Rift of Light

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by William Logan


  The leg leapt forward on its own.

  They also called it a tomahawk hammer.

  My Father in the Shadows

  Mute in drink,

  my father scraped a fork across the dinner plate.

  Vermouth slouched in the cabinet.

  The rotting Morgan had been auctioned off.

  Bills layered his desk

  like drafts of snow.

  The house on Private Road in escrow,

  its blowsy, prize-winning horse chestnut

  cast off dandruff blossoms

  that shrouded a swatch of lawn.

  I’ve seen the satellite photo.

  The new house verged on a ravine.

  Something dead lay at the bottom.

  The new kitchen was a galley

  with a wobbly floor.

  He had taken to pissing in crystal dinner-goblets.

  Out the window,

  the crocus’s hairy eye

  watched the snail-like progress of the snail,

  but nothing stung him to words again.

  There, on the desk, he had propped the Kodak

  of my mother, feathered hat askew,

  grinning like a demon

  with a bald baby in her arms.

  Mary Sowle

  The butternut curl of honeysuckle spent

  its somnolent perfumes.

  Bees yellowed with pollen hung heavily

  in summer’s clotted air, when with our fellows

  we gathered before the orb-weaver

  to watch it do battle

  with the Japanese beetle,

  the first time I heard the phrase “Pyrrhic victory.”

  Was Mary Sowle

  not unlike a spider, harboring the web

  of some 1920s secret we were too young to know?

  Only the memory, or half a memory,

  of the graying brunette—bewigged?—

  in that seaside village

  troubles my recollection of the grass-verged macadam

  that brought our houses formally together,

  hers Gothic and in need of paint.

  Down the road, the Methodists plied their trade

  on bended knee, harmonizing to the blue firmament

  I recognize now as populated with judgment.

  The vanity of it! Those accusing looks!

  The Mail

  The cock’s tail, cocked up, enameled—

  so, the red flag on the steel mailbox

  standing sentry by our stone wall,

  the mail waiting to be pulled out

  like an egg! Ah, wrong. Neighbors kept hens;

  we waited for bills. Father had taken

  to country ways, the gentleman

  farmer with his one vacant field,

  mown every year on Labor Day.

  Who was he then, ten years home

  from a war on the U.S.S.

  Something-or-Other? Why not hole up

  far from the head office

  in a fishing village where every farm

  had been seeded with arrowheads,

  home to some Tripp or Sowle

  whose father’s father’s father

  lay in his grave

  beside his father’s father’s father’s father?

  The town’s two-room schoolhouse

  had a witch for a principal,

  a kindly witch; and one of the Sowles

  swept it out every afternoon,

  lining up oak desks as if with a ruler.

  I was too young for a letter.

  I watched the red cock’s tail

  with the patience of a hawk.

  The Box Kite

  The lift, the very lift and pull of it!

  They’d wasted the summer morning,

  father and son in the devil’s

  breath of July—gnats wheedling

  madly above the drive—pasting Sunday comics

  across the struts, like the canvas skin

  of a Sopwith Camel. Into the close-gnawn yard

  with its humpback boulder,

  they dragged it triumphantly, unreeling the twine

  until the contraption yanked itself

  from bald earth, high above

  the matchbox houses by the sweetly reeking bog,

  beneath the shadow of woods,

  to a height where a boy might peer over the horizon

  to Boston—and beyond, the ocean.

  The son was my father. I tottered at his legs,

  having borrowed his name and my grandfather’s.

  They paid out the ramshackle affair

  until it became a postage stamp. The line

  burned a bloody groove into my palms,

  the last time they stood at ease with each other.

  On the Banks of the Allegheny

  We had started over again—

  an unpainted house with the new Chevy in the drive,

  the model with the push-button transmission.

  The lots were new. Rich brown

  like expensive leather, the fresh turds

  nested in the unseeded lawn,

  shivering with inner life,

  the maggots squirming wildly toward the light.

  The Other Other Country

  I wrote you a brief but rather dull letter.

  —T. S. Eliot

  The days bled alabaster,

  the nothing of sky over Paradise,

  where the original sin was weather.

  Did they miss the wildness

  of the palms, the angels

  who brought breakfast on tea trays?

  Each dawn would be a palimpsest

  of storms almost forgotten,

  humiliation, love.

  The Other Life

  I possessed a secret life: the seedy coastal town,

  the shuttered colonial of twining hallways,

  a wife with the flaring prettiness

  of my mother, a smudge-mouthed child or two.

  Awake, I never thought of that other life.

  The two existed in mutual ignorance,

  until one night the rough fields

  and the volatile scent of my wife—my wife!—

  with her Liz Taylor grin, her shock

  of blond hair, rose from the smell

  of my real garden. Had I died in my sleep,

  I might have woken to that new life,

  ignorant of what I had lost,

  if indeed anything had been lost—

  like the phosphorescent wake

  trailing a swimmer in the bay.

  My secret left the faintest trace:

  the Atlantic over the dunes,

  the north flecked with the fall

  that is fall. One day the dream was gone,

  had been gone some months,

  like a gas flame blown out.

  Mysteries of the Armchair

  News of the world lay in the rain.

  Maple leaves fell, pre-foxed,

  as if stored for decades on library shelves.

  The horse chestnuts had been oiled,

  their waxy polish glowing

  like the Madonna in the Portuguese church

  up the harbor. Immaculate, without sin,

  by winter they burned with mildew.

  His fedora and trench coat damp in the closet,

  Father in his armchair with an icy dry-martini

  quarreled with the rose-trellised wallpaper.

  Mother stood locked in the kitchen—

  the terra cognita of canned vegetables,

  pearly slabs of swordfish, the heaving

  paper sack in whic
h two ill-tempered lobsters

  brooded over their death sentence.

  Sonnet

  All is confusion. Much is understood,

  lost in the fractured hour the freezing wind

  took to its silences, as in a wood

  where automatic birds live dumb and blind.

  Where is the hardship in such holiness?

  Like the idea of God, or just the soul,

  the beatitude of things lives on unseen.

  Where did she go, the girl in the see-through dress?

  Her open blouse, her razor, her window screen—

  those partial partial things that made us whole.

  Descending into Philadelphia

  The chalk fields hung,

  new snow planing away

  all but stick-like trees

  that fringed the blistered

  stone walls, fatally unbalanced,

  and the worn-out hose of black river.

  The sovereign touch—that, that

  too, proved a short fuse.

  They were just toys,

  the first rates and tall ships.

  Cod balls, the disillusions of wine—

  such the bill of fare

  laid by, the iron beams

  underpinning the Quaker

  easements of conscience.

  The plain man constitutes

  my argument with history.

  The Schuylkill lost its flocks

  of mournful birds feeding

  on politics, its “pontifical works.”

  In the Gallery of the Ordinary

  In their excess, their blowsy dreaming

  and King Solomon–like tempers, the clouds

  possessed the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils,

  when a painter earned his profession

  as an anatomist. Those artists of verdigris

  and gamboge, too gorged on joy, perhaps,

  treated that blank pasture of the “heavens”

  like something that had lived.

  Their crawly undoings remind us

  of the mean curiosities of sheep, the sea’s

  half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls

  of cotton—the morning phosphorescent

  or sunset a dull, worn-out gilt.

  The nights there were scumbled with light.

  How could we ever have taken them

  for the abstinence of art?

  Sunday Out

  The rain day’s a muddy blur in the foreground,

  a John Crome elbowed into color,

  frayed at the edges. The sublime rests like laid paper.

  The lawns as well. The hours are translucent,

  truculent, slipped onto the day’s page

  like the thinnest washes. Nature is the one thing

  the Christian surrenders to the Lucretian.

  The Field

  The field was more a painting than a field,

  the flowers oily in their despairing freshness

  and, beyond, the scumble of jack pines,

  the thumbed portion of stream. Along the stone wall,

  a child’s version of a wall, shocks of knee-grass

  rose like lightning. We might have lived

  in some summer-watercolorist’s summer,

  the afternoon like other afternoons

  gathering in that field, arguing with that sky,

  as if there were nothing to be done.

  Sea Turtles

  And there they were, sandy, armored,

  clawing their way from beach potholes,

  one with a fragment of egg stuck to his head.

  The ocean lay exhausted,

  a blue sheet feathered with froth,

  working its businesslike way toward the dunes,

  as if it had an appointment never to be met.

  Baby waves fanned across the sand,

  touched in by a painter in eyelash-dashes—

  frayed and silvery. How damp and glittery

  they looked, the sea turtles! They tumbled forth,

  jerky as Chaplin or Harold Lloyd—

  and stumped from step to step,

  like rusty trucks bumping over a corduroy road.

  On the horizon, the blot of a container ship

  muscled along, running hours late,

  or years, if it were owned by Zeno.

  The sea lay always before them.

  My Grandfather’s Second Wife to My Father, 1958

  Don, dearest,

  Please, please don’t think ill of me.

  I never wanted to break up our dear home,

  but I couldn’t see

  the least turn for the better

  after all your father’s “accidents.”

  The poor guy will never change

  so long as some floozie begs to be his crutch.

  All alcoholics

  hit bottom sooner or later.

  From there, they master it or perish.

  That dope just never wised up.

  I feel a real heel being so tough on him.

  You tell me you think

  you got through to him. Hardy-har!

  Don’t buy that stuff for a minute, Don.

  He’d promise you Red China

  to get out of a jam. When a college man

  can’t support himself,

  that’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

  Your dad goes about telling his pals

  I took him for every dime.

  He spent everything he could draw, and then some.

  His bosses got smart—

  he never ever worked past noon,

  those months at Buffalo Electric.

  No wonder you were so glad

  to pull out of Cleveland. The further away

  you stay, the better.

  For God’s sake, don’t write him a word

  or you’ll never get rid of the fool—

  that guy can be so darned sweet

  when he needs to salve his poor wounded conscience.

  Send me a letter

  at my daughter’s—the landlady

  goes through my things when I’m down to work.

  Nights I’m playing the desk clerk

  at the old Lakeshore Hotel. You know the place.

  We use brand-new bills—

  boy, I’d love a stack of those things!

  They think I’m a widow—otherwise

  no one would give me a chance.

  Don, I know I’ve landed in a real bad spot.

  I’ve lost twenty pounds

  since skulking back home to Cleveland.

  To think I wanted to get thinner!

  Love, Marion

  Christmas Trees

  How should I now recall

  the icy lace of the pane

  like a sheet of cellophane,

  or the skies of alcohol

  poured over the saltbox town?

  On that stony New England tableau,

  the halo of falling snow

  glared like a waxy crown.

  Through blue frozen lots

  my giant parents strolled,

  wrapped tight against the cold

  like woolen Argonauts,

  searching for that tall

  perfection of Scotch pine

  from the hundreds laid in line

  like the dead at Guadalcanal.

  The clapboard village aglow

  that starry stark December

  I barely now remember,

  or the brutish ache of snow

  burning my face like quicklime.

  Yet one thing was still missing.

  I saw my
parents kissing,

  perhaps for the last time.

  Snow

  How did we come to this cold place?

  It is not listed on the maps.

  The cold has disarranged your face.

  These memories are not ours, perhaps.

  But still we must pretend to know

  the reason for things as they are.

  We do not recognize the snow.

  Perhaps that makes us what we are.

  The Servants’ Stairs

  Always in that back corner,

  the paint peeling like burned skin,

  and the flight that by some hard twist

  brought the pockmarked maid

  stumbling into the kitchen,

  where we gave our faces to the fire.

  IV

  Louise Brooks

  Certain memories, uncertain,

  and bearing toward gentle impoverishment—

  Brooks, I mean, of the bow mouth

  and ink-rimmed eye, the raccoon’s

  calculating, injured stare,

  and a black coiffure like an Achaean helmet.

  There were few like her along the Niobrara.

  The End of the Road

  Satan stood on the viaduct, suffering laryngitis.

  We lived the squalor of the ordinary,

  mouth to mouth in those old-school towns

  where the dogs still wore collars;

  and the preachers, dog collars.

  Gold tipped the cattails in the marshes.

  A cellophane spread over the fresh pond.

  The rusty sores of oaks lingered into spring.

  There were other, harsher deadlines,

  not that we knew the cost of perfection,

  or where to go once we had reached the end.

  The Pheasant in His Empires

  The fesaunt, skornere of the cok by nyghte.

  —Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowles

  The laser of English sunlight

  etches the yellow rape,

  heating the stranger’s eye

  to thoughts of mild escape

  to lonely unkempt moors,

  the cankered rose of Blake’s

 

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