all business,\" \r\nwhispers one to the other in litany. \r\nAnd Dad has them help, of course, \r\neven the whipping, even the delicate \r\n\r\nEgyptian procession of raised bowls \r\nover their princessly heads to the stove \r\nwhere Chef does the final fluffing.\r\nHis long arms akimbo, he trawls for air \r\nto fold into the scramble, the Momlet, \r\nhis swimmer's arm lifting and going around \r\nand around again--going for distance. \r\n\r\nI see him there.  I see my son. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Dance Impromptu, Aged 12<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere really wasn't alot to it:\r\nGirls too shy with us to laugh\r\nCorralled by a battery phonograph\r\n--And, here and there on the wretched grass,\r\nA pink and tinsel pirouette.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Tulle Girls<\/h2>\n
\r\nGirls are not like us, no.\r\nThey watch impatient behind taut veils\r\nOf soft thoughts, as we come and go\r\nWith our pockets full of rocks.\r\nGirls are not like us, no.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Almost Lost in the Ladies’ Department<\/h2>\n
\r\nOn department store safari, at four,  \r\nI scoped out translucent loose folds \r\nof whispery flowerprints, deep meadows \r\nof hanging pastels, and lacy clouds \r\nof padded bras and ladies' legs \r\nstaunch as departmental mannikins\r\nor the infinite limbs of grazing giraffe,\r\ntheir shopping voices elated, angelic. \r\nI ran awkwardly in my new black shoes \r\nzigzag through disheveled grasses \r\nof matching pantsuits, a pampas of \r\npantsuits flowing higher than my head, \r\nmy lazy hand rippling the materials \r\nlike a tailor between appointments, \r\nlike a zebra sampling a strange stream, \r\nkilling time, growing older by moments,\r\na pygmy among these women's things,\r\nuntil I arrived at the end of a long, \r\nopen aisle, my hand clanging a gang \r\nof faintly skeletal empty hangers \r\nringing on their rack after the season, \r\nlike Christmas bells swinging in July, \r\nlike waterbuffalo ribs from past monsoons,\r\nand, brave and out of breath, confronted \r\nmyself amiably at the back of the box-store \r\nin an empty dressing mirror, tall as the sky. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Origami<\/h2>\n
\r\n14 folds and you have a butterfly\r\nready to float from the tabletop\r\namidst the snippings, the open hands\r\nand astonished face of the girl who made it.\r\nThe whole secret of life folded right there\r\nso quietly beneath her as she sits.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Arranging Chairs<\/h2>\n
\r\nIn here early, arranging chairs in lanes,\r\nThe otherwise empty room's a spray\r\nOf local artists' ocean watercolors\r\nBy local docents netted in place, prismy\r\nMists and dark wakes so ably arranged\r\nFamiliar things grow haloed and strange\r\n--A broken white fence, now luminous, or\r\nSea stones folding under a wave.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
In Right Field<\/h2>\n
\r\nPlanted in a green corner of heaven\r\n\tI watched patchy grass\r\n\t\tAnd I counted\r\nIntricate, parched clouds as they passed\r\n\tSerene in solitude.\r\nThen, as now, old shapes soon forgotten.\r\n\r\nSkinny Beanie, our speediest pitcher\r\n\tCurtailed the sharp claps\r\n\t\tOf opposing homers\r\nTill into Death's ant-lion trap Old Beanie slipped\r\n\tAnd kept slipping forever.\r\nThen, as now, Death our speediest pitcher.\r\n\r\nPlaying right field has always allowed\r\n\tMe to lean back and sit out\r\n\t\tWhole innings--\r\nKeeping watch in green solitude, content,\r\n\tLooking at clouds and counting.\r\nThen, as now, the world passing by in its shroud.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
In Darkness<\/h2>\n
\r\nLate into autumn we boys slept on the porch, \r\nListening to October's stiffening crickets \r\n\tCompose their last passes \r\n\t\tAt minuet masterpieces \r\n\t\tIn darkness, \r\nThe invisible slim river still tuning its flute, \r\nOur dreams as baroque as a monarch's. \r\n\r\nZipped to the neck whenever night temps blew \r\nLow, we kids kept up chirping and peeping--\r\n\tLazily nested in chaises, \r\n\t\tWhistling boy wishes  \r\n\t\tIn darkness\r\nUntil clouds snugged the moon off to sleep\r\nAnd we woke, cold, mufflered in the drifted snow. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
STAR RISE<\/h2>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Identities<\/h2>\n
\r\n<\/pre>\n
I pull my life down off the shelf.  How many fisheyes in the jar?  How many stars, like fisheyes, in the sky?  The night around me is dark, no matter how I stare.  I, too, am a star. Inside.  A fisheye full blazing with wet possibilities. Lover, brother, poet.  My cold fisheye looks at the night sky through waves of rivergrass, subtle panes of flowing streams.  Pushing onto land, I gulp muddy breaths.  Running on all fours, I hunch into my dinosaur suit.  Later the next day, I ache upright, feeling my ape shoulders burst back from their hunch.  Long I walk with my brothers on the blazing plains, racing after buffalo and elk.  Or we go leaning our nets together into the rich river, pulling.  Tonight we are poets, we sing of stars, sharing the fish around the fire.  Singing.  The fire falls into the dirt, its near star gone dark.  I turn to you under the warm skins piled deep.  You stare silently.  We wear our masks as lovers now.<\/p>\n
\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Night Thoughts in a Time of Quiet<\/h2>\n
\r\nNight pine-tree sweeps, shush-shush, \r\nAgainst the window like a bird asleep, \r\nAll song calmed to intermittent cheeps-- \r\nHalf-conversations halfway overheard. \r\n\r\nA stranger lays beside me in my bed. \r\nHer body is a blazing blossom, her head \r\nFull of whistling voices frail and cold-- \r\nAnd hard to hear, my love, so hard. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Star Rise<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen dinner bells stopped clapping\r\nafter our parents' court-ordered partings\r\nlonely as ship horns mourning, \r\none east, one west--we would each\r\nduck out in darkness, tiptoe stowaways, \r\ninto newly empty backyards.\r\nToo young to kiss, or even hold hands, \r\nwe met at the fencepost to stargaze. \r\nI was sad, and you were sad, and\r\nneither of us said so.  Stars rose \r\nlike sails around us, the dome \r\nof the planetarium cracking.  And then,\r\ninvisible as grass, our two little voices \r\nstippled the sky with stories. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Black Dog<\/h2>\n
\r\nlooks up with questionmark ears \r\nat the blonde woman who,\r\na little sad maybe at being \r\nalmost forty and the dew still \r\nfrosty on the ivy in early May, \r\nstops walking the dog briskly \r\nto sit in meditated misery \r\na moment too long, or longer, \r\non the bench's flat slatting--\r\nand who curls up into a sudden smile \r\nwhen the dog whines and water- \r\nfalls into her small \r\nlap, plop, \r\ngenerously alive, \r\nits black tail pumping. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Guitar Lessons<\/h2>\n
\r\nA wife is playing her guitar \r\nwith inexpert authenticity. \r\nShe is neither too loud nor too bad, \r\nlike an old parrot that learns slowly \r\nto repeat a crackerjack punchline \r\nor an embarrassing string of expletives \r\nthe owner leans in to repeat each night, \r\npouring encouragement along with birdseed \r\nand fresh water into the cage's cup. \r\nEven so, her guitar is getting worn out, \r\nlike a shoe one always dances in, \r\nlike a husband's face smiling as he listens. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Balance and Air<\/h2>\n
\r\nFirst love never leaves us. \r\nLike a first bicycle, all balance \r\nand air, we learned to go downhill \r\nblind, with our hands out wide \r\nas if flying were forever ours. \r\nAfter the fall, a flash of pain, a flag \r\nof blood, and the bones jerk back \r\ninto the body, like a handlebar \r\nwincing ribs when the wheel turns \r\nunexpectedly over a stubborn pebble. \r\nAnd later, you peel the bandage back \r\nfrom an inflated knee, biting a lip, \r\nto check the wound's \"progress.\" \r\nAnd, even later, absentmindedly, \r\nwhile sitting on a folding chair \r\nat the school dance, waiting to ask \r\nor be asked into the moving circles-- \r\nyou roll a fingertip over the scar's hub \r\nthe shape of your own private nation. \r\nIt leaves something with us.  Even \r\nyears later, when we see someone else \r\nskid or stop short, our breath \r\ncatches as if we ourselves are falling. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Stealing Little Things<\/h2>\n
and the cup ran away with the spoon<\/em><\/p>\n
I'll confess:  sometimes I steal from restaurants.\r\nOh, not much;  a cloth napkin for the hell of it.\r\nSomething both fine and tough that lays in the lap\r\nand feels like quality when you kiss it.\r\nBut now I'm afraid Jenny's caught my old habit.\r\nSlick as a jewel thief last night after the movies,\r\nshe palmed a real big soup spoon under a pile\r\nof casual paper napkins right into her open purse.\r\nSmooth as glass, not even a guilty twinkle in her eye.\r\nThis morning I've washed it for her and set it\r\nshining in a stolen dessert cup with crenellations\r\npurpling all around the lip like a sticky jellyfish--\r\nthat mint ice cream and oreo crumble was so good!\r\nThe washed spoon with its big plain silver tongue\r\nstands like the Seattle Needle in the glass, twirls\r\njust the least bit, flashing:  welcome to town!\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Catnip<\/h2>\n
\r\nHe was catnip to the ladies, they all said so, \r\nlicking their paws when they saw him, \r\nwashing their small faces adroitly, \r\nor rolling smoothly over onto their backs, \r\nswitching their tails. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Bleeding Hearts<\/h2>\n
\r\nAbove the weathered bench, \r\nSwaybacked where I sit \r\nAnd damp with summer night, \r\nAn archer's bow of branch \r\nDrops its heart-shaped blossoms   \r\nSteady as a sleeper's EKG or some \r\nDrip off a leaky faucet: \r\nHeart, heart, heart, heart. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Neighborhood Peacock<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe peacock's stubby stiff-legged strut \r\nchops short along downy lawns gone over \r\nto puffy dandelions, as hook over hook  \r\nrow the steady tines of his claws.  His high\r\neye rises, a tower, an outpost, a lighthouse \r\nabove whitecaps, and one sees then that he \r\nis all eyes, a carpet of eyes, a sail of eyes, \r\na sky unto himself of sheer irised iridescence--  \r\nseeking a portly peahen on which to squat \r\nhis rainbow glory, Odysseus upon Penelope. \r\nIt is for her that his neck bends and his beak \r\ncracks, and the seed of his dandelion cry goes forth, \r\nfilling rainy afternoon yards with his loneliness. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Licking the Frosting<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe long night is being carefully frosted \r\nBy day, like a butterknife spreading vanilla icing \r\nOver a round new moon of devilsfood cake \r\nWhile she yawns wide as a sea-lion pup waking \r\n--Dressing slowly, nakedly in her mirror  \r\nWhere dawn-colored curtains flutter.  \r\n  \r\nHer hand disappears into her jewelry box \r\nAnd, frosted with lights, her fingers emerge,  \r\nOne light on each fingertip like a constellation: \r\nThe Starfish.  After a moment, her ears appear  \r\nDangling dark earrings like bats drifting  \r\nOut the cave of sleep and into our morning  \r\n  \r\nThat sits above blue bowls of Frosted Flakes  \r\nBefore we each skate off to our workdays \r\nSynchronized as Olympic champions.  \r\nBut, for right now, she takes a sleepy  \r\nPirouette in her mirror and approves: \r\nOf our lives together, the sweetness of our night. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Pillow<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe pillow where you last were laying \r\nkeeps a spoon's impression of your head \r\nand even a swirl, a dimple, of your ear \r\nas if this pillow were a seashell, where \r\na thousand voices enter which we later hear \r\nas the constant susurration of the sea. \r\nCan you hear me among them if I whisper \r\nso close my sipping warms your pillowcase \r\nwhile the rain goes on snoring in its gutter, \r\nand all the house closed up in a sort of sleep? \r\nI love you, yes.  But what I whisper now \r\nis something other, something just for you. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
&Nbsp;<\/P>
\n
Winter Nights<\/h2>\n
\r\nNights accumulate, turn December.\r\nTurn Xmas, with its sparkly galaxies \r\nOf discarded wrapping.  The fire's chaos\r\nRecalls other heats, other faces....\r\nAnd, shaken, sparks traces of your long departure--\r\nLast Independence Day at the park,\r\nFireworks' wild sunshine in your eyes\r\nIn hot summer dark.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
THE EAT LINE<\/h2>\n
 \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Turning Forty Alone<\/h2>\n
\r\nLife is empty.  A wind rises sideways\r\nuntil my pant legs stand out, twin rudders\r\nsteering nowhere.  Between one housefront  \r\nand the next, irritated lightning, \r\nbrief and naked.  Rain, a thousand miles  \r\nof zippers unzipped at once.  Puddles  \r\nswell like bruises and connect their black\r\nsoftnesses, as they did for Noah.\r\nForty years I've been on this dark voyage.\r\nThe straw is stale, the bursting stalls\r\nfecund with rancor. The lions, male and female,\r\nhave slipped their tethers and roam the galley\r\nall night, roaring and shaking with hunger.\r\nTheir matted manes are thick as rat's nests. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Breakfast on the Patio<\/h2>\n
\r\nEarly memories have an edge of tragedy,\r\nThe trace of a child's hand\r\nOn construction paper, faded.\r\nOr the half-loops of letters, so rudely\r\nLearned, living forever unfinished--\r\n\r\nTime behind crouches near one then, \r\nAhead lies far.\r\n\r\nThe coffee's graceful steam unfurls\r\nAnd morning stones glisten like stars,\r\nAn irritation of pearls.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
“In the Widening Gyre”<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe worrying leaf twists,\r\nIts race arrested--\r\n\r\nMaddened leaves repeat it\r\nIn iterant wind.\r\n\r\nDown the long hill at sunset, one more\r\nLeaf doodles and cavorts--\r\n\r\nNow doubly, trebly muddled in a ditch: \r\nMurmurous leaves.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Three Martinis<\/h2>\n
 \r\nfor Joelle<\/em>\r\n1. \r\nThe first one is cool, refreshing as a cucumber, \r\nA meeting sweetness lapping at the back of the throat \r\nAs if sugarcane dripped off a fat icicle, and then \r\nThe slow burning to the waterline of your little boat. \r\n\r\n2. \r\nNow a power growls and routs small talk, dissent; \r\nConvictions gather like a curtain pulled, mauve, \r\nRevealing the pitted shallowness of daily talk, \r\nThe world set to rights as easily as this olive. \r\n\r\n3. \r\nAt last simplicity arrives, looking through life itself \r\nAs through a clarifying piece of glass, this \r\nGlass, contentedly in fingers twirling triangles-- \r\nContemplating it filled, and its present emptiness. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Eat Line<\/h2>\n
\r\nNimble goats tremble on split tiptoes\r\nEating knots of pine and holly, leaf and branch\r\nAs far as fingering tongues can go\r\nToward heaven for their lunch.\r\n\r\nLoosed to clear Sandy Hook's woods\r\nOf poison ivy, their saliva drips, they say,\r\nImmune to poison, and that's all good\r\nWe say, going out ourselves to play\r\n\r\nSplayfoot on barren beaches.  I spread \r\nThe checkered cloth, pour figgy semillon\r\nBelow the \"eat line\" where they've passed,\r\nCoppice chewed flat as a billiard green.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
The Outboard<\/h2>\n
\r\nMotor's propeller coughs, catching seaweed, \r\nThe intake valve gritty with chaff, the starter flooded, \r\nAn unwell something moaning under the hood, \r\nCatching and stuttering loudly when it should \r\nSlur tigerlike, leaping purring for wavepeaks \r\nIn choppy Keyport Harbor's uneven arena. \r\n\r\nThe men, popping beers and flyreels, \r\nLean back, deckchair masters from mast to keel; \r\nThey survey the costal waters like a lunchbox \r\nStuffed for munching while the boat knocks. \r\nThey're happy.  Their spouses, tan and sheen, \r\nWatch children thrash trash off the stern: \r\n\r\nSurvivors in a drowning world, careening and green. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Retired Sheriff<\/h2>\n
\r\nSaturdays he sat on his porch in his old uniform, \r\nOld like satin slippers stained and torn \r\nBut worn anyway as the last fancy thing   \r\nTo go anywhere in, but he never did--\r\nA general blown out of his war, gold braid \r\nAnd buttons so much parlor-curtain finery.   \r\nEven his silver revolver was a kind of watch fob \r\n(Thirty years service, Bob, and thanks) \r\nSpun by a restless tic in his wrist  \r\nThat wouldn't quit--the watch hands shivery,  \r\nAnd the bullet chambers usually empty. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Bad Dreams<\/h2>\n
\r\nHe drools like a cow, that one.\r\nAll night in his sleep, mumbling\r\nNightmares, an old knife of stone\r\nWhittled by sea and season\r\nTo the one dread:\r\nWife and kids over the cliff, tumbling,\r\nAnd his dog dead.<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Still Life With Sunflower<\/h2>\n
\r\nA still life still requires faith\r\nThat life itself has stopped\r\nJust for you, your fist of brushes,\r\nYour dripping pots of gauche\r\nFetishist yellow-red.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Minotaur Eyes<\/h2>\n
\r\nEyes almost closed beneath his hat\r\nThe old smoker blows gold smoke out,\r\nHis agate eyes almost sedate.\r\n\r\nEyes half-shut.  You've heard the phrase.\r\nIt isn't done to keep smoke out\r\nBut to keep dreams in, as in a maze.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
On Winning the Pulitzer<\/h2>\n
\r\nMy darling friends, I am afraid\r\nThis once-worthy prize is unmade--\r\nThis glittering thing has gone to shit.\r\nA bad generation ruined it.\r\n\r\nAnd, indeed, my winning here\r\nHas me question many years--\r\nMakes me doubt what value, use,\r\nMy life's devotion to the muse.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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The Metaphor for Ordinary<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe metaphor for what's ordinary \r\nTicks rickety, and breaks its wicker back, \r\nCracks sciatic with the dumbass weight  \r\nOf my emphatic Great Aunt Kate. \r\n\r\nThe ordinary's too circular for metaphor, \r\nA bridge to the same side of the stream \r\nWhere everything is as it was before \r\nAnd no balloon squeaks loose from its dream. <\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
’68 Brought the Riots<\/h2>\n
\r\n'68 brought the riots (we needn't speak \r\nOf them), arriving in a crash of days\r\nWashing away the city's soft authority, the meek\r\nBack-and forth of beach cleaning machinery....\r\nAt least we suffer no more the illusory \r\nUnion of then and now--that tomorrow's kids \r\nAre the same as yours, that yours today\r\nAre you....  Too apparent's the decay.\r\nNo fashionable derelict genteel twilight\r\nFades us towards this stripped finality,\r\n\r\nThis painted concrete scratch-graffitied grey. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Swallowing Castles<\/h2>\n
\nStrong clear brilliant air drawn into the mouth in a moment.  A special flavor of life, like the south of France.  The dusty maybe of Marseilles.  The long wet unrolling tongue of the Mediterranean Sea.  Sweet dollops of cloud-stuff hardened to minarets.  Minarets made sweet by the singing of prayers during the Middle Ages’ Muslim occupation and shrunk by forgetfulness to the size of a lozenge.  A lozenge that moults my throat awake.  Awakes me to think of melting time and swallowing castles.<\/p>\n
\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Through Mullioned Glass<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe bird, a blackbird, flies\r\nUp--words tear at his wings:\r\n\"A crooked cross in damask skies\"\r\nOr some other flitting fret or fraying\r\nIts vapid purplish flapping bethings.\r\nSome black clash of shadows\r\nWhere blue bleeds in at the window.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Blind Feathers<\/h2>\n
 \r\nWhite blind feathers, wintry February,\r\nStale cereal fluff dumped from a box.\r\nWe stare at the unlocked locks.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Reading Light<\/h2>\n
\r\nI read, midnights, until the haloed lamp\r\n\tFlares meaningless,\r\nCharon's guidelight on Styx's everlasting damp.\r\nWords once fit for granite no more affix,\r\n\tThe storyline dead;\r\nThe sculptor's hand grown bony,\r\nThe lover by love abandoned.\r\n\r\nThe looming book in my hand's a wick,\r\n\tFlaring, spluttering--\r\nBurns words, rotten words, until I am sick.\r\nMy eyes dry, drugged, bug-eyed, drained,\r\n\tMy life illegible.\r\nI sit alone beneath an S-shaped lamp\r\nTo which I feel inextricably chained.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Sentences<\/h2>\n
for Dan Weeks<\/em><\/p>\n
Sentences trick us out of time's traps\r\nThe way a song will go back around\r\nAnd around on itself to the beginning.\r\nSongs and words, especially drum-taps--\r\nThose dry discrete silences in sound,\r\nChange how long each quiet seems\r\nAs if time only lived inside the drum.\r\nMusic and writing are much alike. To begin,\r\nYou first must stretch the skin out tight.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Days<\/h2>\n
\r\nDays falls together like brushed curtains.  \r\nDawn and evening flutter together   \r\nIn silence, interlacing their delicate edges   \r\n--Light comes up one side of a grassblade  \r\nAnd goes down into dusk on the other.  \r\nThat's how it is, too, when I remember \r\nSuddenly, washing dishes, my name,  \r\nAnd the sink shines with an identity:  \r\nThat's mine.  And all the yesterdays  \r\nCome snapping into place like played cards, \r\nAnd tomorrow's a fan of questionmarks \r\nLaid down beyond the kitchen curtains   \r\nBy a hand that flutters them lightly \r\nIn my field of sedge and flat grasses,    \r\nInterlacing their delicate edges.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Packaging<\/h2>\n
\r\nI pile brown Christmas boxes, stiff\r\nWith stuff: ribbons, tinsel, elves, lights\r\nUntwinkling and tangled--\r\nHooped in a humped death-wreath\r\nGiving no glistering whiff\r\n\r\nOf merriment.  Wires and briars\r\nHang black where torus roses had made holy\r\nThe tree's abstract angles.\r\nHow noble!  How dopey!  How phony!\r\nAs if Christ hunched curled in a plastic star.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
SEEKING THE FATHERS<\/h2>\n
\r\n<\/pre>\n
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Appalachian Spring<\/h2>\n
\r\nLace lifts like ladies' hems\r\nUp the sunlit hills--\r\nA memory, almost of snow,\r\nDissolves with evening's chill.\r\n\r\nSticks of light beat time\r\nOn spindly spring trees,\r\nFlat zags of lightning,\r\nA storm in morning calm.\r\n\r\nEvery day, as out of a cave,\r\nMy eyes wrestle to shore--\r\nUnshaved,\r\nI want to see still more.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Circles<\/h2>\n
\r\nFather scuffled off to his daily office \r\nWhere racks of coolly efficient fluorescents \r\n     Left his smiling features half-effaced,\r\n          A circle \r\nSeen briefly in a cavern, at a distance.\r\nAt home we kids were laying out the plates\r\n\r\nAnd fanning out the flatware for family dinner, \r\nOur hour of bad jokes, day tales and talks. \r\n     We debated rawly, sheer beginners-- \r\n          Our circle \r\nOf faces a boardroom of love's assurances \r\nOver potatoes, Mom's burgers, asparagus stalks. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Swimming Lessons<\/h2>\n
\r\nOur childhood redwood house stood surrounded \r\nBy dry leaves in a time of dryness.\r\nSo Dad placed beside each bedroom window \r\nA rolled-up field fire ladder, and assessed us\r\nAs we spidered out of windows backwards,\r\nAt ease and ready to catch us dandling, \r\nChewing his raw black tobacco chew. \r\n\"Whole damn place is no better than kindling.\" \r\n\r\nDown the short tilted hill through oak trees \r\nLay Swimming River reservoir--its scratchy tangles \r\nSkated over winterlong, doing loops--which soon\r\nGrew warm and treacherous as a betraying hand \r\nWith June, its rich mud silt as quicksand. \r\nDad surveyed those greenish waters warily, \r\nHis lips pursing and going still like ripples. \r\n\"Boys, tomorrow there'll be swimming lessons.\" \r\n\r\nSaturday he took us, one by one in puffy trunks, \r\nInto a cool space of water he'd backhoed clear  \r\n(One drought last fall) of underbrush and stumps \r\nSharp enough to shred whatever entered bare.  \r\nOne by one, he had us straighten out at once \r\nAs if flying, and practice the long Australian crawl,\r\nTurn our heads and spit out breaths of water--\r\nHolding us up entirely at sternum and solar plexus. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Adulterer’s Dream<\/h2>\n
\r\nSomething he had swallowed earlier  \r\ncoiled in his belly, and sat there \r\naimlessly striking his stomach walls \r\nand making him gulp like a toad \r\nfor night air.  His wife looked at him, \r\nher hair piled high and pinned for sleep, \r\nwith twenty years of love and pity \r\nwhile he gulped and gulped, his eyes \r\nhelpless, and out of his wide mouth \r\nleapt lie after lie, and the snake. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Divorcing<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen Mom was done with yelling\r\nAt Father on the phone\r\nWaving gestures in the air\r\nBreast-stroking for some shore\r\nThat receded more and more,\r\nShe continued telling the cat\r\nIn a voice like water breaking \r\nAbout both this and that\r\nUntil cat would purr asleep\r\nIn the exhausted swimmer's lap.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
At the Dock<\/h2>\n
\r\nMy father's head,\r\nthe classic cannonball\r\ntan and slick and fringed\r\nwith foamy tufts of grey,\r\nspat black tobacco juice,\r\nate raw oysters, nipped the tips\r\noff green jalapenos\r\nand cursed easily as he chewed,\r\ncutting the small bait--\r\nhaving a grand time, \r\nit seemed, in the world \r\nof freedom and fatherhood.\r\n\r\nBetween his bare red feet\r\na bucket of crushed ice\r\ncradled long-necked naked beers\r\nsweating freely, floating\r\nuntil he walked away.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Bronco<\/h2>\n
 \r\n...our closeness is this:\r\nanywhere you put your foot, feel me\r\nin the firmness under you.\r\n\t\t~~Rumi<\/em><\/pre>\n
\r\nDad rounded us up weekends, happy, \r\nto his Dad Ranch, permissive as a belch,\r\nwith an occasional locked door or verboten \r\nshotgun only Dad could manage sanely. \r\nThe old blue Bronco snorted down \r\nthe long unweeded drive, siphoning us \r\nboys off, a skim of childish excess, \r\nto buggy wild dunes in South Jersey. \r\nDad steered a fireworks pinwheel \r\nspinning dizzy between his hands, \r\nleaping wave after wave of sand-drift \r\nall night, headlights hitting the tall grass \r\nlike lightning, thunder cracking under us \r\nrev after rev like hooves, the moon \r\nskimming the night's grey undulant surf \r\nas if chucked hard, our stomachs light \r\nas laughter in our throats, we grinning  \r\neven when smacking the roof with our \r\nlittle league ballcaps and wet palms, \r\nriding bareback our parents' dark divorce \r\nscared as cats in a carrier. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Busted Greenhouse<\/h2>\n
\r\nRadiance of light-strobed clouds,\r\na crinkle of thunder, and then\r\nhours watching rain stitch and slicken\r\ndown the cold prow of the greenhouse roof.\r\nThe wet smell like a captain's frisky deckrail \r\nracing through the stiff chop \r\nagainst other slant yachts on an inland sea--\r\nthe shores gorgeous forests of flowers.\r\n\r\nAt times, there'd be stars,\r\nAnd leaves flat as soot against hanging glass.\r\n\r\nI put my head through the blown doorframe:\r\nyou can hardly tell there'd been\r\nany windows at all.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
The Craftsman<\/h2>\n
for Tom Pedersen<\/em><\/p>\n
This is the door at the front of the house, \r\nthe one that goes everywhere and always \r\ncomes home.  This is the craftsman \r\nwho works on the door with his wood-plane, \r\ntrimming and smoothing it continually  \r\nto a flatness, his mind like an adze. \r\nHe carefully screws new butterfly hinges \r\nflush with the doorframe, oiling them quiet. \r\nHe trues up the top of the door in the \r\ndoorframe, checking with level and thumb. \r\nHe tests the lock, then leaves it open. \r\nHe stands back a pace, looks his work over, \r\nhands on hips, and hat brim pushed back: \r\nclosely, carefully, critically.  He spots \r\nsomething, licks his thumb wetly,  \r\nlike a lollipop, unselfconsciously, and \r\npulls it from his mouth with a low snap. \r\nHe spit-shines the doorknob, spinning it \r\nbuff, his red kerchief cradling the knob \r\nlike a hand-sized hammock, until both he \r\nand the door fit distorted and brassy \r\nin the small curves of its world. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Freshening the Day<\/h2>\n
The porpoises were beautiful, their grey skin shining like plastic in the morning light.
\n~~Det. Harry Bosch, The Narrows by Michael Connelly<\/em><\/p>\n
\r\nRain on charcoal shingles\r\nmakes roofs shine pearly grey,\r\nlike the slowly turning backs \r\nof whales that have swallowed \r\nwhole families alive. \r\nSpring trees put out their leaves \r\nin the waving spray, and laughter\r\nfalls like mist in the dim dawn.\r\nSidewalks whiten and renew themselves, \r\nstraightening their ties, ready again \r\nfor the old routines--\r\nA father running late, returning \r\nto work under still-pink floods;\r\nfresh clouds lifting over domed strollers \r\ngleaming wet as birthing calves;\r\nalert dogs following the pack, noses\r\ntense as harpoons in the spray;  they \r\ntighten their leashes, anxious to piddle.<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Cart-Wrangler<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe cart man returns to our parkinglot,\r\nlowing his cattle-car song in morning air\r\nas he backs into a primo spot and starts\r\nroutinely jostling the sleepy carts to life.\r\nHe heaves them into his beat pickup,\r\nhis ancient varsity jacket scraped soft\r\nfrom hugging the heavy carts up and up.\r\nThe carts nudge together unevenly as cows,\r\ntheir grey faces skeletal and condemned.\r\nMost of them expect nothing, in for the long haul,\r\nbut occasionally one breaks free, rollicking\r\noff the truck in a mad rattle and hoofing it\r\nas far as the dumpster.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Black Rat Snake<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhy such evil in the world, \r\nasks everybody and the Bible. \r\nOutside, by my garden hose \r\na cold shed snakeskin   \r\nrejoices in the causeway breeze,\r\na single-fingered glove \r\nfor an absent injured hand, \r\nweightless as dried froth, as airy \r\nand helpless as a weathervane. \r\nGray lifeless hose, your sole  \r\ninhabitant has slithered off \r\neffortless as a stripper's zipper-- \r\nyou the discarded clothespile. \r\nWhatever kept you company,\r\nintimate as a ballroom dancer,\r\nhas bulked too thick in snak- \r\niness to linger in you any longer,\r\nyour diamond-patterned mask.\r\nIt's gone, a child's taffy shadow \r\npulled toward dark horizons. \r\nI touch the rocking feather\r\nstill curled as if to strike \r\nfearfully with the toe of my boot--\r\nHow quickly life escapes!  \r\nI see how, at first, the living skin\r\nmust have split no more \r\nthan a tear duct swelling-- \r\nand then all at once \r\nlike a leathery egg, \r\nfrom snout to shoulder, hissing. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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Meadow<\/h2>\n
\r\nA grasshopper floats off my palm \r\nLike a prayer... then, its tin helicopter \r\nDitches, the splayed skids stir \r\nMy skin with itches: to swipe, to swat. \r\n--How little things, even the green things \r\nOf meadows, can vex a morning's balm! \r\nI wipe the tidy corpse off like that, \r\nSmall as a bullet casing. \r\nNow I can return to fields and nature, \r\nThe grasshoppers shifting in the grass \r\nEndless \r\nAs a thousand hands at prayer. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
A Frozen Waterfall<\/h2>\n
\r\nSwing with me down a winter river \r\non sneakers, zing past a grandstand \r\nof widowy birches petrified forever \r\nwashing their sudsy hair in the stream. \r\nIn the circle of their nakedness is \r\na frozen waterfall, tall and white, \r\nwith a patriarch's great fall of beard. \r\nStudying the topless columns, I see instead, \r\nin their myriad crenellations and odd \r\nglittering rockwork organic as a vapor trail, \r\nthe uncut pages of a book--of what \r\nsecret litany of nature the lexicon? \r\nI find myself crossing over, pulled as if \r\nthose furious waters still exhorted motion. \r\nI pat the tall rough face of page-ends \r\nsealed beyond the genius of knives, \r\nimpenetrable as a meteorite's message, \r\nand rub a few blind valleys like braille....\r\nOnly Spring will read this story, \r\nafter long winter writing has loaded its rifts, \r\ncalling forth, tear by hidden tear, a waterfall. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Rearview<\/h2>\n
\r\nBeyond whatever trouble brought me again\r\n(Past circumstance, ennui, a wish fulfilled)\r\nI drive by the white mailbox a final time \r\nForgetting even the address that led me here,\r\nThe map that was less map than maybe\r\nThis once,<\/em> minor hopes that would not let me be:\r\nYears of loving Dad and getting nowhere,\r\nDefending my life as if it were a crime.\r\nBeside me rolls field after field, untilled--\r\nThe road behind shaky, small and clear as pain.\r\n\r\n\r\n <\/pre>\n
Dad’s Navy Cap<\/h2>\n
\r\nStowed back behind a slipped stack \r\nof power-equipment instruction manuals, \r\nDad's navy cap from the war, wilted white, \r\nlooks a sort of ruined sandhill now \r\nwith a thin black brim for a shadow \r\nand miniature crossed gold swords, sewn, \r\nrecessed under a dented-in ledge  \r\nlike a shallow cave in a sandy river bank \r\neroded deeper by all that water gone \r\nunder the bridge, years of echoing hurry \r\nbelowdecks in the engine room among \r\nrolling waves of steam and steel, \r\ncome ashore to this quiet spare bedroom closet \r\nwith its dusty mirror and its 40-watt bulb \r\ntriggered by a dirty string. \r\nTurned over, there's one old spot of blood-- \r\na dead crab washed to the crest of a dune, \r\njust where the inside of the cap  \r\ntouched the peak of his skull. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Casting Lines<\/h2>\n
\r\nI stepped, a tenderfoot, into the pebbly stream after Dad, \r\nReeling as he taught, casting out from \r\nMy center as if toward nothing, \r\nFeeling light as the \r\nFly. \r\n\r\nNow wicked twists of river water press me as I pass \r\nTo deeper ranges with my casting, where if you \r\nTry to stand in utter stillness \r\nYou feel that you could \r\nFly. \r\n\r\nWhy was I always wading so slowly, so far behind Dad \r\nAll those years ago?  Still ahead of me today in \r\nMemory I see him striding, reeling in, \r\nFall-lit leaves streaming  \r\nBy. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Laundry List<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe ice cold stares of neighbors\r\nclick across you like fridge lights.\r\nWashing machines neat as teeth\r\nline one cement-block wall beneath\r\na whole row of closed windows.\r\nA flare of florescent cleaner like a tongue\r\nlays cut in two by red rubber cart wheels....\r\nThe scrambled contents of their lives\r\nempty hurriedly into the loud Charybdis\r\nmouths of machines: a pillowcase,\r\nyellow with age, tons of undies,\r\na child's bed padding princess pink,\r\nshirts waving farewell, yoga pants \r\npantomiming embarrassing positions....\r\nLives stuck in spin-cycle listen for a bell....\r\nDryer sheets flicker in corners of the room\r\nlike stubborn\r\npopcorn husks, eternal and inedible.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Burning Wasps Nests<\/h2>\n
\r\nUnsholdering his shovel, Dad pointed \r\nto a unnoticed hole, down \r\nin the meadowy dirt, in the field \r\nbehind our house--little more \r\nthan an ambitious ant-mound really \r\nwith a perfect circle centering it. \r\nWe could hear what went on below: \r\nsmall muffled buzzing huzzahs \r\nlike a covered pot of spaghetti \r\nor the sleepy voices of dead folk \r\nstill warm under desiccated grass. \r\nDad took the gas can from me, \r\nits fluent scent flaring clear light \r\ninto our nostrils, and giving a pinch \r\nlike hunger somewhere in our bodies. \r\nThe matchstick arced and landed, \r\na lady jumper with her hair on fire:\r\ngasoline flames came like a whiteness \r\nthat's hard to see--but the heat \r\nhad us stagger back, Dad's hand \r\non my shoulder like a broad blade. \r\nI just stood there, staring at where \r\nthose scrambled buzzing voices \r\nrose more and more angrily, like \r\nthe deepening sizzle of an unwatched \r\npot, its jittery lid shimmering. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Workbench<\/h2>\n
\r\nHe kept his grandfather company summers\r\nby the beat-up workbench in the garage,\r\na piece of fine dovetail sticking halfway\r\nfrom the red vise--a kite's-wing of Icarus'\r\nin for repairs.  He shook a coffee-can of nails\r\nreal loud, and sang loud, too, the one tune\r\nthey knew together, \"That'll be the Day,\" \r\nto keep his grandfather entertained \r\nwhile old careful hands swept curls \r\nof sawdust to the floor among gluepots \r\nand chisels fine as infant fingernails. \r\nThe wide blond grain of the bench\r\nwas blasted smooth as a turtle's back \r\nby hundreds of restless broken things of grace\r\ndragged there and clamped in the vise\r\nuntil they were useful again.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Going Bald<\/h2>\n
\r\nStray hats perch here all seasons, \r\nlike birds who abandon their nests \r\nof stuck-up feathers (and one egg \r\nwhenever I duck out of the weather). \r\nWhere once a loyal brown dog lay curled, \r\nguarding hearth and home genially \r\nunless tangled with, the August sun  \r\nscalds me through an open skylight, \r\nand cold slaps bone every December. \r\nIn a gilt-edged mirror at the stylist, \r\nI can just about squint Caesar's laurels \r\ninto existence, tilting weirdly above my ears. \r\nAfter a shower, with my two-days' beard \r\nshaved, my face is born again, pink  \r\nout of the steam, while above eyebrows \r\nmy pate rises mottled and bald,  \r\na tombstone with a single date. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
The Jellyfish<\/h2>\n
\r\nBelow my knees, the sea\r\nwavers my feet into fins\r\nspied through a stormy porthole.\r\n\r\nWobbly toes grind sandgrains\r\nas if each minuscule stone\r\nwere the whole world.\r\n\r\nHow many summers, Dad,\r\nhad we cast ourselves breathless\r\ninto such endless days?\r\n\r\nThe incoming tide\r\nmakes me sit down--hard--\r\nas if I were drunk.\r\n\r\nGhosts of jellyfish\r\nhem my waistline, frail\r\nas collapsed lungs\r\n\r\nuntil I'm transparent.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Seeking the Fathers<\/h2>\n
\r\nSearching for the fathers\r\nof my baffled heart, I hid\r\nmy head in long books of poems\r\nthat were forever ending\r\ntoo soon.  Once, I was a modern\r\nNative American standing silent\r\nbeside that affable man William Stafford,\r\nleaning together among polite prairie dogs.\r\nOnce, kneeling in deer-soft dirt,\r\nI counted countless red streams of army ants\r\nBobby Bly knocked from old gopherwood.\r\nHe smiled, and we listened\r\nto our spirits whisper in the grass.\r\n\r\nEach volume in the columned hall\r\nstood slenderly beside me, my arm\r\ndraped lazily around its lettered spine.\r\nI found many fathers under the yellow suns\r\nof those aging, open pages--\r\nwe fished whole summers barefoot together,\r\ncasting our lines, our lives, one word \r\nat a time: word, word, word.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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 <\/p>\n
Swordfishing<\/h2>\n
\r\n     Let my boat have neither anchor nor motor\r\n     ~~Emanuel di Pasquale<\/em>\r\n\r\nWhen they were running good\r\nyou could spot their sails\r\nlike dinosaur aileron\r\nabove the spoiling waves\r\ntenting nerve-grey and blue.\r\n\r\nOur new boat, a fast fiberglass\r\nhull, was christened \"Mutha II,\"\r\nand replaced an old wood \r\nHacker-Craft, \"The Pastime\"\r\nfor our swordfishing adventure.\r\n\r\nEach handsewn belly-bait\r\ncarried weight enough to drop\r\nlong hooks to the ocean floor\r\nwhere swordfish often loiter\r\nfor prey dragged by the Gulf Stream.\r\n\r\nEvery Christmas we were pulled \r\nto hear the hissing line\r\nto feel the arch and snap\r\nof heavy fishing wire\r\ndisappear in our boat's shadow.\r\n\r\nAnd to witness all alone\r\non the ocean with our father\r\nstrapped in leather harness\r\nand reeling for the kill\r\nhow swordfish fight and die.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
ESSAY<\/h2>\n
 <\/pre>\n
Seeking the Fathers<\/h2>\n
 \r\nBeginning to fabricate the music of poetry<\/em> <\/pre>\n
Starting Out<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n
\nIt was back in college that I really began to take on poetry as a life-mission.  Every serial killer has his first blooding, and mine took place in the leafy precincts of Monmouth University (n\u00e9e College).  It was there that a trio of instructors really set out the map I was to wander for the next thirty years, exploring the Hundred Acre Wood of literature, leaving my own poems scritched into the easier pines, or a duck marker where the trail splits to show which direction I’ve gone.  Thomas Reiter, Prescott Evarts, and Robert Rechnitz were the three that did me the most good overall.  And, although I don’t mention him here, Bob Sipos and his Shakespeare seminars and knack for interdisciplinary studies gave me two of my lifetime hungers, one for anything to do with the Bard, the other for science in combination with literature.\n<\/p>\n
\nSeeing Skies<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n
\nI leaned lazily against the dirty ductwork, my rump in a rumpus of dry leaves, beside me a stack of Cicero (Loeb’s ed.), Auden, some modernist trash.  I looked past my tilting sneakers to see the edge of the roof of the Guggenheim Library.  A mix of field and woods front leafy Cedar Ave., a terrain that cradled my college days.  This is where I ate my way through french fry piles of poems, feasts of history, big burgers of science, and lemonade gulps of art.  With the open sky above me, a good book beside, and a building full of poetry behind–the world was my oyster!\n<\/p>\n
\nOn overcast days, or when the librarians were marching about, whistling me in from my aerie on the roof, I’d lean against the doorway at the top of the second floor’s curving staircase.  The staircase had an ornate Swastika trim that flowed up alongside the marble steps and was cast (I hoped) before the rise of the Nazis, when civilization had already been rescued once so that F. Scott Fitzgerald could pen his Jazz Age prose for my delectation.  It was nice to lean there at the top of the turning stairs, and read, and look through the long window at the bending cypress trees (fluttery as flame-drops) all spring, or to imagine hearing the wind shake snow from them in winter while the old heating registers creaked.\n<\/p>\n
\nOccasionally I’d see Dr. Reiter or Prof. Prescott Evarts in the “poetry hallway” that led to the staircase–rows of tall bookcases filled with narrow volumes, like a quiver flush with arrows.  I’d have to fold my legs into my chest to let the tromping professors pass, who’d offer only a laconic greeting while I’d proffer a phrase from some poem that was trying to absorb me body and soul.\n<\/p>\n
\nSeeking the Fathers<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n
\nBack then, I was seeking the fathers.  The long beards who could sensiblize this enticing chaos of experience, with its shaggy roots entrenched in history, and its mystery made gritty by dirty Time.  Of all the fellows I came across who seemed to hold this sort of full focus that could harrass chaos into the momentary clarity that I longed for, was Thomas Reiter–a poet, I think now, looking back, more of precision than of delicacy.\n<\/p>\n
\nHe had the tall, inquisitive look of a microscope, with a focused intelligence that could reduce callow poems to a tear-stain on a lab slide, each line investigated for signs of microbial activity. Gawky in glasses, Dr. Reiter spread my too-tall-by-half pile of high school scribbles before him on his cramped office desk, post-it notes stuck here and there, and announced that he would proceed by a method of “divide and conquer” to guide me out of my juvenile shallows, and into the Odysseyan deeps that a man might sail for several lifetimes.\n<\/p>\n
\nHe saw the junctures where past wisdom and present experience overlap.  And at that overlap, always there burns the bright arclight of the sculptor’s welding torch.  Inflection points, capacitances and resistances (as Dr. Reiter might say), all come within the domain and to the mindful moment of the artist–whose hands guide the welder’s fire, whose fingers impress new patterns in the steel.  Layer upon layer pressed into palimpsest, and palimpsest hammered into meaningful mandala.  It is the completeness and complementarity of his patterns that allow Dr. Reiter’s welded Iron Giants to come to life–and to stay alive.  Every capillary has been laid to its destination as surely as any mile of rail.  A shield for Achilles made with American hardware.  But not made with the willful loss ideology uses to shape its tin minions;  ideology that can only cut to create, snipping experience to fit its blinders;  ideology that mistakes the narrow road for the wide landscape.  Instead, the craftsman works with the simple, slowly learned, touch of humanity.  That is the artist’s way: adjusting, assessing, remembering all the while.  Such strength of touch we learn from watching our fathers work every day.\n<\/p>\n
\nAnd Dr. Reiter loiters along my skyline yet, a shaper of the landscape.\n<\/p>\n
\nExcellent Faces<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n
\nProf. Evarts always remained a mystery to me–or retained his mystery, perhaps I should say.  Tall, with close dark curls grey at the temples, he has a passion for excellence–and for excellence alone.  And here I think is his true poet’s touch: he never wavered in his ability to even silently emanate that dedication.  In his poems, he casts his heart continually back to the Greeks–as who must not who seeks for excellence?  He saw, and shows, how this pursuit of attainment and mastery is what sets our humanity most nobly alight.  In his person, the man seems simplicity itself, with some humorous inward gleam withheld–or held within, more than withheld.  But, like a prize grouper in his weedy redoubt, when some tempting excellence fins by, he nabs it without fail, adding to his hidden store.\n<\/p>\n
\nWhat’s the secret that lies behind every face?  Where do the rubbery strings that tie on our masks attach?  Something of that esoteric knowledge is what a useful culture can impart to its devotees.  And any useful human culture must believe in the best of the humanity of which that culture is composed.  Teachers are the intermediaries here, being shaped themselves by the best of the past, and shaping that which is yet to come.  It is a moral course, whose compass is composed of  Euripides’ “warm droppings of human tears.”\n<\/p>\n
\nThe self-contained individuality of Evarts’s stance toward life and culture (or a life of culture), has taken me decades of rocky yearning and mossy slip-ups to really begin to appreciate.  It’s a life-lesson from an old classics prof of mine.\n<\/p>\n
\r\nA doze is a light sleep\r\nthe mind dips into,\r\nthen wakes from, achingly,\r\ninto little Iliads\r\n  ~~Prescott Evarts, \"The classical world,\" \r\n             in The New Criterion, November 1994\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nThe Importance of Being a Proscenium<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n
\nDr. Rechnitz taught me that “Literature is an education of the emotions,” and I’ve noticed that when you read a book openly, getting involved with the characters and letting your imagination be deeply invested, you actually become capable of feeling things, of being sensitive to feelings, that you didn’t even know you had!  You really are inventing yourself–your capacities and imaginative possibilities–every time you crack a spine (not to re-evoke the serial killer simile).  Like Christian aping the words of Cyrano under Roxanne’s window, we grow eloquent within ourselves when we kiss genius.  For words, spoken or viewed, do all their golden alchemy within us.\n<\/p>\n
\nDr. Rechnitz also directed plays at the college theater, and is now, since his retirement from teaching, responsible, with his indispensable wife Joan, for the Two River Theater in Red Bank–just the most beautiful theater built in New Jersey in the last fifty years.  And when I saw him in the context of the stage, I got hip to the fact that for Dr. Rechnitz, “all the world’s a stage.”  Everything, as in a poem or a well-ordered novel, has meaning in three basic ways: what it is in itself (either as essence or fact), what it is in relation to others, and what it pretends to be to itself or others.  You see this in Odysseus, who wears many masks on his voyage home to Penelope, but never loses mastery of his essential (still mysterious to us) self.  And with Dr. Rechnitz, it was seeing a different version of himself under the proscenium that clued me into how our awareness guides not just how we see the world but what we see of the world–how large our perspective can be.  It’s related to growing with that “education of the emotions” stuff.\n<\/p>\n
\nThere is a criticality, a reserve, in even the most audacious clown.  Ask the French about the slapstick genius of Jerry Lewis–they get it.  Our essence, understood and held by ourselves within ourselves is always under observation by a part of us that doesn’t exist in any single discrete moment of time–but is the “wisdom” (for lack of a more boisterous term) of all our time of acting and observing.  This gives the interior quality of good actors, and of happy people engaged in creating meaningful lives for themselves.  It’s an open secret, a fun, doubling sub-plot with the power to intensify the main action.
\nAnd for letting that cat out of the bag, my thanks, Dr. Rechnitz, wherever you are.\n<\/p>\n
\n*  *  *  *  *\n<\/p>\n
\nYears later, outside the Two River Theater, I had parked and debarked to see part of the cycle of August Wilson plays they were putting on that season–Jitney, I believe.  A long late-model sedan pulled in behind my car, and began a series of seesaw adjustments in attempting to parallel park–first gently crushing into my back bumper, then backing into the bumper of the Jeep behind it.  After observing a few of these poolball style bankshots, I leaned in to the passenger side of the car and saw a bank of modern \u2018park-assist’ technology displays brightly arrayed in the dash of the car’s dark interior; recessed screens showed in dynamic color each bash of the sedan into my car’s duct-taped bumper like the radar display on an aircraft carrier;  and the picture-in-picture safety cam spotlighted a grainy close-up of my old torn Ramones bumper-sticker.\n<\/p>\n
\n“Gregg G. Brown!” A staticy voice burst from the driver’s side.  It was Dr. Rechnitz, grinning gamely as his gold sedan slipped into reverse for another bash at the Jeep.\n<\/p>\n
\n“Would you like me to pull forward?” I asked as the passenger, the ever-lovely Joan Rechnitz, further lowered her power window with a near-silent zzzzt.\n<\/p>\n
\n “You’ve got to see this August Wilson play,” continued Rechniz.  “It’s a magnificent American original.  And no need to move your car–this boat has auto-park.”\n <\/p>\n
\n“I’m on my way in.  I’ll let you know how I like it.”\n<\/p>\n
\n“Yes.  Do that.  Do that.  You won’t regret a minute.”  And he went back to studying the wild displays, digital sweep and counter-sweep lighting up his circular eyeglasses.\n<\/p>\n
\nI stepped back out of the crash zone, and kept a backward eye on the sedan’s awkward tipping and turning, expecting to hear the Jeep’s car alarm larruping behind me at any moment.  At the next play the following month (not King Hedley II), I left my book of literary essays, Vindictive Advice, at the box office, saying only that it was “for the Doc,” and saw an email acknowledgement pop up in my inbox a few days later.  I assumed the note would be something in the form of a UPS receipt, one you sign sloppily for the downstairs neighbor before accepting a questionable package wrapped in plain brown paper–and no return address.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe note was indeed brief, but far from perfunctory.\n<\/p>\n
\nHow, he wondered, had I gone from being the homely noticer in the back of the classroom at Monmouth to the well-read raconteur evidenced in the pages of my book?  I felt deeply complimented by Dr. Rechnitz’ note.  It had not been too many summers before that I had suffered the slings and arrows of 2,000 rejection notes from poetry magazines–without a single acceptance or even a paternalistic pat on the back.  And here, in this small note, was acknowledgement of years of literary effort.  The note even included a touch of that real writer’s compliment in its bob-tailed paragraph–envy, glittering in its bitter rarity.  I felt embarrassed, but glad.  I didn’t know what to do with his praise:\n<\/p>\n
\r\nThe bell's tongue\r\nStruck me dumb. \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDr. Rechnitz’s note had managed to park me twenty-five years into the past, back up onto my perch on the Guggenheim Library roof, the view renewed, a fresh bucket of icy oysters by my side in the summer sun.\n<\/p>\n
\nScrutable Totems and a Human Heightening<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n
\nWhat exactly did I learn from these guys?  Let me talk about the poets, since I think I covered some of what I gleaned while in the good graces of Dr. Rechnitz.  From Dr. Reiter, I learned (or observed) how a poem can set itself up as a generator of paradox, or mystery.  By that, I mean that the circumstances a poem places before the reader recreate the moment in the poet well enough so that the reader, too, must try and manage his way into meaning from what is presented.  Hmm…  Let me try again.  Wallace Stevens has said that “a poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.”  I think what I saw in Dr. Reiter’s techniques is that that resistance can be ongoing in the poem, can remain in resistance to any sense of settled ending.\n<\/p>\n
\nDr. Reiter manufactures artifacts that embody the dilemmas they explore.  They are scrutable totems of immense experiential value–and you could say of explanatory power if you are willing to include being, manifestation, as a form of explanation.  If the story and its details can be set up the right way, with enough technique, enough craft, and enough justice to reality, the elements that the poet exposes to the reader go on making the poem long after the poem is over.  It’s like striking a cymbal.  You haven’t just hit a circle of brass, you’ve touched the nature of the cymbal and evoked it into resonant interaction with the world at large.  So, Reiter would be able to set the scene–a plowed field, and country grave-marker, for instance–and turn the description, or evocation, of each of these elements toward a meditation of the relationship between living and mortality in a way that wasn’t a one-off noticing.  The elements themselves, in their arrangement, remained deeply provocative.  Like an ethics problem or a moral fable, but full of the super-sensible subtleties of poetry.  And this is what life confronts us with all the time.  And this way, life insinuates itself into the poem, and the poem has heightened life.\n<\/p>\n
\nDr. Reiter’s work is difficult to excerpt because of this well-crafted relatedness of parts, a sort of perfection in sum that resists summation, but here’s a few lines from “Sodbusters,” whose circumstance is described just above (ellipses are mine):\n<\/p>\n
\r\nSay the child died that first winter\r\n....\r\nSay Matthais Bell kept \r\nclear of the new stone\r\nthat spring the prairie blazed with space\r\n....\t\r\n\r\nSay year by year he plowed closer--\r\nnot that he forgot\r\nhow the boy's hands were the color\r\nof freshly opened apples\r\n....\r\nI see him turning the earth\r\nbeside this graveyard where the prairie\r\ncompass  marks the meridian\r\nwith its deeply divided leaves.\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAnd it is also with this matter of a heightened life that Prof. Evarts’ poems most impressed me–as well as his whole demeanor.  Exemplars, standards, a larger life seem always very near him, like presences.  If anyone I know knew where Sophocles was hanging out on the down-low, it’d be Evarts.  And by having a ready and eloquent access to these past exemplars, Prof. Evarts constantly calls us to our better selves–not some phony more moralistic self in any narrow sense–but in the very real sense of being ever-alert to our highest excellence.  Don’t be good, be great.  And he always seemed to have a long enough perspective to avoid the pitfalls of Romantic subjectivity–where the greatness is in what the ego, the I, is feeling–and if you couldn’t feel it too, you are just some kind of lame lumpen-proletariat.  No, it’s actually a kind of heroic ideal, a human faith in human faithfulness, if you will.  That our capacity to act matches our possibilities–and that the work to move in the direction we are heading is life’s one joy in some final way.<\/p>\n
\r\n     The snail, inch by inch, climbs Mt. Fuji. \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAnd Evarts just always knows which way to Mt. Fuji!  Directionality, combined with work and not accepting less than your own very best effort, creates a life and a poetry of excellence.  A note that always plays true.  I know this sounds a bit like a business seminar, with the way they wobble on about \u2018excellence’–but I mean it in the olden way of the Greeks, the becomingness or ar\u00eate, with man as the measure of all things.  Less an appeal to ideas than an appeal to a comprehensive human experience that includes ideas.  In this way, ideas are neither excluded nor exclusive.  Ideas are simply another, and necessary, ingredient in the meatloaf.\n<\/p>\n
\r\nGregg Glory\r\n[Gregg G. Brown]\r\nApril, 2015<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Coda: Persistence<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe sea comes into the rock.\r\nThe rock mocks the sea.\r\nThe sea comes into the rock\r\nUntil the rock ceases to be.\r\n\r\nSecretly the book is being readied. \r\nObstructions and obfuscations \r\nAre being blown up and shredded. \r\nThe book, the words, are come! \r\nBeat thou a merry drum! \r\nDon a motley cap, and a gown fine-beaded. \r\nThe book, the words, are come! \r\nBeat thou the drum! \r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] Under the first stars, there by the back gate, secretly, I Would relieve myself on the shamed and drooping hollyhocks. ~~ Don Justice …an irritation of pearls… ~~ Emari DiGiorgio Roadside Wine Pull off 71 suddenly, onto a wide shoulder of dust and grass. Yellow loads of honeysuckle weigh down […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1748],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hummingbirds-apprentice","category-1748-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7366,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643\/revisions\/7366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}