2018
POEMS
ALDEN NOWLAN (1933–1983)
I give you smoke on the autumn air
Alders, gone fire red—
Popals long and white and bare
Near a snowy riverbed
Gin when the night is cold or dark
Wings to soar our sky
Hope and Truth in your fierce heart,
Knowledge, Love—
Goodbye
THE WINTER TESTAMENT
The snow has silenced the barn
Left its white hide across the walls
And blinded the horse
And tempered the grand illusion
That spring will ever come at all.
Outside by dark the sky is smoke
The dog, half-starved barks,
For he’s chained to the hard-luck culvert
By his master gone away.
THE WINTER TESTAMENT 2
Beyond the crude window
Across the road the snow
Fills the tracks, the spruce stand is cold
Where the fisher burrows;
A rabbit followed my brother home
Sat on his boot in the dooryard;
And there was quite a hoot,
So he named it, I think, Thumper.
Found out later
The fisher had caught its scent
And scudded it all that day,
The rabbit
Bet against the odds
Just to get away.
NEWCASTLE, WINTER OF 1956
Leonard Drillon lay drunk downtown
While fire burned his house to ground
And trapped children screamed his
Name.
Next morning, Constable Billy Dunn
The one who kicked him in the groin
Called all his fuckin’ family “scum,”
Shook his hand, looked ashamed
And offered to drive him home.
NOVEMBER 1977
November, the trees are still.
The black earth reminds us of a regimental
Song, and, from the hospital stack, smoke
From bandages
Touches that raw sky
Just at one white spot in the heaven
And I’ve come outside
For a cigarette.
(I look seventeen, though am twenty-seven)
Up in the room beyond the white curtain
Jammed with frost and the ridges of aluminum
Where the job is following a blue Monitor,
The nurse after twelve years, eleven months,
Has become the disinterested partner in
The pain of others.
And, her patient,
My mother, has just suffered
Another botched operation,
By a cursory drunken doctor.
So many of her gender have died this way—
As wonderfully brave as they can manage in a
Room full of strangers, more interested in the
Machinery than in such struggling,
Frightened, still-beautiful bodies.
THE SPRING TESTAMENT
I go every day past the gravel bar
And walk to the church
In the April mud
Because my friends have tossed me out
And slammed the doors upon my face,
There in my worn suit
My face is lashed by crawling shame
I reckon with what I have done
That has so besmirched my family name
And humbled by my new stage of grace
Walk home alone in the setting sun.
PEG AT SEVENTEEN
My love was like a winter sparrow
The world she saw a winter land
The pulse of light on broken boughs
A flush of sun on popal stands;
The ice and drifts of a winter gale
Left sorrow in her eyes—
I remember my love when she was young,
Before winter made us wise.
CIRCUS
I have come out on a grey afternoon
To be at the circus with my son.
The man behind me with his wife and
Children laughs, as if a joke was so
Well crafted he’s undone, and grabs not once
But twice, my shoulder as he grins.
So then he laughs every time the elephant
Breaks wind.
Or when the clown begins his task
Of wrestling with the ostrich,
He points his finger and chews
Popcorn, blows bubbles with his gum.
He is radiant in what I cannot see, that
Has become
Hilarious to him.
All these poor animals trying
To act gracious
Their eyes, again and again
Showing the universal
Symptom of mortification, remorse and pain
Not only for themselves but
For their harried trainers.
Finally it is over, all that unseen shame
And they have shone the spotlight
On the nineteen-year-old Armenian girl with
The peculiar Armenian name;
She’s ninety feet up
Without a net, swinging free of the
Pin bar that keeps her from her death
All of this—all of this
In order to make a dollar.
And even though through the torn tent
Comes dismal blowing snow and rain
A smile never leaves her—for she takes it
As her duty.
And the man with his wife
And children,
No longer points or giggles
But finally understands enough, to shut
The fuck-up.
A TRIP TO THE OUTER ISLAND (THE POET AS GUNSLINGER)
The gunslingers are always the age we were then—twenty-one or thirty-nine
Younger the killings become
Studies in dim pathology
Older and we mistake as comic the
Poignancy of
A gun well oiled worn so low.
The young gunslinger doesn’t know
How much of a set-up it’s been
Until he gets there
And is expected to be entertained
By laughing at pistol tricks he’s
Seen before, and finally, though the .44
Is pointed at his head, won’t draw
Except as last resort.
The old gunslinger counts on this, of course
When he holds open his shirt to show his scars
Which keeps the kid in his place.
The old man
Could spit in the kid’s face before he’d
Choose to make a move.
In the end the old gunslinger
Won’t come out of his room
And the kid from the first moment
Wanted to be home.
Yet coming onto evening both
Search the trees for wanted
Posters, both know what it’s like
To be alone;
And the kid’s reputation has grown, and grown
The price on his head is getting
Larger, and someday someone
He knows will get him in his back.
That’s really what the old gunfighter
Is counting on smiling at.
THE JOURNEY
I sometimes wake, know
That we are not
Travelling through the night
Of snow with the train’s endless rocking, the
Iced-over glitter of some obscure village lights
And my sons are with me, safe at home.
I have not, this time waking alone
Migrated anywhere.
That has really been my desire
As long as I have known journey,
Not to journey anymore.
For I have used travel like a drug
To ease pain I cannot treat
Affliction I cannot cure.
I have travelled
To places filled with dull company
Shamed by the actions of others
I have come upon
Or riotous in abandon of myself
All knowing gone.
I have stood with men
Who would murder if they could without a
Thought, and saw how others fawned about them
Greedy to be snivelling for no cause;
Or have agreed myself with those who had
No truth to please my sense
Of camaraderie in a bar.
With this comes wisdom to be alone
So wisdom is faith if not ignored.
I have long known,
That my youthful hope was dashed
Not only by my own frivolity,
But by the ill others had for me;
One who asked me favours as he hid
Behind the comments of his wife and friend.
And knowing I was honour bred
Never to answer what lie was said
But to do my duty if I could.
I have attained my life in spite of that,
Dream only of mercy, not justice at
The end; for mercy is justice after all.
But it seems this night I have lost more
Than I have ever gained
True loves lost, friends gone,
Those intolerant of my life
Contemptuous of my name.
Today my son asked me if we
Could go to that city street
Where he lay his best toy car down
Under some forgotten flower bed.
He smiled, unsure, but said he knew
The place it could be found
And wonders if it can’t be far;
Tries to remember the city or the town.
“I forgot it there,”
He said. “You remember the garden with those tiny plants—?
“Ah yes,” I said, “and the smell of the great
Grey sea, the improbable sea that so far away
Had no comfort or claim for your mother you or me.”
So I told him the trip
Could not be made—that journeys such
As those are ones we cannot take.
What is lost remains where it was lost,
Hope and love, camaraderie in a bar
Or honour squandered, all buried like his toy,
And the seas are cold and forbidding now
Even if our poor heart breaks.
But tonight my child is unsettled in his sleep,
Seeking that garden in Tasmania
To reclaim whatever part of him was left behind;
Toy car, or truck or Jeep.
And now and then I hear,
Against the dark and bitter slashing
His few clear words
“I found it, I found it every part.”
As if the wind itself is asking;
Or telling that children’s wisdom makes us pause
Their bravery makes us weep
And is carried in their laughing—
Telling that they themselves are our hope,
On cold nights that are so slowly passing.
PARTING AT THE STATION IN VÖCKLABROOK
Inge smiles and offers me money
I will never take
For having travelled from Paris
Through Austria by train to see her;
Offers it as gentle as a blessing,
Offers it with her kiss as sweet as kindness,
She knowing I have paid a week’s wages
For a trip that ends as soon as it begins,
A trip hurried into blindness, Munich and night falling.
With the ticket takers
And station masters, the jurisprudent ones
All of us must deal with, all of our lives.
Their faces so clean shaven—
Those who would never take advantage of anyone,
Except some child running away in winter,
Orphan out of step with all the others,
A man who can never speak the language
And has been trying to all his life,
A woman with a pleading smile,
Or a stranger,
Yes, a stranger they can better.
WE HIT BILFERD
We hit Willie Bilferd in the mouth
The air was sharp, when he cried,
We all felt brave
When he tried to stand,
Wipe torment from his eyes.
He’d written a song about his mom,
Was on his way to take it home.
We threw him down and stepped on
It, the week after his father died.
He and his mom lived alone
Wore a bowtie in the November sun,
Face white as milk that dried
Leaves curled in a lime-rinsed drum.
Old memories pierce these forty years
Touch of cruelty in a child’s glee,
Sitting solitary on the grey deck chair
Telling her of new friends he had,
But the one who liked him most was
Me.
THE LILLIPUTIAN LOOKS UP
I have lost my youth, Peg,
You know that.
Nothing more can be said
About curtains blowing
Above a register
In your house when
I visited that hard, cold night in 1968.
(Something I’ve written about for forty years)
Well,
A party in the dooryard
Rough and ready boys singing;
The winter snow, where the light went gold,
Grader passing on the road,
Bedroom
Smelling of love at twilight,
The kitchen—ah, the kitchen, my dear,
Of bacon, onions and wine.
THE HOUSE
My mother hated our house:
Big and empty
When night settled,
And the hallway ran from one end to the
Other.
There were never enough tables or chairs
Its smell contained the secret of endless hours
Of washing and scrubbing.
Ajax detergent after school at four o’clock
The floors were pulled apart
By callow children running.
Nothing nice ever lasted
And not a friend of hers entered.
All of this
And winter, winter, winter,
Besides.
She loathed it, as an
<
br /> Anathema
And who could blame her.
The work was never done.
That last week
In the hospital
She tried to pull herself up.
Go home.
AUTUMN TESTAMENT
So on the hills to the north the sky is clear
And far away the metallic drone
Of rattling chainsaws
Cuts the evening to the bone.
Fresh ruts are visible in the snow
While the river, still glides cold and slow
Here is where the buck has moved
Sheltered by the frozen moon.
From the chop down can be seen
The doe that moves across the stream,
Muscled in her tough and dainty hide
While snow blanches her back and side.
The buck moves toward her in the cold
Swaggers its tines and lifts its nose,
Moves its tongue to taste the air,
Breathes in the doe urine lying there.
It is November so she is touched
By the heat of need and northern musk.
Hunted, hounded, while coyotes bark,
This union
Makes them heroic, in the chilling dark.
TRAVEL
We are travelling again my son and I
And he is so far from home,
Nor do either of us speak the language
Or understand the money
Though he holds the coins in his small fist
And the air has turned colder and the sky
Gone strange, the breath of phantoms
Plagues me day and night; and I am leaving behind
Bad plans, bad relations, I have been travelling half my life.
Murder Page 10