Far-Fetched
Page 3
Hawk and starling sport
through all this rigging
of blocks and lines
counterweights and arbors
the street
a theater set for storms
*
A chunk of sycamore
adorns the telephone line
branch and trunk long gone
stump a faint impression
just that cylinder
faintly nautical
hung in a crown of air
*
Triple your chances to win
Take it at twenty-to-one
No money down
No faith in desire
*
Cashing out
the bartender croons
If you see me getting smaller
Trobar clus
Closing time
*
Two boys lug
a Samsonite
full of leaves
across the lawn
*
A starling whets
her thorn of beak
and song gives way
to sunlight on concrete
LEAVING HOME
after Eudora Welty
One beech within a winter wood
glowed with a crown of leaves
and slid behind the bare trees,
a little evening sun.
It traveled with you awhile
in ghostly fashion,
your own crown of hair
in faint reflection,
here and gone.
COME AND SEE
A Sunday in Saint Louis,
the avenues
quiet as country lanes.
Cabbage whites
ride a current of air.
Sycamores lean
and scrape the sky
like schooners
not yet under sail,
their leaves in tatters.
A soft rustle,
a nautical creak.
More faintly still,
sticks clatter
on the playing field
behind Our Lady of Sorrows.
You’ve lived here
thirty, forty years.
Suddenly a Clydesdale
with no tack or rider
clip-clops around the corner
and trots along
the yellow lines.
A marvel of
the Pleistocene,
creature of grass and dung,
it must have wandered far
to reach us,
through all hours
and seasons,
trampling the dust
of every kingdom.
From dark recesses
residents
step out to watch,
stepping away
from busy lives,
something on the stove,
a bath drawn,
the phone covered
like an astonished mouth.
SMALL TRIUMPHS
Along the freight yard, a cop
waved me to the side.
Windows down, engine off,
I heard the clink of chains
and steady brush of pads
before a pair of elephants
entered my left mirror.
*
A lyrebird at noon!—
fossicking for worms.
No song, no éventail plissé
of filaments and plumes.
Regardless, clear as day—
a lyrebird at noon!
*
You talk with animation
of what you’ve seen, and where—
proud to have been so lucky,
amused to feel so proud.
IN SEARCH OF MULLOWAY
for Bob Adamson
The fisherman makes an appointment
by map and tidal chart
unfolded across the bare floor.
Sorting through his gear,
he ties a knot and talks of jewies,
not jew- but jewelfish
for the otolith within its ear,
a bob for equilibrium
like the bubble of a spirit level.
According to lore, a traveler shines
from weeks on the open sea,
cold sluicing along its flanks
and buffing its soft scales to chrome,
crossing Lord Howe Rise,
who knows why,
then home past Lion Island’s head
with a worm inhaled en route
writhing in its gut.
All the while, a resident
turns to bronze and tarnishes
at the mouth of Mooney Creek,
wolfish yet asleep
in the shadow of a pile.
Motionless, the monster steeps
in its own ammonia tang.
Traveler and resident,
both taste about the same.
SAILING UNDER STORM
after Horace
This heavy weather drives you out
to sea once more, old sloop.
What can you do but lie ahull
or run off under bare poles
while trailing lines astern?
Don’t you feel your steering fail
and hear your cracked mast groan
in another gust of spindrift,
the night sea full of foam,
and wonder how your hull
could ever survive the coming wave?
You have no seam unsplit, nor God
to call upon in such misfortune.
Though you were built from live oak
and longleaf Georgia pine,
and proudly christened A-OK,
the frightened sailor finds
no comfort in a name.
Take care, or you’ll become
the laughingstock of wind.
Source of all my drudgery
and now my deep concern:
stay well clear of the hidden reef
from which no ships return.
SILVER
I am the warper
caught in a weir
like a muscular tongue
against the teeth
or stuck with a spear
or reeled from the dark
to writhe on a hook
and make no sound
though sometimes heard
to whistle off-key
in a ruffled sound
or estuary
I am the warper
sniffing the air
and sliding across
rough wood and root
en route to pools
of Ira-waru
or branching streams
of Batasuna
though never at home
in the Pyrenees
preferring the deep
and rolling seas
I am the warper
pickled in brine
a cable wrapped
in gutta-percha
walloping north
as a spring unwinds
its subtle ribbon
beneath the keel
in a warp of murky
light and water
here and gone
a silver eel
TING
A whipbird calls through fog
Its whistle sustains and clarifies
until a crack
taut and metallic
punctuates the morning
Across the estuary
an inlet of the Tasman Sea
bellbirds swing their heads
to ventriloquize
a lip of glass
By channels of coolness
the echoes are calling
each call a drop of water
or tap on glazed ceramic
or tink of sonar
to sound the empty space
and test how long
how far
tink tink-ting
tink tink-ting
Think of Ming brushwork
and how each island
has its ting
open to all weather
a pavilion in which to pause
among eroded rocks
and cataracts of moss
along a river
still unscrolling
Just so the tink of bellbirds
unchanging yet arrhythmic
cool yet intimate
gathers fog around it
to sound the hush
and make it ring
SCAVENGER
A rail, buff-banded rail,
weaves among the legs
of picnickers who loll at ease
on the buttress roots of fig trees.
It queries fallen fruit
with manners so refined
as to be indeterminate,
its herringbone immaculate.
Aloof though underfoot,
the rail extracts a crust
of pie from picnic residue—
no seediness, no trace
of table-scrap solicitude
for any human hand or face.
SATIN BOWERBIRD
Devout in your compulsion,
you weave a bower of endless night
from something old and something new,
collecting bits of broken glass
from a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin,
a single curl of dyed wool,
parrot feathers, and filaments
from your own electric eye.
Behind a palisade of twigs,
you squeeze cobalt straight from the tube
and smear it with a palette knife:
blue teapot with two white cups attending.
Your feathers brush the night sky
with ultramarine straight from the tube,
or else, mixed with a medium
of charcoal, spit, and masticated pulp.
Ratcheting left and right,
you strike a Blue Tip match on chert
and fulminate—burnt, flagrant, phlegm.
Alert in your devotion,
unseen by any human eye,
you weave a bower of endless night
and pause within, head cocked
to nudge one azure bead
until magnetically aligned,
fussing over vestiges of sky.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These poems have previously appeared in The Australian, Australian Poetry Journal, Grey, Jubilat, Literary Imagination, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Stolen Island, and on www.poets.org. “Saturday Morning” was published as a broadside by All Along Press. An earlier version of “Owl-Eyed” appeared in Telepathy (Paper Bark Press, 2001).
A few echoes may warrant attribution: “A Fly from the Early Anglers” draws on Gervase Markham and Izaak Walton, among others. “Bright Thorn” quotes excrucior from poem 85 of Catullus. “Night and Day” borrows some phrases from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors. “Ting” quotes a line from Henry Kendall’s poem “Bell-Birds”: “By channels of coolness the echoes are calling.” “Satin Bowerbird” adapts a line from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “Weaves a Bower in endless Night.”
ALSO BY DEVIN JOHNSTON
POETRY
Traveler
Sources
Aversions
Telepathy
PROSE
Creaturely and Other Essays
Precipitations: Contemporary American
Poetry as Occult Practice
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Devin Johnston
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
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eISBN 9780374714086
First eBook edition: February 2015