What Shines? and others

The initial entry in this tetrad, originally published in The Alaska Quarterly, is the title poem of my forthcoming (February /23) fifteenth collection. The other three are spanking new.

                   What Shines?

Astonishing, this never-ending effort

to have had a happy childhood. Why does it matter

now, why will yourself into all that forgetting?

She may have been a good mother– at least she tried.

Did she? Once again, you’re the one who’s trying.        

You contend you do remember moments that glow:

You picture her standing one day in the snow, her teeth

in a chatter, no doubt, and yet she looked quite cheerful–

or she seemed to be trying. As you are. The teeth at least

were one good feature, radiant to the end.

You were poised at the top of a hill on a Flexible Flyer,

red sled that shone, your Christmas present at nine.

It may have brought you joy. You’re trying to alter

the down-slope rush, to make it shiny too,

to forget the icicles of snot, the raw 

fingers, chilblains. Pain. A father was there,

a good man, you’ve always believed, who’s now no more

than a specter, whose presence is no more advantageous

than on that day. Or was it of some avail?

You can’t remember. You honestly can’t remember. 

Perhaps you just don’t want to. You’re doing well–

at least you’re trying– with this, your obstinate bid

to winnow the damage and see if there’s anything more

than just the sorrow. Well, there were certain instants. 

 

You say, I remember stones. You say, I saw

a beach by moonlight. And did those pebbles glint

like stars, as you insist? Are you quite sure 

clouds never came to eclipse them? You keep on trying.

There’s that pervasive gleam along the shore.

Then you take a step and suddenly there’s nothing

   Innocence and Experience

First warm spring day. A melody

pours from someone’s window.

Unlike me, the player is young:

notes stutter from that piano,

   the music more moving for that, of course.

   The child’s youth hurtles away

at daunting speed, which the player won’t sense

until a later day.

Up through thick foliage of village trees,

plink plink plink.

The tune is one whose author and name

I used to know– I think.  

                      A Stranded Moose

Having stopped to tow a woman out of a mud-season ditch,

I came home, kicked off my boots, and brewed a cup of coffee.

Oh, how gallant I’d been. Oh, how easy my life is.

I recalled from this incident a moose’s fix last fall.               

She’d stood shoulder-deep in the bog at the southerly end of Long Pond.

Now a car in the mud is one thing, a foundered moose another.

She was helpless, paralytic. Fish and Game came out

with block and tackle. Futile. They couldn’t even reach her.

Should nature have taken its course, as sentimentalists say?

Well, the officers shot her dead and left her there for the ravens.

I can almost hear their words. “There was nothing else we could do.”

I’m glad that she didn’t live on to drown in the muck. What a death.

Forget your Disney movies: nature’s exquisitely cruel.

The great head dropped to the water, a hole behind each eye,  

her foot-long dewlap splayed among the pickerelweed.

The dark, ever-garrulous birds started to gather right off.  

I say so. I wasn’t there. The only part of that moose

I ever saw was her ribcage, almost eight months later

when I came to paddle the pond for what’s called recreation.

I recreate from some bones what I figure must have unfolded.

How close am I to the truth? I haven’t asked anyone.

The poet in me, you see, is always in search of a subject,

the more dramatic the better. Musing’s often my muse,

to give it a fancy name. Such a pompous inclination–

it may be male egotism, this craving to play a role:

hero, or maybe begetter.  Whatever you do, don’t trust me.

I don’t even trust myself as imagination gallops

from one inventive sham right on to another one.

I may be driving along and the whups of pavement seams

– to choose something wholly at random– will trigger a memory,

maybe a bass drum’s thump in a jazz club back in my twenties.

And if it doesn’t in fact, who’ll stop me from saying it does?

Whatever the prompt may be, I’ll wrangle associations.

Can anyone else be pleased by such brazenly willful scheming?

Are ethics even involved? I claw at justification,

for fear I’ll get bogged down, like that poor cow moose last autumn.

   

               School Dance

...the traditional maxims of old ... have often so little effect on the conduct of life, because their meaning is never... really felt, until personal experience has brought it home.

–S.T. Coleridge

In the ancient photo, its yellow corners curled,

an adolescent grins. In the room behind him,

there’s a quaint Victrola, needle flush with the vinyl.

Who took the picture? Who knows? I found it by chance

at the recycling center, among the mountains of paper.  

                    

Someone else’s trash might have covered it over

or I might have left it there in the bin, of course.

But I brought it home. Whatever my motive, I’ve studied

the image over and over, more than its due.

Its due, if I think about it, was likely none.

But I’m always grateful to have my imagination

sparked in whatever way, and the picture serves.

I see the boy at school. Long day. In his final class,

he was half-asleep and only came awake

to watch the lips of a cranky old English teacher.

Amazing. They actually quivered as he read

from a book called A Farewell to Arms, in which a woman

dies in childbirth and breaks her lover’s heart

and boo hoo hoo. A ray of sunshine slants

from an unseen window above our youngster’s head.

It glints off the phonograph record, which doubtless blares

some early rock n roll, perhaps by Fats

or Jerry Lee. “I’m Walkin,” maybe, or maybe

“Great Balls of Fire.” He knows he should be excited:

he and some friends will all be getting together

for the dance tonight at school. But he sighs and wonders

if he really wants to go. He curses acne.

His best friend Billy, whose dad is constantly sloshed,

will smuggle in liquor, thank God. It may provide

our hero the courage to walk right up to a girl

and ask for a dance. A slow one. He won’t dare

to jitterbug till he’s drunker. He’ll be waiting

for tunes like “Eddie, My Love.” The cautious embrace

of a slow dance may help him sense which partner, if any,

finds him funny or “cute.” A gulp or two of liquor

will make him another person, or so he hopes. 

He’ll shuck the shyness and avoid cliché

in character and speech. Am I the one

I remember here? Who else? That guy in the picture–

he’ll be disillusioned, out of his league. Again.

To borrow a shopworn phrase, I stood in his shoes,

ones he’ll do his best to keep from stomping

on his partner’s shoes, an effort that may well fail.

But even if he could dance like Fred Astaire,

things wouldn’t change. No matter how cool he plays it,

.

even before he gets there, he envisions

some apple of his eye who’ll lead him on,

then drop him like a hot potato. That tune:

it’s trite and he’s heard it before and vodka won’t help him.

Would anyone blame her? he breathes. Is it over the top

to tell you the poor kid’s little heart will be broken?

Go ahead, scoff.  But the poor kid’s heart will be broken.