outside in gambols

Here lies a confessional piece. I wrote it last year sometime to commemorate an epoch of literal powerlessness in my life. Before I wrote this poem (as indicated in the first two lines) I had written very little in the way of direct acknowledgment of my on again off again struggle with incapacitation. Since I wrote this poem, I have written more freely (at times more pathetically--allowing myself the occasional wail of self-pity) of my tenebrous condition.

Because such poems are practically and rightfully poor stuff for at-large publication, my little blog here makes for a decent outlet.

The Playground

I have not said enough of the bed

Or the five weeks I spent there

Daily funneling through the slender

Middle of an hourglass

until the end when all of me

Had settled in the bottom.

Five weeks and I’ve only a few lines

To show for it. The comforter—ha!—

Was red, faded from use and ultraviolet

Rays. Windows are crap for stopping

Light and no great conquerors

Of playground sounds either.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

The great triumph of some days—

Crawling to the bathroom; the white

Flag of most days—pissing in a bottle.

Family bought CDs of jokes, L’Amour,

Music interposed on lapping waves.

For calmness. For calmness slows

Funneling grit. That was the theory.

At last, I lost my mind. Five weeks

Finding shapes in the ceiling:

Horses, mostly, horses on a carousel

Without poles, without children—

They were all outside in gambols.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

What else? It’s important

To be forthright. As I gathered

At the bottom, pinned by the Wrestler,

Watching my million grains cascade

Upon me. Me in the third person—

Out of body because in of it reeks

Of sweat, fear, the last several meals

And unwashed armpits. To be forthright.

It’s important. What else? Envy.

Sadness. Radish-bitter daydreams,

This one of many: Me in a tree,

Limbs like a ladder, up and up.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

Sometimes, I sang. I’ve written

Hundreds of songs but none

Of them came to mind. I sang the hymns

Of my youth. God on a horse

On the ceiling, me and the comforter—

Faded, stitched together; it cannot

Budge beneath me, I cannot rise

Above it, we are each others’ jailer.

No bars. Just keys. Jangling

From the ceiling. Do I remember

Any psalms? The twenty-third, is all.

It’s enough. For an hour. Then not even close.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

in prep for summer

Here's a poem that first appeared in my thesis and subsequently in The White Pelican Review. Pasted here for your encouragement if it happens to be close to home.

Ratio in Drought

The reservoir recedes. The shore

Is fishing lures and mussel shells.

In sorghum muck the heron stalks

A glimmering of fish. She knees

Along her way in snapshots while

Her crook of neck uncoils to meet

The spot where she’ll be next.

With waders hitched above his gut,

A thin man floats a feathered fly

Into a cranny dimpled

By invisible mosquitoes.

A twelve-deep stack of notices

At home, a tumor in his young

Son’s head, he comes to cast and jig,

To swallow the fist in his throat.

A bass erupts through gathered froth

And pauses, still-life for a blink,

Then flops, darts for waters cool

Beneath the jutting bluffs. The man

Is happy for the miss, the chance

To try again. The bird ascends.

A bloated, tallow-bellied cloud

Slugs in the distance—steady, slow.

smell of absence

Here's one I wrote a couple of years ago. I'm in the mood of it right now and it's coincidentally seasonal. It occurs to me that I may have posted this one before which causes it to occur to me that I should create an archive list for the poems I have included in this blog. Look for said list in an upcoming page with links to the original posts. (Because I just know some of you have favorites that you would like to read again and again and again and again.) So, whether for the second time or the first, here is . . .

Grandfather After Nineteen Years

I knew you in the grocery aisles,

In the butchery bloody with steak.

I found you in the back counting boxes

Of cereal, at the register frowning.

I remember your store for its smell

Of absence when the fluorescents

Fizzed out like soda and the placard

On the door was flipped to Closed.

In the house underneath, when the den

Was dark with Christmas lights,

You called for your rifle and fired

Into the Blue Ridge foothills.

Deaf, I waited for the moment

To make sense. Needing the toilet,

Not daring to budge. Your scope

Brought me close to the beast—

The struggle up, the final buckle,

And also, now I know, the fragmented

Whole of our meantime lives:

Each malaise and renaissance,

Each –ectomy, suture, and December

Ever since. And always—ears pricked,

listening—the preserved and looming

Bust of the eight-point buck,

Its dead eyes following me.

cigars in heaven

In the beginning, there were Tolkien and Lewis. My early guides into the dank underground of fiends and fell beasts. Into the perilous realms of myth and faith and fairytale. Into the crannies of my own imagination. Sure there were the abridged [gasp and shame] editions of Cooper, Stevenson, Twain, Defoe, Dumas, et. al., and the uninhibited goofiness of Seuss and Silverstein, and the apprenticeship to Encyclopedia Brown, and the commiseration of another fourth-grade nothing, and espionage with one Harriet M. Welsch, and more, for sure; but it was in the Shire in conference with a wizard that I first felt the true, osmotic warmth of fiction's fire; it was in Narnia over tea with Mr. Tumnus that I knew, more than almost anything else, that my name was Lucy and I was fond of the flute. Soporifically fond.

In short, I am here for having been in those places. My enthusiasm for literature would likely have dwindled soon if not for the early and abiding influence of those two ingenious dons. Perhaps, I would have never returned to unabridged editions of those illustrated classics. Perhaps, I would never have mucked through the marshes of Dickens or raced through the heather of Hardy--those two later heroes of mine. And here's a thought, by what road then, if not for them, would I have arrived in front of this screen. Writing because I too am a writer now, if I may be so audacious in the vicinity of these other names.

I wonder if I'd've ever found my way here. Then again, such is the nature of all of our choices. That is, they uncannily result in actuality. Or so it seems. Though there is some dispute as to the existential before and after of it all, the which-of-my-choices-were-mine-after-all of it all. So who knows, really. I am only guessing that I would not be here. Here in your face, specifically. More generally, here in my face. What laughter lines do I owe the bumbling Samwise Gamgee, what furrows were plowed when Aslan was slain? Even if those particular lines have been erased, re-scrawled, and erased again since then; it was surely those lines that first taught my flesh to wrinkle at words.

I am of this mind presently because today is Lewis' birthday. A fact I do not claim to have secure in my head by devices mnemonic or repetitious. A fact I was treated to by my desk calender. Thanks, desk calender. It is a fun fact indeed and colors my cockles rosy. The fellow would be 112 by now. Had his mortal heart been as lasting as his legacy. Had anachronisms not been liquidated in That Hideous Strength. (Best Chapter Title Ever, BTW--The Liquidation of Anachronisms. That phrase alone could have kept me thrilled with literature for a plenty long time.)

Though we are not always on the same page, Clives Staples (best name ever, btw) and I, he will always be half of my holy duo. Beyond his fictions, I will always admire his faith in the unflinching face of reason and reality. Through his personal grief, he learned the approximate weight of the world's sorrow and bore it out on pages before us that we might feel, by reading mere words, some lightening of our own heavy loads. He said what we wanted to say about God--what we should say if not for want of a candor willing to broach the blasphemous. What a fine apologist, old Jack. Commitment in surfeit. Against all claims of experience. An "intolerable" doctrine of Hell, admittedly repugnant and "detestable" but nonetheless justified as moral. No problem. A heaven populated by unrecognizable family and friends yet more joyous than the sensational loves of them all combined. Sure. Why not?

Now doesn't this all sound great. In fact, thanks to you, Jack, it does. Happy birthday, Mr. Lewis. I hope you were wrong about heaven. I hope "there are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored."

this is not the poem's title, the title is below

Blood

First to grandmother’s, whose grief is refined,

Weathered, that is to say, on the other side of the family,

To eat late and hear the story of our lives—and how she “just laughed

And laughed and laughed” when so and so

Did such and such,

To occupy her room occupied by a ghost

Charmed within picture frames—silver, dusty.

To Bristol. Bristol to Roanoke.

A forgotten beauty, that is to say, lost in the mines

Of unrefined remembrances,

The quilt of late October laid

To warm the foothills. A drive worth the drive.

Hours, if given back, which would be re-spent identically.

A fast-food meeting with grandfather, whose grief

Is engrained—ravined and veined—in the skin,

Laden in eyelids. Arby’s. Freezing.

Could they turn down the air? Sorry but no.

Life’s refrain is restraint, apology, coda. With feeling.

Our little caravan stops at a church. Out we pile and stretch and moan.

If they got ‘em, uncles and step-aunts are smoking.

Children of cousins duck behind cars. Bashful—a word,

Come to think of it, only uttered on occasions

Like this. Like this:

So many hugs, I lose count. Fewer tears but still many.

Mostly smiles, faint recognitions, empathetic nods.

Songs—favorites of the pain-free man in ashes,

Traces of morphine, maybe, but certainly no trace of need—picked

And strummed as he would have done,

As he once showed me how.

A dinner of sandwiches after.

Hugs of departure. Lumped throats. The usual,

That is to say, the common way for strange

Days like this.

Turning for home, the Peaks of Otter,

Scapulas of blue earth in early evening,

Heave into the sky where the Hunter’s Moon

Exsanguinates all else.

going home

I was born in Lynchburg, Virginia. Small town then. Smallish now. Besides being my birthplace and its atrocious name, it is probably best known for its intrepid cleric--one Jerry Falwell and his more reasonable extension, Liberty University.

The year was 1975. The month was December. The day was the fourteenth of thirty-one--not quite middling.

Within a couple of years, I left Lynchburg behind for the larger town of Richmond where I spent ten years bicycling, shoplifting, collecting baseball cards, playing a variety of tags, whining, and being average at sports, above average at school, and below average at having friends--which was fine because I had a big brother and, before long, three little ones. Life, on average, was good. And, as it turns out (having witnessed and heard-tell of other lives) far, far too good for complaints.

Today, I am leaving for Lynchburg. My birthplace. For a funeral. Too easily ironic to elaborate the irony. In fact, I am troubled to find that my feelings about the trip are ones of alternating hesitation and resignation.

But why? Well . . . I suppose there's my natural aversion to dolor and its wont of sucking one into its melancholic juices, there to marinate until dour, until sour with thoughts of one's own mortality. Thoughts I've overthought already. Already having brushes near enough to taste. (In my experience, that particular taste is sweet, the moment calm, the resignation so pure as to obviate all hesitation. But this irony too is almost too blah to mention.)

What else? Well . . . there's the fact that the uncle for whom the bell tolled is the one I've interacted with the least over the years. (35 since 1975 [he calculated unnecessarily]). So there's a sense that among the nearer family members I will feel somehow unworthy of bereavement. That somehow, when I go to hug a cousin or an aunt, there will be a coolness in my touch that bespeaks my absence from their lives. On one hand, this is a bogus thought. An imaginary exclusion. But on the other hand, I believe there is something to it. Not a bad thing and certainly not a good thing but just a thing. A thing that makes you feel that way without offering excuse or implicating its agency. Just an icky, unavoidable thing.

Anything more? Not much. I'm not a fan of the shrinkray of adulthood. The redoubtable influence of time over matter. The squish of youth beneath the heels of experience. The verdant football yard now barely a swatch of brown grass.

Oh, and I hate, with a capital HATE, car trips. Anything over thirty minutes really sticks in my craw--which is saying a lot because otherwise I have no craw to speak of for all that I know. Craws are like the appendices that way. Unnoticeable until molested. In that case, craws are also like one's feeling upon going home. Not just for a funeral but for an encounter with the living. The rest of us. The flesh-wrapped skeletons, still warm from birth.

something altogether peaceful

I have been in a prosy state of mind over the last week. Re-reading my novel. (Which, by the way, gets worse every time I read it. It's like there are little elves that skitter and twitter and make my manuscript sucky when I'm not looking. I really wish they would just help me with my cobbling.) Then I got a story accepted for publication which gave me a glimmer of hope, fiction-wise; so I've been skittering and twittering and attempting to make other short-stories less sucky. Add my quotidian, prosaic lifestyle to the mix and you've got a prosy state of mind.

That said, here's another fiction excerpt from a story called "Wet Cement." There are two narrative tracks that interweave as the story progresses. Both follow Nathan--as an adult in the past tense and as a child in present tense. The excerpt is an example of the latter. I should also mention that in the present tense, the narrator is given a juvenile voice. It is less evident here than elsewhere. But still, you should know it's intentional; otherwise, you might think me a tad silly. (Or more silly as the case may very well be.)

Simon is Nathan's older brother. Murphy is Simon's oafish friend. Dottie is Simon's girlfriend. The foursome have gathered at a forbidden rope-swing as naughty children will and, in an ill-advised grasp at glory, Nathan finds himself in a spot of bother.

Nathan is hanging from the rope like a horse thief. An idiot horse thief who had been trying to impress Simon’s girlfriend with a circus feat. Only he had underestimated, truth is, everything. He didn’t stop for one second to think what a knuckleheaded thing to even think about. Never mind shoving off the bank and actually doing it.

Murphy is laughing like all get out. Dottie, at least, is telling him to shut up. Someone help him. He’s dying.

Dying? Nathan is dying. What a thought for him. What a pitiful life flashes in front of his eyes. Not even all of it. Just that first time they actually caught Big Bertha and didn’t know how to unhook a catfish, only that there was a special way. That’s what he sees as he hangs, swinging, gasping—him and Simon toting the croaking fish that flopped like mad all the way home for Father to unhook. Nathan is vaguely aware of efforts to rescue him, shouts, wild and fearful. He’s on the verge of something pale, something altogether peaceful. He smiles, drooling, at the image of Father’s disembodied head looking over the back of the sofa at he and Simon and the dripping, croaking, flopping fish. Father looks happy to see them and not like they are going to get whipped for bringing a fish in the house. Mother’s head pops up beside Father’s, to see what there is too see. They’re grinning like kids. Like naughty kids.

Nathan is brought back to panic with a huge, long gasp. Simon yells, “You gotta reach, Natty. You’ll die if you don’t.” On tip-toes and not so steady, Simon stretches a branch towards Nathan’s hands.

Nathan reaches and barely grips the branch. Simon pulls him back to the bank of the gully. He has saved Nathan’s life. For happening so quick, it sure took forever.

“Your face is purple, moron,” Simon says.

This hurts about worse than choking. Being right about to hug his brother out of trembling gratitude and then stiff-armed with a “moron” to the face. He shrugs like no biggie but it is a biggie. It’s a hugie. He had almost died. He is full of love and boiling with hatred. So confusing, still dizzy. He will not cry. He will not cry. Dottie asks him if he is all right and he busts like a dam.

Murphy opens his fat mouth, no doubt to be a giant jerk-wad, some wise crack about the swing or the tears or both. But Simon stops him.

“Just shut up about it, Murph. How’d you like me to send you to the gallows.”

“Like to see you try.”

“Like to see you stop me.” And Simon chases Murphy down the tracks toward Sycamore Street. Nathan is left with Snotty Dottie who’s not so snotty now that she has so recently begged for his rescue.

The two older boys continue on, punching each other in the arm. When they reach the road, they turn left down the Sled Hill.

“They’re going to Finnegan’s Hollow, I bet.” Dottie’s voice surprises Nathan. He had been hoping they could just walk, no talking.

“Sure,” he says, meaning who knows what.

“Were you scared? I mean when you were up there, back there?”

Nathan feels his lip doing that lip thing when you are about to cry after you had already been crying enough. He manages, “Nah.” Like he’s some big tough guy. Like she was not a first-hand witness to the whole blubbery freak-show.

“I was scared,” Dottie says. Her voice is like his mom’s, like Mary’s, he imagines. It coats his insides like Pepto in those commercials. He knows his face is on fire and just looks ahead. His lip has stopped that thing and now he can’t grit the goofy grin out of his cheeks. She says, “Hey Nathan,” not Natty but Nathan, and he stops and turns smack into her puckered lips. They are silky wet like milk and her gloss tastes strawberry. Strawberry milk. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh man.