Three poems from my forthcoming sixteenth collection, What Shines, due from from Four Way Books in September.
Standard Time
… skateboarding’s values have always appealed to those who consider themselves somewhat outside of society’s regular pace.
–GQ
We just got a photograph of a grandson, cherubic, at the local skate park.
His smile shows he’s pleased to have been adopted by the older so-called thrashers,
though he hasn’t yet learned like them to be tough as nails, or to look that way.
I’m not sure why I think of Buster,
except that his toughness is real. He too looks incongruously cherubic,
though I wouldn’t tell him that, and if I did, he might not know
what I meant. He also might not like my explanation, and then
I’d wish I had somewhere else to go,
and quickly. I passed him today. He was mowing a lawn. If he hadn’t been,
he might have been digging a grave or tuning his pickup or maybe splitting
some wealthier neighbor’s firewood for winter. I’ve never asked, of course,
but Buster– or so at least I’m guessing–
doesn’t consider himself a rebel, though he did quit the highway department
ten days before he’d have been entitled to a pension. He was that pissed off
at his foreman’s high-handed conduct, and I would certainly call that rebellion.
Buster’s face is weather-buffed,
which lessens the cherub effect, I grant you. The kid to our grandson’s right
has a skull tattoo on one arm, and barbed wire inked around his neck.
He shows a nasty expression. Whereas the bill of his hat points backward,
Buster’s bill points dead ahead.
I notice the scowling, tattooed thrasher is stripped to the waist, whereas Buster
as ever had on the shirt that laborers seem to wear all over:
collared, Army-surplus green, with blotches of sweat at his armpits
and on his back from shoulder to shoulder.
Buster, I think, embodies the meaning of what’s called eking out.
When I passed him this afternoon, the light was dying, because it’s November.
I know something better than I did at the age of those boarders, half-naked and surly,
let alone of my grandson– or even Buster:
that the cold comes on at a pace nobody can keep outside of forever,
and the darkness shows up early.
Omen
Wingbeats at the window
snap me out of the torpor
of my minor springtime sorrow.
A blast of desire, not wholly
carnal, not wholly not,
suddenly overcomes me:
I’m almost 80– and lovestruck.
What can that have to do
with a cardinal’s frenzied attack
on his likeness there in the pane?
Bright bird, I see that you’re jealous
–of what? You’re at it again,
enraged. Small wonder you’re scarlet.
Listen: you’re only alone.
Aloneness. Somehow I feel it.
A small bird’s futile ardor
brings on a premonition.
My love’s in the bedroom, dear reader,
and I picture my world’s perdition.
Mere Humans
Tink shouted, “Did you hear my bad news?” I turned
from bucking up firewood and killed the engine.
How different he looked, our tough old bantam
neighbor– a rascal, but stolid as stone.
Here stood a suddenly tinier version.
No one in town would believe he’d cry.
Things had to be bad. He told me why:
“Mike’s gone. Some business called... aneurism.”
I caught my breath. Mike? His grandson?
Fallen at forty. Tink and Polly
had practically raised him up from a schoolboy.
(There were troubles with the in-between generation).
Tink’s gone, but I see him back twenty years,
red oak sawdust pooled at his feet.
I still can’t believe he actually weeps.
Two-stroke exhaust smoke loiters on air,
no matter I’ve choked the saw dead quiet.
Mosquitoes strafe us. I somehow recall
Mike passing in front of our house last fall,
trailed by the 6-point buck he’s shot.
Two flecks of blood have dried on one cheek,
and in spite of November’s chill, he sweats
from dragging that whitetail out of our woods.
For years he’s been bigger than Grandpa Tink.
So is the deer. (Mike will give our family
good venison backstrap later that autumn.)
Who’d predict I’ll go over to Tink and hug him?
Not even I. It’s surprising he lets me.
How long does he soak my shoulder like this?
Long enough, it seems, for me to sense
something like splendor in this awkward clench
by which I’ll always feel shocked and blessed.
A common thread running through the three poems?
Would the following analogy work?
Engines come in all types. As oil is the universal lubricant necessary for most engines to work smoothly, toughness is the quality making it possible for all manners of simplicity or difficulty to transpire. From this perspective, the grandson who looks upon his newly found thrasher friends with approbation is himself seemingly looked upon with approval as going in the right "mentors" to learn this essential trait for life that he otherwise might not find exposure to in his environment. The scowl and profane expression of the young thrasher with a defensive attitude that he is going to need so badly to quell threats to his own hegemony in his environment is seemingly viewed with sympathy, understanding and condolence.
Butch and the red cardinal have authentic chutzpah (if not essential “other” wherewithal and where the thrasher’s exhibit is yet for show, not real) to intimidate any would-be challengers into submission even before they’d contemplate threaten. And tough Tink has gone through life with no one in the town ever thinking him capable of tears (on one level laudable) yet he has understandable breakdown and weeps uncontrollably and inconsolably on the poet’s shoulder (a testimony to his own humanity) when his boy prematurely dies of an aneurism.
In this way, all three poems would seem to share a common respect for the toughness shown to survive in their respective environments even when the “intellectual” element (the poems point out) may otherwise be lacking. Toughness is the universal oil needed to navigate the difficulties and hardships of life and its approbation seems to be a common theme seen in all three poems.
A point I’d make is that though the poet is himself many times over, and to the highest degree, a man of letters, he has yet the humanness and compassion to (the cardinal poem omitted here for understandable reasons of exclusion) to be non-judgemental about the life style and chosen decisions made by the non-literary among his neighbors and those who are or would be laborers found amongst them through sweat eking out a living; and accepts them on equal footing as human beings standing on the same ground as he and his family. I think this acceptance of others is among the chosen about as rare as Goldilocks’ coins.
Thanks for the three poems--compact, powerful storytelling. Always wide awake to life.
I'll send you one now.