A Pot Falls in 2B

For a brain addled by the bedlam that comes with spring break in these parts, the imagination sometimes collapses under the storm of ruckus and clamor. What’s next? Will it be another rearrangement of the furniture overhead? A scrap at the shuffleboard court? Maybe a herd of eight children in clogs stampeding down five flights. I keep a notebook for scribbling random poems I come across here and there, poems that usually fit a particular mood or situation. Seems like without knowing it at the time, one day last December I copied a poem that fits spring break at the beach like a glove.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, poet James Tate has published seventeen books of poetry, most recently The Ghost Soldiers in 2009. He won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his collection Selected Poems, and in 1995 the National Book Award for Worshipful Company of Fletchers. For many years he has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Talking about the process of writing poetry, Tate has described how he plays with phrases clipped from newspaper articles, bits of history, anecdotes, or ordinary everyday speech, and through a process of assembling, cutting and pasting, attempts to put together a tightly written body of lines that will unveil a peculiar insight into the craziness of human nature.

“Flight” is from his 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Selected Poems.

FLIGHT

Like a glum cricket
the refrigerator is singing
and just as I am convinced

that it is the only noise
in the building, a pot falls
in 2B. The neighbors on

both sides of me suddenly
realize that they have not
made love to their wives

since 1947. The racket
multiplies. The man downhall
is teaching his dog to fly.

The fish are disgusted
and beat their heads blue
against the cold aquarium. I too

lose control and consider
the dust huddled in the corner
a threat to my endurance.

Were you here, we would not
tolerate mongrels in the air,
nor the conspiracies of dust.

We would drive all night,
your head tilted on my shoulder.
At dawn, I would nudge you

with my anxious fingers and say,
Already we are in Idaho.

Twice as Rich

A chilly day like our east coast Florida Friday seemed like the best of days practice some hospitality, to ask people in for a time of shelter, a stretch of warmth and a good plate of food. Had the demands of my day been different I might have done just that, but the best I could do this time was read about others opening their home and hearts to people living their days on the edge. In the poem “Bums at Breakfast” from his 1999 book, Traveling Light, poet David Wagoner recalls his boyhood days at a time his mother welcomed the homeless into her kitchen every morning, offering shelter from the rain or cold, a half hour of stovetop warmth and a plate of breakfast.

BUMS AT BREAKFAST

Daily, the bums sat down to eat in our kitchen.

They seemed to be whatever the day was like:

If it was hot or cold, they were hot or cold;

If it was wet, they came in dripping wet.

One left his snowy shoes on the back porch

But his socks stuck to the clean linoleum,

And one, when my mother led him to the sink,

Wrung out his hat instead of washing his hands.

My father said they’d made a mark on the house,

A hobo’s sign on the sidewalk, pointing the way.

I hunted everywhere, but never found it.

It must have said, “It’s only good in the morning—

When the husband’s out.” My father knew by heart

Lectures on Thrift and Doggedness,

But he was always either working or sleeping.

My mother didn’t know any advice.

They ate their food politely, with old hands,

Not looking around, and spoke in short, plain answers.

Sometimes they said what they’d been doing lately

Or told us what was wrong; but listening hard,

I broke their language into secret codes:

Their east meant west, their job meant walking and walking,

Their money meant danger, home meant running and hiding,

Their father and mother were different kinds of weather.

Dumbly, I watched them leave by the back door,

Their pockets empty as a ten-year-old’s;

Yet they looked twice as rich, being full of breakfast.

I carried mine like a lump all the way to school.

When I was growing hungry, where would they be?

None ever came twice. Never to lunch or dinner.

They were always starting fresh in the fresh morning.

I dreamed of days that stopped at the beginning.

David Wagoner was born in Ohio in 1926. In addition to twenty-two collections of poetry and ten novels, his work has appeared in Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, New Republic, Antioch Review and Prairie Schooner. Twice nominated for the National Book Award, the list of prizes and awards he has won is too long to include here. Considered by most to be a nature poet, Wagoner has been described as not writing as well about his human subjects. “Bums at Breakfast” with its rich characterization of homeless men sitting down for breakfast is surely enough to give the lie to that particular criticism. Wagoner lives in Bothell, Washington and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on Whidbey Island.

The Bright Altar

In my first year of high school my father bought a new car and decided that the old one would be handed over to me. At the time it didn’t seem like a groundbreaking event, but the significance of having a car all to myself began to grow and within a few weeks that old car had become the crucible of my teenage life, its four tires elevated to wings that lifted me to a whole new realm of freedom. Though he was not writing of cars and teenagers, Charles Dickens described it well: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light…it was the spring of hope.’

Returning to a later century, poet Stephen Dunn says it another way. Dunn is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning Different Hours. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, and the American Poetry Review. He has for many years been the Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. One poem from his 1989 book, Between Angels is about flying free, that part of youth that, car or not everyone can relate to. The poet has zeroed in on an experience most common to teenagers and their cars, but in a broader sense his poetry is a reflection of the social, cultural, and psychological territory of the American middle class.

THE SACRED

After the teacher asked if anyone had
a sacred place
and the students fidgeted and shrank

in their chairs, the most serious of them all
said it was his car,
being in it alone, his tape deck playing

things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth
had been spoken
and began speaking about their rooms,

their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,
the car in motion,
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

who understood the bright altar of the dashboard
and how far away
a car could take him from the need

to speak, or to answer, the key
in having a key
and putting it in, and going.

Walking Over Bridges

Something always brings me back to Charles Bukowski. It’s easy to get lost in a new book, to be caught in the pull of a new or unfamiliar writer, and for a few days lose sight of the familiar standards on the shelves around you, but in my case not too many days will pass before my eye returns to Bukowski. If we were not out of touch, I would thank for the third or fourth time the friend who introduced me to the writing of Charles Bukowski over twenty years ago.

Henry Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) was never one for failing to acknowledge the writers who were an influence in his life, either positive or negative. He was as easy with praise as he was with criticism both on the record and off. Among the writers that Bukowski admired were the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, Frenchman Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Americans John Fante and Sherwood Anderson.

Bukowski deeply admired Sherwood Anderson’s work. Writing about him in his journal-like book, The Captain is out to Lunch and the Sailors have Taken Over the Ship, he said, ‘I think Sherwood Anderson was one of the best at playing with words as if they were rocks, or bits of food to be eaten. He painted his words on paper. And they were so simple that you felt rushes of light, doors opening, walls glistening. You could see rugs and shoes and fingers. He had the words. Delightful. Yet, they were like bullets too. They could take you right out. Sherwood Anderson knew something, he had the instinct. Hemingway tried too hard.’ Talking about him near the end of his life Bukowski again praised Anderson, saying, “Sherwood Anderson knew something. He had the instinct.”

The poem below first appeared in Bukowski’s 1981 collection Dangling in the Tournefortia, and later in the posthumous collection, The Pleasures of the Damned, published in 2007.

ONE FOR SHERWOOD ANDERSON

sometimes I forget about him and his peculiar

innocence, almost idiotic, awkward and mawkish.

he liked walking over bridges and through cornfields.

tonight I think about him, the way the lines were,

one felt space between his lines, air

and he told it so the lines remained

carved there

something like van Gogh.

he took his time

looking about

sometimes running to save something.

then at other times giving it all away

he didn't understand Hemingway’s neon tattoo,

found Faulkner much too clever.

he was a midwestern hick

he took his time.

he was as far away from Fitzgerald as he was

from Paris.

he told stories and left the meaning open

and sometimes he told meaningless stories

because that was the way it was.

he told the same story again and again

and he never wrote a story that was unreadable.

and nobody ever talks about his life or

his death.

Anderson’s death was an unusual one. While eating the olive in his martini, he accidentally swallowed the toothpick on which the olive was speared. Death came as a result of peritonitis caused by a perforated colon.

Jar of Octopus

Dean Young’s latest collection of poems was published in April of this year, just days after he received a life-saving heart transplant. He currently holds the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas-Austin, and his 2005 collection Elegy on Toy Piano was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Fall Higher is the poet’s latest collection. Critics like to describe Young as a poet influenced by the New York School, a writer combining surrealism and experimentation. The poem below, “Changing Genres” is from Fall Higher. My particular attraction to the poem is its juxtaposition of love, the brief haiku form of seventeen syllables and thousand page novels in the vein of Dostoyevsky.

CHANGING GENRES

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,
jar of octopus, cuckoo’s cry, 5-7-5,
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping,
another 75 of what you think staring out
a window. I don’t care about the plot
although I suppose there will have to be one,
the usual separation of the lovers, turbulent
seas, danger of decommission in spite
of constant war, time in gulps and glitches
passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,
speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sled
outracing the wolves on the steppes, the huge
glittering ball where all that matters
is a kiss at the end of a dark hall.
At dawn the officers ride back to the garrison,
one without a glove, the entire last chapter
about a necklace that couldn’t be worn
inherited by a great-niece
along with the love letters bound in silk.

Grown-Up Conversation

A busy Friday and one keeping me away from home until late in the day. This is Octoberfest, a biker’s weekend in my part of the world, and the roads in a hundred mile radius are echoing with the roar of Harley Davidson motorcycles, and police passing out traffic violations as though they were raffle tickets for the big prize. Don’t be mislead to think it's a time of Hell’s Angels gone wild, because for the most part the huge crowd of visiting bikers are always polite, friendly and cooperative. Heard from someone that half of them are doctors and lawyers from out of state enjoying a long weekend of indulging their hobby.

Trouble free or not, a day of driving in and out of hundreds of motorcycles can be tiring, and the thought of coming home and closing my windows and doors to the celebrations was number one on my mind. For much of the day my thoughts kept returning off and on to a poem I read on The Writer’s Almanac earlier in the week, one by poet Charles Douthat. Difficult name, but correctly pronounced as Dow-set.

He is the author of a recent collection of poems titled Blue for Oceans, which is his debut collection. A native Californian, he graduated from Stanford University, and for the last thirty years has lived in Connecticut where he practices law. Poetry for Mr Douthat began as a diversion during a long mid-life illness. His work has been published in several magazines and journals and on several occasions featured on The Writer's Almanac. Blue for Oceans received the 2011 L.L.Winship/PEN New England Poetry Award for the best book of poetry by a New England author.

In one interview the poet said, “A poem is not a poem until it surprises me.” I had a good idea of his meaning when I read the poem below and discovered the surprise of the final line. Perhaps the writer’s surprise and my own surprise fail to converge, but I certainly understand what he means in suggesting that a poem should always contain a surprise. “Mrs. Miller” is taken from Blue for Oceans, and a link to booksellers offering the book is not included here because it is a hard one to lay hands on. Amazon offers a paperback copy for $200.00, but that seems a little steep.

MRS. MILLER

And to the south lived dear old Mrs. Miller,
the first next door neighbor I really knew.
A doctor’s widow. White-streaked, yellow hair.
With a nervous New York way of talking
though she’d lived out West for twenty years.

A grown daughter—Dorothy—lived with her,
worked somewhere, drove a red sports car.
Fruit trees grew behind their gabled house
and a crunching path of white crushed stone
ended at a Japanese-style fishpond.

I was tall enough then to climb the bamboo fence
and pull oranges from the tree that overhung
their pond. What fruit I couldn’t reach, fell.
In January, you’d see lazy, blurred goldfish
tailing beneath navels floating on the pond.

Saturdays, I’d wash Mrs. Miller’s Buick
with a bucket, soap and sponge. The fifteen cents
she paid was good money in ’61. Later, on the lanai,
she’d pour my coke, wave away her cigarette smoke,
and engage me in grown-up conversation.

“Since nothing ever goes according to plan,” she’d say,
“You’d think we’d figure out the plan.”
I was at most eleven. She was a drunk, I suppose.
Confused, but open-hearted. Lonely, of course.
The first person like me I’d known.

The painting included here is one of Douthat’s own. In addition to writing poetry and practicing law, he also paints. The cover of Blue for Oceans shows a detail of John Constable’s 1827 painting Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, a work similar in style to Douthat’s.

In Musty Light

The author of twelve collections of poetry and a Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Ted Kooser was the United States Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. His 2004 book of poems, Delights & Shadows won the Pulitzer Prize. Before settling down to write full-time he was a life insurance executive. About his poetry, Mr Kooser has said, “I write for other people with the hope that I can help them to see the wonderful things within their everyday experiences. In short, I want to show people how interesting the ordinary world can be if you pay attention.”

The poem below is from his 1985 book, One World at a Time, one which is often hard to find and more than likely expensive when it turns up. The best bet for getting this one is at a garage sale. Or maybe at the goodwill store. In a preface to his poem, the writer said: “I am a devotee of thrift shops and goodwill stores and garage sales and yard sales and so on, and have spent hours and hours in these places—I just love them, I can’t exactly say why. But the following poem describes the basement of a goodwill store in the way I’ve seen them many times.”

IN THE BASEMENT OF THE GOODWILL STORE

In musty light, in the thin brown air
of damp carpet, doll heads and rust,
beneath long rows of sharp footfalls
like nails in a lid, an old man stands
trying on glasses, lifting each pair
from the box like a glittering fish
and holding it up to the light
of a dirty bulb. Near him, a heap
of enameled pans as white as skulls
looms in the catacomb shadows,
and old toilets with dry red throats
cough up bouquets of curtain rods.

You’ve seen him somewhere before.
He's wearing the green leisure suit
you threw out with the garbage,
and the Christmas tie you hated,
and the ventilated wingtip shoes
you found in your father’s closet
and wore as a joke. And the glasses
which finally fit him, through which
he looks to see you looking back—
two mirrors which flash and glance—
are those through which one day
you too will look down over the years,
when you have grown old and thin
and no longer particular,
and the things you once thought
you were rid of forever
have taken you back in their arms.

Wondrously Multicolored

Once in a while childhood memories of Saturday afternoons in Baton Rouge float to the surface and I think back to those strolls down Third Street after a showing of Old Yeller or Jailhouse Rock at the Paramount, that aimless drift that sometimes carried us to the open doors of Woolworth’s. A store long gone, its aisles and smells are still anchored in some part of my brain awaiting the next spur.

The spark this time was a poem stumbled upon in one of the three Garrison Keillor anthologies, Good Poems for Hard Times, a poem by Minnesota poet Mark Irwin. It comes from Irwin’s 1996 collection, Quick, Now, Always and is titled “Woolworth’s.”

By way of introduction to readers unfamiliar with the name, Woolworth’s was one of the original American five-and-dime stores and one of the largest retail chains in the world during the twentieth century. It was one of the first American stores to put merchandise out for shoppers to handle and select without the assistance of a sales clerk. From 1913 until 1930 the Woolworth Building in New York was the tallest building in the world.

WOOLWORTH’S

Everything stands wondrously multicolored

and at attention in the always Christmas air.

What scent lingers unrecognizably

between that popcorn, grilled cheese sandwiches,

malted milkballs, and parakeets? Maybe you came here

in winter to buy your daughter a hamster

and were detained by the bin

of Multicolored Thongs, four pair

for a dollar. Maybe you came here to buy

some envelopes, the light blue par avion ones

with airplanes, but caught yourself, lost,

daydreaming, saying it’s too late over the glassy

diorama of cakes and pies. Maybe you came here

to buy a lampshade, the fake crimped

kind, and suddenly you remember

your grandmother, dead

twenty years, floating through the old

house like a curtain. Maybe you’re retired,

on Social Security, and came here for the Roast

Turkey Dinner or the Liver and Onions,

or just to stare into a black circle

of coffee and to get warm. Or maybe

the big church down the street is closed

now during the day, and you’re homeless and poor,

or you’re rich, or it doesn’t matter what you are

with a little loose change jangling in your pocket,

begging to be spent, because you wandered in

and somewhere between the bin of animal crackers

and the little zoo in the back of the store

you lost something, and because you came here

not to forget, but to remember to live.

Currently teaching at the University of Southern California, Mark Irwin divides his time between California and Colorado. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest in 2008.

About Flowers & Trains

Couple of poems to consider. Theodore Roethke is a name that eluded me for a long time, and of course that is my unfortunate loss. He is a prize winning poet with a considerable body of work spread over eleven collections of poetry, two of those written especially for children. His collection, The Waking was winner of the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Roethke had an often difficult life and died of a heart attack in 1963 at the age of 55. For many years before his death he battled severe depression sometimes causing hospitalization. At other times in his life alcohol was a problem, but through these difficulties he continued to write.

He was born in Saginaw, Michigan where he passed his childhood and youth in his uncle’s greenhouse observing the cycles of flowering life all around him, and it is easy to see this background in his work. Perhaps the outstanding characteristic of a Roethke poem is its rhythm and natural imagery.

Here are two of his poems, the first from a 1941 collection, Open House.

NIGHT JOURNEY

Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night.
To see the land I love.

The second is from his 1964 collection, The Far Field.

THE GERANIUM

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled,

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,

Or a wizened aster in late September,

I brought her back in again

For a new routine—

Vitamins, water, and whatever

Sustenance seemed sensible

At the time: she’d lived

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,

Her shriveled petals falling

On the faded carpet, the stale

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.

(Dried out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!—

The dumb dames shrieking half the night

or the two of us, alone, both seedy,

Me breathing booze at her,

She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me—

And that was scary—

So when that snuffling cretin of a maid

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,

I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,

I was that lonely.

Both poems are included in Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems.