(Years ago I saw portions of an old b/w foreign film—which I seem to remember was made in Czechoslovakia—on a small television screen with very poor reception. Between static and blur, I was able to discern only a few images and almost none of the subtitles, so the poems became a way of finishing for me a narrative that the film triggered. Because I’ve been unable to locate the name of a film that would match the details I do remember, I sometimes wonder if I didn’t just dream the whole sequence.)
THREE POEMS FOR MY FATHER (from THE BOOK UNDER THE STAIRS)
I.
The Shepherd, Czechoslovakia
A winged white robe wanders the fields
calling the dog who calls the sheep
Calling and calling A man swirling
under the fog gathering his sheep
The wheels of his white-tented wagon
rest stilled in the field’s mud At night
his whistles rise through tears in the cloth
of what drapes him What drapes him
is the field’s fleece What stays
with him is the sound of the dog
circling his wagon
and then circling his sheep
The bottle that keeps him is never empty
and his bed is a pillow of feathers
and wool Night filters out through fog
stirs morning from sleep
and the man rises wrapped in white sets out
across the fields his figure translucent
against the fog and the sky
and the circling waves of sheep.
II.
The Man and His House
A man on his knees is building his house.
He climbs the steps to where his door will be,
knee after knee,
building each step as he climbs.
His world is a sea of grass swirling behind his shoulders,
and the room he builds here will be bare
except for the globed eyes of the fish he keeps
and his own low darting shadow.
This man whose legs were crushed long ago
beneath a tractor—for years now he goes on
dragging two ghost limbs behind him,
a wooden pallet tied to each knee
as he propels himself into the day
across the mud-rutted yard
and pulls open
the gate next to the horse stall,
lets out the sheep and cows,
then hoists himself
to press with a stick
the latch of the pigeons’ roost.
The man is moving.
His day is a prolonged slap and kiss with the ground.
The furrows of his field fill with his sweat.
Grass sweeps to the strain of his muscles.
III.
A Man and His Pipe
When he finishes drinking
in one long slug
the jug of fermented liquid something
he brewed from heads of flowers
or fistfuls of grain
he found in the field
he pours oil down the neck of his hand-carved pipe
then holding it to his lips
he sounds a call into the pine woods behind the kitchen
and his is the cry of metal scraping against stone
of the harrow dragging over
the hidden boulder it rises
from the throat of a man who can’t remember
how to sing wheezes and screeches
up from his lungs squeezing through
what space his throat will allow struggling
as it forces itself slowly
into the forest’s dampest corners—
I am here, it sounds, I am here.
What Was Useful
A little money stashed away in the basement’s red wooden box
or hidden inside the worn shoe’s lining—
a little money layered between obits and want ads— stacks of Popular
Mechanics interwoven with receipts long-forgotten.
Between the sheets, Love and Will added no interest
to a Chilton’s Catalog of Parts and Accessories;
a little money to accumulate, banked into dust underneath the bed—
slipper to slipper—a small fleet of barges gliding the river.
But nothing useful radiated from inside her Imitation of Christ,
and the Emily D led only to anger.
What’s lost is lost among the folded, crumbling maps—how to navigate
grids of streets and the old neighborhood churches falling apart
from McKeesport to Erie, how to locate the narrowest alley, a place
where Mikula’s Progressive Czech could be traded for Warhola’s little money.
Thank you for getting me out, I want to say to myself, to whoever will listen,
for saving the tiny wads of cash like damp tissues stuffed far into the sofa.
There was never enough little money to strike a match to, when the markets and butchers
no longer flourished, and under the garage’s dim shop lights, his brakes went on
bleeding. Just hurry east, someone said out loud,
and I heard it.
(originally published in Blast Furnace; Spring, 2011)
The Girl with Snow in Her Hair
for Paola, in memoriam
Here is a picture so quiet almost no one can see it.
Inside the frame winter swirls white and fixed
at the center, a girl’s head and shoulders are held
still and straight—
seen from behind, the curve of her hair
falls to rest
against her back like the drape of a silken black veil
mantled with snow.
Beyond her, the tips of the yard’s far trees
have for the moment shaken free
from their white
and they wave a row of tired faraway hands
toward the slanted blue-gray line of the street lamp pole.
This is the first time she has ever seen snow
here in the North,
and the picture she wants her brother to take of her
is this one—
the dark net of her hair catching the sky
as it falls
in a dazzling white to rest on her head,
each strand of hair first brushed, then smoothed into place.
It is what we have left to remember—
her face turned from us
and her eyes wide open
to what swirls silent and white,
and waits, still hidden, before us.
(originally published in ANON 6)
After
a meditation on the light in the Avignon Pieta
Because even in death there are spikes of light
that radiate from you
like spokes of a sun wheel in the sky’s black tent
so that I can see your yellow skin
that is drawn tight
across bone, across thigh and foot, lit
beneath the motion of sparks from your head: the welder’s mask,
a glass eye, a bridge.
I can see wherever you are
as you wear it, the thin winter field’s ochre grasses
crisscrossed with shadows,
or a creek in moonlight, its green currents
swarming with fish; even when I stand guard
over my own ribs’ broken cathedral, I can still see you.
(originally published in Ekphrasis, A Poetry Journal; Spring/Summer, 2008)