by Carl Dennis
We didn’t manage to take before.
All those with degrees in dream analysis
Are free to turn for the day to the harder problems
That social workers and teachers are up against.
In my dream the reality principle
Showed merely as gray streaks in her hair
And a few wrinkles that seemed becoming.
Reality made us linger so long in Mantua
Over pumpkin pasta, sharing the inside story
About the Renaissance,
That we almost missed our train to Verona.
The only painful part of the dream
Was leaving her at a mountain hotel
When I went to Paris to lecture on the Bastille
That poetry sometimes opens. But soon I returned
To find her standing alone on the terrace,
Her face lit by a smile that anyone
Skilled in interpreting smiles would say
Showed how happy she felt that moment,
How lucky. And when I woke I marveled
How lightly the weight of history
Presses on a sleeper’s chest as he dreams.
It’s likely the muscle that pumps the blood
Finds the work a little harder each year,
But it still seems eager to pound if a name is mentioned
Or a letter that fails to arrive is imagined
Waiting among the magazines and the catalogues.
So what if the signature and the date are missing
And the paper’s so yellowed and wrinkled
I have to step to the window to read it.
“That hand,” the heart says stoutly,
“I’d know it anywhere.”
Candles
If on your grandmother’s birthday you burn a candle
To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra
To honor the memory of someone who never met her,
A man who may have come to the town she lived in
Looking for work and couldn’t find it.
Picture him taking a stroll one morning,
After a wasted month with the want ads,
To refresh himself in the park before moving on.
Suppose he notices on the gravel path the shards
Of a green glass bottle that your grandmother,
Then still a girl, will be destined to step on
When she wanders barefoot away from her school picnic
If he doesn’t stoop down and scoop the mess up
With the want-ad section and carry it to a trash can.
For you to burn a candle for him
You needn’t suppose the cut would be a deep one,
Just deep enough to keep her at home
The night of the hayride when she meets Helen,
Who is soon to become her dearest friend;
Whose brother George, thirty years later,
Helps your grandfather with a loan so his shoe store
Doesn’t go under in the Great Depression
And his son, your father, is able to stay in school
Where his love of learning is fanned into flames,
A love he labors, later, to kindle in you.
How grateful you are for your father’s efforts
Is shown by the candles you’ve burned for him.
But today, for a change, why not a candle
For the man whose name is unknown to you?
Take a moment to wonder whether he died at home
With friends and family or alone on the road,
With no one to sit at his bedside
And hold his hand, the very hand
It’s time for you to imagine holding.
from A House of My Own (1974)
Useful Advice
Suppose you sat writing at your desk
Between days, long before dawn,
The only one up in town,
And suddenly saw out the window
A great star float by,
Or heard on the radio sweet voices
From wandering Venus or Neptune,
A little hello from the voids.
Who would believe you in the morning
Unless you’d practiced for years
A convincing style?
So you must learn to labor each day.
Finally a reader may write he’s certain
Whatever you’ve written or will write is true.
Then all you need is the patience to wait
For stars or voices.
Students
A middle-aged man inspects the painting
That seems to present a boy with a bird and a whale.
Though his children, perhaps, have refused his counsel,
Though his wife has a lover who borrows money,
And his job at the savings-and-loan isn’t inspiring,
He lays no blame on his country’s decline,
Or his mother’s coldness, or the slope of his chin,
But humbly supposes his ignorance does him in.
So he looks hard at the painted scene.
Maybe the boy with the bird and the whale
Would tell him something useful about the soul
If only he hadn’t neglected his studies.
He needs a teacher, he thinks, to help him see,
And looking around the room discovers me
Looking at him with my sympathetic stare.
If he comes this way, I’ll have to tell him the truth
About the shortage of teachers everywhere.
Relatives
“Remember your father the wolf,”
The lecturer says.
“Chewed by its appetite it chews its prey.
It howls with fear in the woods
Beyond blame or praise.
Drop food in your children’s cages
When they follow commands,
And they’ll all be good.”
During the lecture, it was later learned,
Crows were observed tumbling in loops
Over North Dakota.
Two dogs at leisure on a beach in France
Ran a race to a rock.
In the Indian Ocean
Thirty leagues down
Men in a diving bell picked up an hour’s aria
From a pod of whales in a language unknown
Sung to unknown listeners leagues away.
Remember your old cousins,
Those fish who crawled from the sea
When seafood was plentiful
And the land bare.
Think of the voices they strained to hear
As they chose to hobble on tender fins
Painfully in the sun’s glare.
Knots
I respect your plan to slip into the graveyard
One of these nights and topple your father’s stone
And dance on your mother’s grave
To the tune of your old grudge.
One night while you were sleeping,
They crept into your little attic room
And tied all the furniture to the floor.
So you spend your life untying knots,
The slowest work of all. And every morning,
After a night spent dreaming of rearrangements,
You wake up to find it all roped down again.
Still, you might picture brave young sailors,
As they boomed along in a gale off Cape Horn
With creaking spars and strained lashings,
Thanking their lucky stars for the bowline,
That ingenious knot passed down for so many years
From old sailors to young
With care, with patience.
from ClimbingDown (1976)
Ingratitude
Spring, I remembered you all these months.
I spoke of the green yard under the snow
To my slumped visitors.
I sobered the giddy neighbors.
“You may think you’re still happy,�
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I cautioned, “but recall the tea roses,
The lost leaves of the dogwood tree.”
But now you have fallen upon us, Spring,
Without warning,
So much greener than I remembered.
Friends I kept from forgetting
Laugh at me as they run outside
For falling so short in your praise.
The Homeowner
When I turn the key, I like to hear the furniture
Straightening up for inspection,
Poising expectantly in the hush.
Sometimes a few pieces aren’t ready
And it seems I intrude on the couch and chair
Or startle the lamp-table from a nap;
But most often they show me courtesy.
It’s my pictures that ignore me—
The girl holding a rose to the light,
The fisherman drifting alone in his rowboat,
The couple strolling a woodland path.
I stand a foot from their frames and wait;
With gestures I invite their confidence;
But they hold aloof, too distant to nod,
Too proud to acknowledge an audience.
They’re in love with their own weather for good.
They need no comments of mine
To sweeten life in their walled preserve.
They gladly will me my furniture and its deference,
All things that pass through the house
On the outside.
The Peaceable Kingdom
No rust on the fenders but the car won’t start.
You tear open the hood and stare in.
The fuel pump’s clogged with flowers.
You suspect mischief, but the old enemy
Spring infects everything.
The engine block is all thumbs
As it daydreams of colliding hard
With the shapely Pontiac
Parked down the block.
Give up. Take a walk.
Pull the tail of your two-tone collie.
Pull the hair of your idling girlfriend.
Your old road plans have been suspended.
Praise for My Heart
Don’t you deserve a few lines for youself,
You who work in the dark, in silence,
Under no orders, with no weekends free,
Shipping food to the hungry cells
On all my peripheries?
When I wake in the morning it seems clear
You’ve been at it all night
I get up shamed by your diligence.
What can such effort signify
But faith in the enterprise?
You’re certain the world would be wounded
If you once failed me.
You believe in me without thinking.
Native Son
You try to imagine highways to all men
But your heart has always loved boundaries,
The heavy fields in back of your house,
The visible streets of America.
Now when a plane crashes in Paris
You scan the death list for American names,
And only when American gunners fly out
Do you board the plane in your dream
And jostle the pilots, and grab the controls.
America is your friend at a loud party.
Her jokes are no worse than the others
But they sadden you most.
You want to take her home before it’s too late.
It’s hard to write letters in your attic study
When you hear your father downstairs
Smashing the furniture on his path to a glass.
He was a wino before you were born;
You are not to blame,
You say to yourself as you go down
To look at the mess.
from Signs andWonders (1979)
Listeners
After midnight, when I phone up a far-off friend
To describe my chills or a blister by the heart
That won’t wait, I can hear the breath of the operator
As she listens in, lonely among the night wires.
They all do it, breaking the rules.
In the morning she takes home my story to her husband, her
friends.
A sad burden. No useful wisdom yet.
No advice about selling the house, the move to Florida,
The right neighborhood for the boys.
It’s getting harder to tell where the words go.
You send them off with instructions not to stop on the road,
Not to speak to strangers, but as they run they spill over.
Even on a bare bench when you whisper to yourself,
Sigh softly how the world has let you down,
From the bench in back you can hear a breath.
Your thoughts have entered the far world;
They have changed to stones;
And someone walks round them as he climbs.
Near Idaville
Has the story reached you of those few who live alone
And love it, and never open their mail?
The long Sahara of summer vacation is for them a sea.
They put forth boldly on billowy mornings,
Crowd sail through fragrant nights when no one knocks,
Free at last for their mission to rewrite
The history of the world in a room
Near Idaville, in back of the drygoods store.
Hunched by the lamp, each asks a question of himself;
Each listens thoughtfully to his own replies.
Wiser than before, he jots them down.
In his one-man apartment a quiet pair,
A lifetime of dialogue.
How far away this life is from your solitude.
For always on your hunting trip to the North,
In your rented cabin, at the edge of the pines,
With a wide prospect of the valley, you hope for visitors,
And imagine a couple beside you sharing the view.
And they, your own creations, though they love the quiet,
Want visitors too, and dream of the field
Filled with strangers who look like friends, but happier,
A congenial race of enlightened souls
Walking arm in arm in graceful pairs
Slowly along the hills and down,
Greeting each other with warm, ceremonious smiles.
And you imagine them too, and wait for them.
And you’re sure whoever hopes for their company
Deserves to be loved not for himself or his work
But for his endless need to become like them,
These strangers who are not yet here,
Whose bones, though beautiful and sure to endure,
Are thin as light and light as air.
Carpentry
Carpenters whose wives have run off
Are sometimes discovered weeping on the job.
But even then they don’t complain of their work.
Whitman’s father was a carpenter.
He was so happy hammering houses
That he jumped with a shout from the roof beam
And rolled with a yawp in the timothy.
This led his son to conclude wrongly
That all workmen are singers.
Whitman’s father was weak.
He had trouble holding a job.
He hoped that the house he was working on
Would be lived in by a man more steady
Than he was, who would earn his sleep,
Dreaming easy under a sound roof
With no rain in his face.
Of course, there are bad carpenters everywhere.
They don’t care if the walls don’t meet.
“After all,” they argue,
“We’re not building airplanes.”
But Whitman’s father measured his nails.
Many mornings, clacking his plane,
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He crooned a song to the corners,
Urging them on to a snug fit.
No needles of heat will escape through a crack
If he can help it, no threads of light.
Snow
Thirty-four years haven’t put a dent
In my vision of snowstorms, my impatience
With the paltry inches of the winter dole,
Slim pickings even in Buffalo.
My hunger is to wake in the morning
In the deep dark, the windows snowed over,
The doors opening into walls. No one can move.
Nothing to do but tunnel. So I push out
With my snow shovel, clearing a dark hall
To the buried toolshed, quieting my rabbits
And spaniels, who feed from my hand.
Then I turn to rescue my neighbors, the near
And the far, pausing to relieve the drugstore,
Helping the weeping pharmacist from behind the counter.
He offers me medicine for a lifetime, which I refuse.
I dig to uncover roofs and porches.
At every door I leave frozen breadloaves,
Pound with stone fists, and hurry away,
Too busy to wait for an introduction.
The hungry families spend hours in vain
Guessing the name of their deliverer.
The Tree
Only the outermost ring of the tree you love
Is alive. All trees are like that,
The spine wholly dead
And the dead wood undecayed,
Bracing the sap-flow just under the bark.
Slowly the sap edges up
When the daylight is long enough
And the leaves unfurl for their outdoor work.
Far below your surface, the tree inside you