Two poems from my volume HERE (2019)
As ever, I don’t know how to fix the poems’ formats. The first is in six-line stanzas, with a single line at the end. The second alternates three- and four-line stanzas, also with a single concluding line.
Gooka-mol
To watch that band of vultures
coast along their thermal this morning
is to marvel at elegance and composure.
There’s no need to repress old platitudes
about the birds as tokens
of doom. I don’t even take up the notion,
or rather, if I did,
I’d imagine the doom of some woodland creature.
No, why not be honest? My mind’s on our dog.
Just last week, the vet saw a bulge
she didn’t like on his chest.
Tomorrow she’ll cut it out. At a loss,
I think of the vultures’ circling.
I think of etymology,
how some people call those birds revolting,
which literally means they turn us away,
how vulture itself in fact
derives from the verb for turn in Latin.
I’m thinking, you see, of whatever
has nothing to do with a horrible illness.
Shrecklich, I name it, recalling my grandmother’s
Pennsylvania Dutch locutions,
which I probably can’t even spell.
Sometimes she’d cry out Gooka-mol,
which signified Let me see.
Cancer’s taken far too many
beings who’ve shared their lives with me.
The dog has set my mind on this course,
and I think to myself, Gooka-mol,
as the string of birds slips over a knoll.
Where have they gone? I can’t say.
From the height that the birds command, I might
look down on someone behaving this way
and simply conclude, The man is crazy.
It’s only a pet, after all,
and the world’s still wide and rich and lovely.
Granted. It is. Sometimes. Gooka-mol.
Fire and Jewel
Eighty-foot hemlock, spruce, fir, pine–
They kept lifting off their stumps like so many rockets,
smoke-trails and all. And I
beheld the fire cross-lake from where I drifted.
I’d been plumbing the water for fish when my eyes were lifted.
Fifty years later, I still recall my thoughts,
and how I felt that to think them was more than odd:
I was glad I had faculties to behold
the hill’s astonishing orange heat as it flared
to white with each explosion,
then the whole of the conflagration bending toward earth,
a horizontal wall, a monolith
that somehow tore downhill in a sudden fury
of wind. It was gorgeous. Several hours would go by
till I learned Earl Bailey was forced to fly
as quickly as he could on his ’dozer down
from the ridge right into Farm Cove.
He just had to take the loss. It was that or burn.
Donald Chambers, wielding an axe in his turn
with the makeshift crew, collapsed from labor and heat.
Paul the storekeeper dragged him away by his feet.
I knew Don, sadly, just a few more years.
He and Earl and Paul: good honest men.
I can’t account for dreams
like the one last night when I watched that fire again.
In what seemed again pure quiet, serene,
the same jetliner as years ago crossed high.
The same scent rose– torched needles, caustic smoke.
The same evil roar came on as I rocked
in the same canoe, the waves still slapping its hull.
In an hour, five decades back,
the length of that ridgeline turned the color of onyx.
The latest of my wife’s birthdays will soon be upon us.
Is that why the dream passed smoothly into the next one?
I saw, precisely, a beautiful onyx stone,
hung on her breast from a slip of chain.
I’d never dreamt such a woman as that hillside blackened,
wouldn’t meet her for years. Today,
I drove to a jewelry shop, as if still dreaming.
Three hundred miles to the west of that little mountain,
I bought the necklace, and felt some fire in my being,
mild version of one that kindled in that old autumn,
which has for a long time, underground, kept burning.
These two poems by Sydney Lea demonstrate remarkable skill in weaving together the mundane and the profound, creating layered meditations on mortality, beauty, and memory.
"Gooka-mol" exhibits several striking virtues:
The poem's associative logic feels natural and earned - moving from vultures to a dog's medical condition to memories of a grandmother's dialect. This mimics how the anxious mind actually works, jumping between connections in ways that seem random but reveal deeper patterns.
Lea's etymological exploration of "revolting" and "vulture" (both connected to turning) adds intellectual depth while remaining emotionally grounded. The wordplay isn't merely clever - it reflects the speaker's desperate attempt to turn away from worry through language itself.
The Pennsylvania Dutch phrase "Gooka-mol" (Let me see) becomes a powerful refrain that transforms throughout the poem. It begins as simple remembrance but evolves into a prayer-like utterance about perception, acceptance, and the limits of what we can know or control.
The ending is particularly masterful - acknowledging both the relative insignificance of a pet's illness ("It's only a pet, after all") while honoring the genuine emotional weight of loving any mortal creature.
"Fire and Jewel" showcases different but equally impressive strengths:
The poem demonstrates Lea's gift for precise, visceral imagery - those trees "lifting off their stumps like so many rockets" captures both the violence and strange beauty of destruction. The progression from orange to white heat shows careful attention to physical detail.
The ethical complexity here is notable - the speaker admits finding the fire "gorgeous" while fully acknowledging the human cost (Earl Bailey's losses, Donald Chambers' collapse). This honest admission of aesthetic pleasure in destruction feels psychologically true and morally complicated.
The temporal structure is sophisticated, moving between the original event, a dream 50 years later, and the present action of buying jewelry. This compression of time mirrors how memory works - certain moments remain vivid across decades.
The final image of underground fire that keeps burning becomes a perfect metaphor for how formative experiences continue to shape us. The connection between destructive fire and the "fire in my being" when buying the necklace suggests how beauty and loss, creation and destruction, remain intertwined.
Both poems share Lea's gift for grounded transcendence - finding the spiritual within the everyday without pretension. His line breaks and stanza structures feel organic rather than forced, and he trusts readers to make connections without over-explaining. These are mature poems that honor both intellectual complexity and emotional truth.
What wonderful poems, both quite moving.
Your first reminds me of my visit to a conservation facility in South Africa for vultures and other endangered wildlife. To see these animals up close is to be in awe of their size. Not only are they not good-looking, they also make a terrible mess of their environment. They are of this world, nonetheless.