in the aftermath

On the 27th of April, a violent storm plowed a massive swath of destruction across the the Southeast. The cost in life is unspeakable, the cost in property is incalculable. The damage runs deep-- beyond the death toll, beyond the structures--into the psyche of those affected by the devastation; a depth I cannot fathom. As a poet, I could not help but be fascinated by such an event; the poetic mind is, I think, less creative than it is empathetic and less that than morbidly curious--if not as a whole, than at least for me. So in the aftermath of the storm--the news coverage, the horrifying images--of course I was compelled by my blinking cursor to say something. To make note of the event if not sense of it. But I knew I was no match for the cataclysm. Nature, as she often does, had left me nonplussed.

A couple of days passed. I took stock of the storm's disarray, hoping to find my way into some aspect of its horror (empathy) or beauty (curiosity). Then I remembered something I heard on the radio when the tornado was bushwhacking Tuscaloosa. The meteorologist had said something about the debris--how it was turning up in Birmingham, falling from the sky.

Then I wrote the following poem. It does not do justice to the storm. Because it can not. In fact, the storm is intentionally distant, ravaging elsewhere, juxtaposed with the relative calm of a flower garden. Because flower gardens, I can do. EF-4 tornadoes--not so much. This is still a work in progress (and please do chime in, if so inclined) but I thought I'd share it while it's fresh.

Debris

“ . . .soon in glory bright unclouded . . .”

Tornadoes came to Alabama—commemorative

Stamp of blasted timber, shattered homes.

Miles away, Eugenia transplanted bulbs

Of tulip. Each time she stood, her spine radiated

Tendrils of flame. Wincing, she spaded

The soil. Winds flexed and muscled trees.

Eugenia sang her favorite hymn.

“ . . . all my sins and grief to bear . . .”

Tornadoes ambushed Tuscaloosa, spun

Cars and children and motel receipts

From clandestine loves. Hailstones the size

Of tulip bulbs. “ . . . what a privilege to carry . . .”

A photo fell in Eugenia’s garden, worse

For the weather—torn and grimed, missing

The head of the man beside the woman

Who smiled a smile for the ages, eyes cinched

Against a flash in the offing.

Eugenia hummed an interlude, surveyed

The sky—white clouds and blue on blue.

“ . . . o, what peace we often forfeit . . .”

Eugenia resumed. The photo flew

On a gust. She reached but her back caught fire.

She passed an hour supine, watching mementos

Fall, blinking off incidental splats of rain.

Litter like ashes like weeds in her garden—

To be plucked and shoe-boxed just in case.

“ . . . blessed Savior thou hast promised . . . "

Tornadoes plowed, Eugenia sang. A smile for the ages

Flew—mile after mile on weakening gales.

in the woods

Ether,

Maybe you've noticed something by now. How could you not? It concerns the ilk of poet to which I, humble blogger in your immateriosphere, belong. If, that is, I belong at all. But membership is another issue, not for today. For today, I confess the readily apparent. I am of a lowly sort of poet. Much out of favor in modernity, to say nothing (except this) of post-modernity. But there are those who remain on the outskirts--simple, rustic folk we are. We luxuriate in decay; we wallow in wet-clay. A deer in the distance through sycamore and pine: we stop and watch. And watch. And only turn away when the deer does, never for boredom or haste. A sky turns lavender in remnant light: we return to lavender associations--other sunsets, other instances of loss and deep, deep longing, other bracings for night. We are the nature poets. Untimely? Yes. Unsophisticated? Often. Unnecessary? Perhaps. But we survive. On the outskirts. In the woods. Unshowered, unshaved, unkempt. Eyes wide in wonder, peeled for fear of missing something lovely or so densely ugly only loveliness remains.

In my years of writing poetry, I have regularly tried my bulksome hand at more delicate poetry. More refined poetry. Or poetry with more chutzpah. More damn-it-all verve. And at times, I still try. I see what's being published in fancy journals and I try to emulate. To see if I can. Can I be the sort of poet who dresses in his Sunday best? Can I be the sort whose mortarboard cap and tassel seem permanently donned? My pride says yes, of course. Surely I am qualified. But in the end I fail. And for a while I am sad. Woebegone and pitiful.

Then I spot the deer's white tail--distant but indeed. And I watch and watch. Until it turns to leave. Or until the sky turns lavender and I am transported to a place where I belong. Which, fortunately, is right where I am. I am a nature poet.

I say all of that as introduction to this little number I wrote yesterday. It's still rough around the edges, but you've also probably noticed by now that that is how my poems usually remain.

Making Way

March again, again greeted warmly.

Birdfeeder rocks on its wire, nodding,

Empty. Birdsong: Halloo, it’s March again.

Knock, knock—the flame-crested pecker.

March, come in. Please do.

It brings wine and early flowers—house-

Warming. Brown-yellow grasses,

Days numbered, sulk in pear-tree shadows.

Smokewhitebloom stench. Pear trees.

Lovely and sour. March. Not quite

Spring. A petal on the lip. Tongue-tipped.

Today’s lesson is flesh.

How to greet it warmly, when

To eat it madly. Birdsong: March,

How do? How do you do? Food

For the rocking feeder. Finches

Await. The squirrel awaits. Summer

Awaits. Spring, come in. Please do.

February fronts, hot on cold,

Storm swept

Acorn and sweet-gum ball,

Lingering, last leaves.

Way-made for purple clover tufts.

Way-made for ample rain. Tomorrow’s lesson

Is flesh, continued. A lip on the petal.

Finger-tipped tongue. How and when?

March, how do? Please do

Come in. Birdsong again, house-warming.

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.

of numbers and names

So now it's getting a little ridiculous. Beans and Pickles continue to grow leaving Scooter ever diminishing in comparison. And it's not cool that I am thinking of my cacti in terms of exponents and algebra. Let the growth of Scooter be x and the growth of Beans/ Pickles be x squared and the increments of development be equal to the time elapsed between blog updates on the growth of my cacti. Or something. I'm not a mathematician. Which, Ether, is why I'm here and not elsewhere. Well, that and jocose crows. Side note: I actually scored higher on my GREs in math than I did in language. Perhaps why so many English programs turned me down. Well, that and the B- undergrad GPA. Well, those and the weakness of my writing samples. Anyway. Yeah. And speaking of weak writing samples . . . BEHOLD THIS POST. Johnny's my name, Lackluster's my pain. [See track 28 on my little ditty widget below to the right for this realization in slapdash song.]

Oh yes, let me introduce you to my hyacinth--the purple butterflies seeming to flit about the top of the frames. What's that you ask? What's her name?
First of all, it's not a she it's an it. Secondly, therefore, she doesn't have a name. It doesn't, I mean. Why on earth would I name a plant? Next thing you know I'll have it talking, telling us of the vicissitudes of purplishness, the vagaries of rain and wind.

It will say . . . fine she will say . . . fine Calliope will say, "Johnny, lacklusterest of poets, ramshacklest of bloggers, listen as I whisper soft against the vines, gingerly through the cactus quills. There is a story in the veins of my leaves. A story of love purblind and purpose lost. And the cost of pennies flicked in wells for wishes ill-conceived."

But that would just be silly.

Silly and AWESOME.

in memory of Jeremy Lespi, my undeserved Keats.

Today, I honor a friend--hundreds of days too late but I fear tardiness is the least of my offenses. Because I lost him as a friend long before the world lost him for good. I made choices and I lost his trust. I made choices and I lost his voice. I made choices and I lost his words.

But recently, the words, at least, have been restored to me--delivered by the hands of his gracious sister Nicole. A gift the worth of which I could scarcely repay if she would even entertain the offer.

So, what can I say here, here in this modest forum, for what few eyes at odd times wander this way? Can I possibly say enough? Should I dare say a word? What words? Exactly, what words?

The question brings me back to Jeremy. Words. Those were the heads we banged and the bruises were no less real for being figurative. Me full of bombast and blurts, he full of meekness and subtleties. Between us in that dialectical dance, grew an ineffable intimacy comprehensible only in the viscera.

We were young poets, doing what young poets do--that is, discovering that poetry did not need us, we needed it. We needed it to excuse our penchant for looking at things through wonky glasses and to support the weight of unwieldy ideas.

And it was in those days, those two monumental years, that I was believed into being as a writer. Jeremy's belief in me turned into belief in myself. His sincerity, his devotion to the art--just as evident in his eyes as my own reflection--stood me up, dusted me off, and said get to work.

And so I wrote and blustered and spoiled my liver and along the way I made choices and lost my mentor, my nurse, my hero, my friend.

Years passed. In the meantime, he excelled as a scholar, had the soul of an explorer, and continued being what he had always been, even in the sonic-boom of my fleeting fame--he continued being the real poet. The poet with wider eyes. The poet with keener senses. The poet with more open arms. And, sadly, the one with the broken heart.

I continue to write. I've studied, I've engaged the craft, I've been tormented and delighted by the whimsy of words. But do as I can and try as I might, since the severance of our paths over ten years ago, my vision blurs when I look through those old wonky glasses and my back buckles beneath the ideas of my youth.

Three poems follow. The first was written in the days of our dance and alludes to a larger conversation between Jeremy and myself. A conversation typical of those unwieldy ones parsed beneath starry nights in Columbiana. The second was written within a week of his passing, the grief for which I rightfully suffered in silence. The third was written recently upon finishing Jeremy's posthumous collection Guard Your Speech and Letters: 30 Poems of Jeremy Lespi. [See sidebar for information on the book and regarding contributions to his legacy award.] I post these poems humbly and respectfully to honor his memory and share my heart.

To A Friend Before I Forget

Love’s tyranny is so complete that even when it’s gone

We’re scared to feel other things.

Where the sleight of hand becomes so slight

It neighbors real sorcery is where the poetry

Finally smells the animal musk of real life.

The lines that separate are dental floss thin.

Ready to cross at a moment’s indiscretion,

One fell tremor and we are in.

But being close is sometimes as good as being there

Because urgency’s more satisfying than achievement

Because as soon as you’re there--

The end zone, the championship, the heaven,

The fight is done and every purpose is wrung from the sponge of our toil,

Our stalactite patience crumbles from the ceiling and showers the ground

At our Undoer’s feet.

To a Friend, Though He’ll Never Know, but Before I Forget

Reminder: Love is blind, deaf, dumb,

Paraplegic and suffers migraines.

Suffers all in the paleness of cloudy

Days perhaps spent dancing

On the crumbling shoals.

Suffers the palpitant annoyances of its own

Decay. Like your heart,

Your real one. I loved

Your heart—your real one.

That flesh-fused, bleeding but briefly,

And eventually shit-headed, assassin

Heart of yours.

Love being what I said,

I hope mine only injured, never

Murdered. Because yours believed

Me into being. We danced the crumbling

Shoals and wetted our ankles in the creek, laughing

Because the lives we were speaking of were so

Obscene, humiliating, sacred, and deep dug down

through the heated core, down,

more deep down

Into the starry lake beneath.

Sestina for a Friend, Two Years Too Late

A melancholy comes with yellow-birds

That vanity swore we could lift with words

Accustomed more often to twisted shapes

And sentiments, more to what separates

The angles, by orders of magnitude,

At the extremes of our hypotenuse.

I call our growth apart, Hypotenuse—

The yawning of us since the yellow-birds

Came whistling of sadness’s magnitude.

With notebooks on our laps like infants, words

Like colicky complaints, we separates,

Once one, began to form our disparate shapes.

Of all that fashions and of all that shapes,

What most will lengthen the hypotenuse

Is the sobriety that separates

The wasted poets from the yellow-birds.

Such subtler creatures, unlike wasted words,

Disguise the barrenness of magnitude

With seeming praise for that same magnitude.

With their color, with their songs, with their shapes—

Each argue the case well. Funny, no words

Are called for. Funny, no hypotenuse

Can threaten the feathers of yellow-birds.

They fly unconscious of what separates,

Unbridled by the yokes we separates,

Then one, once mistook for mere magnitude—

The lachrymal bond of those yellow-birds.

Recall it was the day you showed me shapes

That poems can make, the hypotenuse

One forms by slowing the rhythm of words.

But it was not what we said (not our words

Scratched on flimsy paper) that separates

Us now. This widening hypotenuse,

Our overestimated magnitude

Propelled into eternity, now shapes

The heart-bursting song of yellow-birds

Into a magnitude of blathered words.

Hypotenuse separates mirrored shapes

and along its length are the yellow-birds.