by Carl Dennis
Here he is, back with the blonde girl,
Whose smile seems nervous now, who may be wondering,
When he’s silent, if he’s drifting off.
Did she say something she shouldn’t have,
Or is he distracted by the man with the camera
Focusing by the taffrail?
Is he troubled to think of himself as old
Looking back on a photograph of this moment
When his heart was younger and more beautiful?
Don’t worry about it, I want to tell them.
Don’t waste your time with recollection or prophecy.
Step forward while the light and shadows are still clear,
The sun, low on the water, still steady.
Enter the moment you seem to be living in.
Defining Time
If it’s like a river, the current is too much for us,
Sweeping us past a moment we’re still not used to
Out to the void of the not-yet-come.
Should we resist, wherever we are,
Or be reconciled?
It seems to bring us gifts. Each day
Arrives as a fresh basket of bread.
Our right hand no longer can touch our left
Around the girth of our Buddha bellies.
How can that be if the minutes of the day are fish
Nibbling away at us till our bones show through,
Nibbling away at our friends, our houses?
Let’s try to ignore it, whatever it is,
As we do the thin air of the Himalayas
When we climb, breathless, to pray for enlightenment.
Can we really ignore its earthly mass
As it lies between us and the thing we hope for?
A long wait till the train goes by
And we can cross the tracks into the evening,
Our favorite time. At last we’re walking after dinner
On our ritual mile to the great magnolia.
There it is, glimmering at the end of the field.
Just a handful of whatever time is
And we’ll be standing beneath its branches
Looking back at the poplars we’re passing now.
How young we were back there, we’ll say,
How confused and moody in that early era.
We need more time to consider it,
More than the dole allowed us at any moment,
The nickels and dimes.
We need to unfold time on the table like a map,
With the years gone and the years to come
Colored as vividly as the moment,
Proving how little it means to say
Time has gone by, passed through us
Or around us, and left us old.
My Guardians
Not aloof like the famous sky gods,
They keep just one lesson ahead of me,
As uncertain as I am about final things,
Stumped yesterday in Bible class
By the verses that now stump me.
They can’t resolve the question
About heaven’s kingdom,
How far it lies if it lies within.
They’re only an hour or so in front
As they walk home after the concert,
Asking themselves what I’ll be asking soon,
Where exactly the music’s gone,
Whether the difference between what is and was
Is as vast as it seems and as final.
I’m walking their narrow trail across the country.
The embers of their fire are still warm
As I make my fire and snuggle in,
Happy, as I fall asleep, with the thought
That I’m keeping my true pace,
Not so slow that I lose them,
Not so quick that I pass them unawares.
When I’m lost, I know I’ve arrived
At the same spot where they were lost,
My wavering steps in the thicket
Proof of my loyalty, my tentative circles
Tramping their circles deep and clear.
Tuesday at First Presbyterian
Though he wheezes a little, and is stooped, and fat,
Our speaker this evening at First Presbyterian
Warms to his subject in the chilly church hall,
Not afraid to expose the greed of the big polluters
Or the sloth of the small. A man with a mission,
Who’s willing to take the planet under his wing
As he might an orphan, who deserves a poem in a high style
That can lift a lowly subject like recycling,
The use of trash as raw material.
The odds against his success are longer by far
Than the odds in many stretches of hexameter.
Whatever Odysseus does to charm a king and queen
Famous for courtesy as they linger over wine,
Reclining on couches in the marble banquet hall,
Is nothing compared to reaching us few in the pews
As we sit here fretting over colds, delinquent bills,
Problem children we have to run back to.
Ten minutes of facing us is enough
To make our speaker drift to an island
Farther than a sea nymph’s hideaway.
We can see him walking the beach collecting driftwood.
We can see him resting in the hut of a forester.
A note on the table points to jars of nuts and raisins
Cooling in the dark under the floorboards.
A map marks the secret path to the brook.
Just imagine the blessed few he wants to find there,
Kneeling by the clear pool, cupping their hands.
But now he’s rowing back to our church
To resume his lecture on mortal rivers
Flowing through fragile drainage basins.
For his sake we should pay attention,
If we can’t be moved directly by the water itself,
Slaking the thirst of us all, the just and unjust,
In smoky city streets and dusty farmlands.
The Window in Spring
These weed-grown car hulks rusting in my neighbor’s yard
Could be read as tokens of disdain for my neatness
Or as mere indifference to my feelings
If he weren’t civil in other ways,
If he didn’t take in my papers
When I go on vacation and forget to cancel.
When the eyesore rankles, I tell myself
He could be cooling his flesh with gloomy reminders
Like a hermit contemplating a skull
After the fall of Rome, killing off his hunger
For any abiding place on earth.
On my side of the fence, my garden
Already green, my apple trees and Japanese plums
Proclaim the triumph of husbandry
Dear to the yeomen of the republic,
Disciples of Jefferson.
I was the confident boy in grade school
Shouting the Pledge of Allegiance,
A natural patriot.
He may have been the nervous boy in back
Mouthing the words he couldn’t feel,
Destined from the first to be a stranger.
Could be there’s a cold mother behind him
Or an absent father, whose father in turn
Lost all he had in the Great Crash.
It’s a free country when two perspectives like ours
Live side by side without rancor.
No one strolling our block can complain of boredom
Or a lack of options. Door-to-door salesmen
Won’t prosper here unless they can vary their pitch,
Masters of many strategies, not merely one.
They tend to choose my house,
The house of a man who clearly cares about upkeep,
Gutters and siding, while my neighbor’s junkyard
Seems,
in its want of pretension,
Attractive to Witnesses for Jehovah,
Who come Sundays in pairs,
Bibles in hand, to fish for souls.
One of them could have been the girl in my grade school
Whose parents thought the Pledge a form of idolatry,
Who sat, hands folded tight, in silence.
If my parents had raised her, she’d be at home now
Weeding her flower garden or watching the news.
But here she is, or someone like her,
Venturing up my walk as the Bible commands.
She’s going to ask what truth I rely on
To save the world, and what’s my plan exactly
For convincing my neighbor he isn’t stranded in Sodom
With no escape car while the streets are burning.
Haven
It can’t be Athens, this town
We don’t inhabit but carry with us,
For here Socrates hasn’t been tried and silenced.
Here he’s still at his post on the curb,
Challenging any citizen who pretends
To be an expert on the good life.
And the young still gather to watch
As the proud man is discomfited.
But here, instead of vowing revenge,
As he might in Athens, the man feels grateful,
Eager to get home and report that fame
And power aren’t as interesting as confusion.
“What a day!” he mutters to himself,
Pausing at the grocery
For a gift of pomegranates and plums.
We can’t see his face as he waits in line,
But we know he’s happy, just as happy
As the brother of the grocery man
Who lives over the store in one bare room,
A saint who just this moment
Has shown his passions the door
But not with the rancor common in other regions,
Not with the hate.
He wishes them well, a good home elsewhere.
And now, in the sudden quiet, he sits on his bed
And leafs through the town bible for inspiration.
Why not the chapter where Ahab forgives the whale
Or the one where Lear decides not to divide
His kingdom after all but to dine with Cordelia
In the main hall, off the best plates?
“What should we do,” he asks, “with your sad sisters?”
Before she can answer, the saint jumps from his bed
And offers to walk the girls to the waterfront
And teach them how to hear the waves.
The sea that labors in other towns
Under a curse of silence seems here
To be waiting politely for the land to speak first.
And the land is clearing its throat to begin its solo
In a voice too gentle for us to catch
But not to praise.
Adventure
When we’re tired of adventure, there’s always Chekhov,
The challenge of a story like “A Journey by Cart,”
Where nothing happens that hasn’t happened
Hundreds of times to the heroine,
A schoolteacher for thirty years.
She’s made the monthly trip to the city in the provinces
And collected her salary, twenty rubles,
And now she’s on her way back.
Twenty pages without incident
On a long day’s bumpy journey by horse cart
To the ramshackle school, in the meager village,
Over a muddy road she knows too well.
Nothing happens to show her she’s wrong
For wishing she could have lived instead in Moscow,
City of her childhood, and never become a teacher.
Need forced her, not faith in the calling.
And what faith could have lasted anyway
Out here, where schools are forgotten?
Are we supposed to notice something she’s missing?
Is this a story where the heroine,
Preoccupied with her losses,
Fails to detect the delights available?
It’s spring, after all. The snow has almost melted.
The woods smell piny and the air is clear.
Can spring be a substitute for a friend,
For someone who listens?
The landowner splashing by on his horse,
Handsome and smiling, slows down to chat,
But he isn’t going to propose to her.
Their lives are too different, she sees,
And she’s too old. He seems to like things
Just as they are, unmended.
He could have paved the swampy road
If he’d wanted to.
The cart bumps along again and nobody’s different.
Even if we send her a hundred handbooks on charm
And she memorizes each one,
She’ll remain where she is, in the cart with the driver,
Stubborn Semyon, who refuses to keep to the road,
Despite her urgings, in his quest for shortcuts.
And again the cart bogs down and fills with water.
Again the sugar and flour she’s bought are ruined,
Her socks soaked and her feet numbed
By the time the roofs of the village edge into view.
“Don’t plod on like this. Start over again
In a city with real choices,” we’d call from our chairs
If we thought our voices could reach so far.
Now as she waits in the cart for a train to pass,
We want to believe she’s resigned and hardened.
Too bad she glimpses in a flashing window a face
With her mother’s high forehead and glossy hair.
That’s all it takes for Moscow to flood back,
The easy talk in the bright parlor,
The piano and the goldfish bowl,
The girl she was, still young and gaily dressed,
Awakened from a dream of thirty years.
And then the vision’s gone and the train.
And here’s the village. The story’s over.
Do we leave her there?
Do we let her go in alone
To light the stove in her frosty bedroom,
Our sister, who’s growing old with us,
Whose crossroads are all behind her?
We have to get back to Moscow,
To our family, to our friends who miss us.
From the window of the train we glimpse her
Huddled in the cart back at the crossing.
Any words of advice we think of shouting
She’s thought of long ago on her own.
Just time enough for a nod and a wave.
Then we sit back with the wish
She could read the story we’ve read
And see her life carried over into art,
Generous art where she’s the heroine.
The Bill of Rights
You’re free to imagine many lives
Though only one’s allowed your body,
The body you didn’t choose,
Small-boned and thin like Grampa Wheelock’s.
Among the songs your elders sang
You were free to pick the one you preferred
And sing it with your own inflections
To the baby sister you were asked to watch.
It was your decision to save half your summer pay
For the teachers college your uncle went to,
To see its closeness as an advantage.
You were free to walk home on the route you fancied
From Ferguson Elementary to the woman you chose,
The sweetheart with your sister’s long hair
And the dark eyes of Miss Gorse,
Your Latin teacher in high school,
Who told you you’d go far
If you learned to trust your feeli
ngs.
Nobody forced you to buy a house
Near the sycamore trees you climbed as a boy.
Its features pleased you most
Just as you’re pleased this sunny Sunday
To climb the ladder and clean the roof drains,
Scooping out mud and sycamore leaves.
And now you choose to pause in your work
And look out over the valley town.
There’s the Dalys’ slate roof
And the Hendersons’ shingles.
There’s the smokestack of the bottle plant
And the blue patch of the water tower.
This must be one of the vistas held out to you
Before you were born, one of the many
You were free to choose from.
And now you’re free to guess what spirit
Guided your pointing hand that day.
You’re free to wonder who whispered in your ear
As clearly as your daughters are calling now,
“Come down, Dad. Come down.”
They want to show you the flowers they found
Streaked like the ones you picked for them last fall
Behind the school you sent them to.
The Invalid
Today they’d have found a way to get me and my chair
Up the thirty steps of the high school, but then
It seemed impossible, as if the ramp had yet to be invented,
As if two strong boys couldn’t carry a skinny girl.
Hearts weren’t smaller back then; my friends were loyal.
They visited me at home just as you do now.
But imagination was more confined.
Even my parents couldn’t think of a way around it.
And I too learned to see it as a fate
I was foolish to complain against.
Of course I managed to learn at home
As much or more than my friends at school,
Scored higher on achievement tests,
Grew more curious about the world.
Still it seemed I was waving from the dock
While they sailed away to the future.
Now I know that metaphor was mistaken.
I too have traveled in spirit, though given the choice
To live again as I did or with one amendment
I’d choose to try my chances without the polio.