The Giant Book of Poetry (2006)
Page 50
abandoned for years
overgrown with sumac and sour apple,
the iron scrapped, the wood long
gone for other things.
In summer my father would send us along them
to fetch the cows from the back pasture,
a long walk to a far off place it seemed
for boys so young. Lost again for a moment
in that simple place,
I fling apples from a stick and look for snakes
in the gullies. There is
a music to the past, the sweet tones
of perfect octaves
even though we know it was never so.
My father had to sell the farm in that near perfect time
and once old Al Shott
killed a six foot rattler on the tracks.
“And when the trolley was running,”
he said, “you could jump
her as she went by and ride all the way to Cleveland,
and oh,” he said, “what a time you could have there.”
Mark Turpin (b. 1953)
Before Groundbreak1
Off work and going upslope for a look
I left the plans—to see the view
their money bought—weighted with a rock,
and trampled a path of parted weeds
past pampas, nettles,
poison oak bristling in the breeze,
a weathered two-by-four
nailed high up in a cedar’s fork,
a haggard pair of panties waving stiffly from a thorn—
I walked where they would walk.
Standing there, out of breath, where
they would soon stand, vacuuming
or reaching for a towel—how bare
and graspable it will seem,
and ever-present, our time and effort spent.
Don Fargo & Sons2
Helpless to throw them away
or to use them unaltered,
for years he crossed out & Sons on the tiny invoice pads
from a cardboard box too tall
to fit beneath the seat.
His blackened mechanic’s hands
turning the slip of carbon.
At seventy, he needed help up
the site’s steep slope to the hoe.
Two laborers and him up
the loose hillside, or him by himself,
hauled by a cable from the loader’s winch,
grasped with grim embarrassment.
Then, arriving, he spat and pissed
onto the bucket of the hoe
before he climbed to the seat,
as all smiled. Tall, craggy, with
a big-voiced drawl, he learned
to operate a backhoe in Korea.
There was no gentleness, only
precision in the swing of the hoe
with Don in the seat as the arm
swung from pit to pile in flowing,
boxlike movement, dripping grease.
I recall the blandness of his look in the sun
as the bucket tore the ground we
stood on and the backhoe rocked.
I never asked if he loved his work,
or if a day’s glorious vulgarity
was why he still got up at seventy.
His gift was not seeming to try.
Jobsite Wind1
that rips paper from the walls
and changes plywood into sails
staggering a bent laborer with his load—
that curves string lines,
bounces grass and trees in gusts
and makes the stick-framed studs
above the ledger hum.
It searches all of us moving or standing still,
holding hammer or nailgun, our faces tight with cold
and hair wild. It searches us, leaning into the day,
for nothing we have,
buffets the unprotected
figure atop the wall and one stooped above
a half-framed floor
forcing blocks between the joists. Wakened
by the wind I drove deserted,
limb-wreck streets to the job
and found the roofless walls awash in wind,
thrashing like a ship
in webs of lumber and shadows waving
above raindark floors
laid purposeful with wood and nails.
Wind that threaded the trembling sticks of the house
driving plastic buckets down stairs, testing the corners
of a plywood stack,
smearing a dropcloth to a wall like a shroud—
that rolled out of the throat
of the world huge and articulate blasts—
And shoring spreadlegged,
watching my hand hammering
in rhythm to my breath, the world hidden
beyond the nailhead’s own demands
while inside a focused stillness intact and undisturbed
also incessant asked Who am I? Why this action?
What is this place I am in?
Pickwork1
There is skill to it,
how you hold your back all day, the dole
of force behind the stroke, the size of bite, where
to hit, and knowing
behind each swing a thousand others wait
in an eight-hour day.
And if the head
suddenly comes rattling down the handle:
knowing to drive a nail for a wedge
between the wood and the steel.
The inexperienced
pretend to see in the dirt a face they hate,
and exhaust themselves. The best
measure themselves against an arbitrary goal,
this much
before lunch, before break, before a drink of water,
and then
do it. Some listen to the pleasant ringing
of the pick, or music, and trance-like, follow the rhythm
of the swing. Once I spent a half-hour attentive
only to my muscles triggering into motion, sweat
creeping down my chest.
Ground makes the biggest difference.
In sandstone you feel the impact to your knees,
in mud you yank the point from the muck each throw.
The hardest part is not to let the rhythm fail,
like stopping too often to remeasure the depth, stalling
in the shithouse, losing self-respect,
or beginning to doubt:
Am I cutting too wide? Is the line still straight?
Or thinking of backhoes, more help, quibbling inches
with the boss.
On my job Lorenzo works in the sun all day,
his silver radio quietly tuned to the Mexican station.
Shoveling out, he shrugs and says, “No problem, Mark,”
waist-deep in the hole.
From the spot I work,
I hear the strike of his pick all day.
Driving home together
he has told me about his two black whores,
his ex and daughter in LA,
and Susan Nero, “on-stage.” Thirteen times
he’s seen her. Almost reverent,
he says, “She is so beautiful,”
and makes immense cups with his hands.
And driving home he has told me
of his landlord who extorts him
for the green card he doesn’t have, of his “mo-ther”
dying of cancer in Mexico city, of his son-of-a-bitch
dad who beat him, and her, and ran away,
of his brother Michael,
and JoaQuim, in Chicago, the Central Valley. In the car
he asks me if I think the boss
will hold half his pay, he needs
to save something for his sister
—I hear his pick all day
and in the afternoon I go out to ask him, how’s it going?
He shrugs me o
ff. “It’s no big problem, Mark.
No problem, I can do it, but the fucking pick is dull,”
and shows me the blunted steel point.
“I need something—
sharper, you know: I need a sharper pick.”
Poem1
What weakness of mind
gripped a moment’s meanness tighter
than his?—
stalling, reeling, retarding at the thought that
cupped the vision of the rope
actually smoking through his hands
—while elsewhere and peripheral,
a huge tree-limb plummeted.
The rope, as he observed it,
was not a thing, not an object,
but a slender field of havoc
twisted to a strand which, though he
opened the grasp of his hands from pain of it,
would not leave
his hands
(unless he thinks of something yet to do. )
But he did not—
not immediately, and later
he would raise his hands, and marvel,
grin, almost feel joy at recognition of that groove
the rope burned and furrowed across the flesh of each;
he could plainly see its path in blood, blisters,
and burnished skin
from finger to finger
as if it were something caught that was
rarely caught. He held his hands up as evidence of something.
Waiting for Lumber2
Somehow none of us knew exactly
what time it was supposed to come.
So there we were, all of us, five men
at how much an hour given to picking
at blades of grass, tossing pebbles
at the curb, with nothing in the space
between the two red cones, and no distant
downshift of a roaring truck grinding
steadily towards us uphill. Someone thought
maybe one of us should go back to town
to call, but no one did, and no one gave
the order to. It was as if each to himself
had called a kind of strike, brought a halt,
locked out any impulse back to work.
What was work in our lives anyway?
No one recalled a moment of saying yes
to hammer and saw, or anything else.
Each looked to the others for some defining
move—the way at lunch without a word
all would start to rise when the foreman
closed the lid of his lunchbox—but
none came. The senior of us leaned
against a peach tree marked for demolition,
seemed almost careful not to give a sign.
And I, as I am likely to do—and who
knows, but maybe we all were—beginning
to notice the others there, and ourselves
among them, as if we could be strangers suddenly,
like those few evenings we had chosen to meet
at some bar and appeared to each other
in our street clothes—that was the sense—
of a glass over another creature’s fate.
A hundred feet above our stillness
on the ground we could hear a breeze
that seemed to blow the moment past,
trifling with the leaves; we watched
a ranging hawk float past. It was the time
of morning when housewives return
alone from morning errands. Something
we had all witnessed a hundred times before,
but this time with new interest. And all of us
felt the slight loosening of the way things were,
as if working or not working were a matter
of choice, and who we were didn’t
matter, if not always, at least for that hour.
Kevin Hart (b. 1954)
The Room1
It is my house, and yet one room is locked.
The dark has taken root on all four walls.
It is a room where knots stare out from wood,
a room that turns its back on the whole house.
At night I hear the crickets list their griefs
and let an ancient peace come into me.
Sleep intercepts my prayer, and in the dark
the house turns slowly round its one closed room.
Molly Fisk (b. 1955)
Intrigue2
I love living in a town so small
it still has a noon whistle.
There is one stop sign,
four-way.
We have our own post office.
People here say hello
and they watch where your car is
at night,
not wanting to miss
a good story.
This makes me want
to park,
flagrantly,
outside the homes
of unsuspecting bachelors,
and lurk in the Parkside
over breakfast,
to hear news
of my own misbehavior.
I am perched
on the edge
of being familiar.
On the Disinclination to Scream1
If I had been a ten year old stranger
and you had tripped me in a dark alley, say,
downtown, instead of our mutual living room
I’m sure I would have screamed.
If, in the alley, you had straddled me as fast—
your knees clamping my elbows into asphalt,
not the blue Chinese dragons
of our living room rug,
I might have been Quiet there, too.
When you opened my mouth
with your heavy flat thumbs,
filled it with pain and flesh—
I would have choked in the alley,
as anyone would choke.
But if you had groaned then, and stood up,
walked away from the dark street
leaving me to vomit and shake alone,
I might have been saved.
I could describe you to policemen.
Perhaps their composite would match your photo
in the Harvard Reunion guide.
Your fingerprints, lifted from the collar of my dress,
might be found in Coast Guard files.
If they never found you and there was no trial
I could have gone home to people who loved me:
horrified, enraged, they would plot revenge
and rock me to sleep in soft arms.
I would have been frightened, maybe forever,
of alleys, strange men, and the dark—
but encouraged by the world,
who would hate you on my behalf.
I would have been as safe as a ten year old can be.
Instead, I rose quietly from the Chinese rug
and went upstairs to wash.
No sound escaped me.
I couldn’t afford to throw up,
and it wasn’t the first time.
The Dry Tortugas1
They were building a house in the Dry Tortugas,
less for the solitude there than the open eyes
of a swallowtailed hummingbird they had seen once
on a fishing trip—the early Fifties, he reeling in
an oversized yellowfin, Humphrey Bogart
facing the wind, one foot on the rail in To Have and Have Not,
she whistling the stuttered call
of the Amazonian kingfisher,
and singing in Spanish to flocks of Bonaparte gulls.
It comes to nothing in the end, though the land
is paced off and measured and two palms felled
to expand the view, a road graded the requisite mile,
and some of their friends fly down from New York
to surprise them, circle the islands all morning,
gleeful and chic
in their 4-seater Cessna
(he’s something exalted at Chase),
and later the bottles of Myer’s and Appleton Gold sweat
dark rings on the terrace flagstones,
and someone’s pink
lipstick makes delicate kissprints
along the rim of her glass.
No one has told me what happened—his heart
attack in Guatemala, her premonition about the wide
and empty view, or the world swinging in
with its usual brazen distractions—but they framed
the architect’s plans of the house, and this
is what I inherit, a rendering in colored pencil:
what they were dreaming before I was born.
William Roetzheim (b. 1955)
Response to Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!”1
We sat around a fire and drank Merlot,
a California wine called “Two Buck Chuck”
by those of us that shop at “Trader Joe’s.”
When someone asked, “If I had to be stuck
in Jimmy’s mountain cabin for a night
with anyone except my wife, who would
I choose?” I thought of you, images right
and verses tight with clarity I should
achieve but never will. But more, I want
you on the night you wrote this piece, the panted
words fresh from your pen. And lest God taunt
you for your wish I’d have the light be slanted
such that I appeared to be the one
inside your mind when this piece was begun.
Fading into Background1
The murmurs were the first to go,
those eavesdropped conversations
moving here and there within a crowded room.
And soon I lost discussions
from across a crowded table
at loud and boisterous weddings,
gone to background noise
like waterfalls, and for my part
just nods and smiles,
nothing but nods and smiles.
And then my wife as translator,
“What did she say?”
“What did he say?”
Until I found
it didn’t really matter what they said,
when nods and smiles will say enough.
Stretch Marks2
You lie beside me,
snoring lightly, nude and tan,
your breasts relaxed. My eyes are drawn
to spider webs of lacy white along