The Crunch is the Thing

In April of last year I remarked in these pages that poet Dorianne Laux has affected me more strongly than any poet I have read in some time. Nine months later that feeling is much the same. Dorianne Laux is a magical poet and continues to be under-appreciated and under-read; she deserves a wider audience. Sunday was a day I decided to reread her latest book of poems published last year, The Book of Men.

As well as this most recent, her work includes Facts About the Moon (2005), Smoke (2000), What We Carry (1994) and Awake (1990). Facts About the Moon was a recipient of the Oregon Book Award and also chosen as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the collection Awake was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. One of Ms Laux’s peers, the poet Tony Hoagland said about her work, “Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion.” Laux lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University. The poem below is from her latest collection, The Book of Men.

Though it does not speak of rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood or sexual love, “A Short History of the Apple” is evidence of the poet’s range.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE APPLE

The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through

living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days. — Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.

Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.

Eve’s knees ground in the dirt

of paradise. Newton watching

gravity happen. The history

of apples in each starry core,

every papery chamber’s bright

bitter seed. Woody stem

an infant tree. William Tell

and his lucky arrow. Orchards

of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.

Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.

Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.

Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.

The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.

Snow White with poison on her lips.

The buried blades of Halloween.

Budding and grafting. John Chapman

in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward

Expansion. Apple pie. American

as. Hard cider. Winter banana.

Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet

by hives of Britain’s honeybees:

white man’s flies. O eat. O eat.

For more poems from The Book of Men look here and here and here.

Metz is Alive for Now

Earlier in the year Scriblets featured poems on two occasions from a collection published in February titled, The Book of Men. By way of an introduction for this third sampling from that collection, nothing could be better than a direct quote of poet B.F. Fairchild writing for the book’s inside flap…

‘In the emergency room, I read The Book of Men, then hand it to my wife, who is wired to a couple of machines. She says, “Oh my, these are wonderful,” and I agree and think, yes, these are poems for the people of planet Earth, for those who wait tables in Juneau, Alaska, in order to buy a bed, who go off to war in place of those who send them, for whom gold is the ‘color of mold in the broken refrigerator’ rather than a smart investment, and for whom language crafted to speak truly and memorably of such things is a kind of salvation. In The Book of Men our recognition of a drifting world brought to the hard edge of meaning is immediate and enduring and makes us grateful once again for poetry’s capacity for rescue. I read “Staff Sgt. Metz” to the nurse on duty, and he says in a whisper, “For Chrissakes, who wrote that?” and I say, A poet named Dorianne Laux.’

STAFF SGT. METZ

Metz is alive for now, standing in line
at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear
and buzz cut, his beautiful new
camel-colored suede boots. His hands
are thick-veined. The good blood
still flows through, given an extra surge
when he slurps his latte, a fleck of foam
caught on his bottom lip.

I can see into the canal in his right ear,
a narrow darkness spiraling deep inside his head
toward the place of dreaming and fractions,
ponds of quiet thought.

In the sixties my brother left for Vietnam,
a war no one understood, and I hated him for it.
When my boyfriend was drafted I made a vow
to write a letter every day, and then broke it.
I was a girl torn between love and the idea of love.
I burned their letters in the metal trash bin
behind the broken fence. It was the summer of love
and I wore nothing under my cotton vest,
my Mexican skirt.

I see Metz later, outside baggage claim,
hunched over a cigarette, mumbling
into his cell phone. He’s more real to me now
than my brother was to me then, his big eyes
darting from car to car as they pass.
I watch him breathe into his hands.

I don’t believe in anything anymore:
god, country, money or love.
All that matters to me now
is his life, the body so perfectly made,
mysterious in its workings, its oiled
and moving parts, the whole of him
standing up and raising one arm
to hail a bus, his legs pulling him forward,
all muscle and sinew and living gristle,
the countless bones of his foot trapped in his boot,
stepping off the red curb.

For other poems from The Book of Men look here and here.

Streetwise But Foolish

A little over a week ago here in the Scriblets pages was a sort of mini-spotlight on poet Dorianne Laux and her marvelous poem, “Homicide Detective: A Film Noir.” The poem is one of thirty-six in Laux’s most recent collection, The Book of Men, published last February. I first read the poem in The Writer’s Almanac and hugely impressed, ordered a copy of the new collection without delay. I got the book two or three days later and have since then read and reread the poems again and again, probably boring friends by even reading one or two poems out loud. But isn’t most poetry meant to be read aloud anyway, even to ourselves?

The poetry of Dorianne Laux has affected me more strongly than any I’ve read in some time. In words better than my own poet B.H. Fairchild said, ‘In The Book of Men our recognition of a drifting world brought to the hard edge of meaning is immediate and enduring and makes us grateful once again for poetry’s capacity for rescue.’ From the book’s front flap, these words go directly to the heart and kernel of Laux’s writing.

The poem below is another from The Book of Men, one called “The Mysterious Human Heart in New York.” The poem originally appeared in Dark Charms, a 2009 chapbook of Ms Laux’s poems from Red Dragonfly Press.

THE MYSTERIOUS HUMAN HEART IN NEW YORK

Streetwise but foolish, the heart

knows what’s good for it but goes

for the dark bar, the beer before noon,

the doughy pretzel hot and salty, tied up

in a Gordian knot. It takes a walk

through Tompkins Square where

the homeless sleep it off on stone benches,

one shrouded body to each gritty sarcophagus.

The streets fill with taxis and trucks,

pinstripes and briefcases, and the subways

spark and sway underground. The sun

is snagged on the Empire State, performing

its one-note song, the citizens below

dragging their shadows down the sidewalk

like sidekicks, spitting into the gutter

as if on cue, as if in a musical,

as if there’s no association between the trash

flapping against the chain link and the girl

with her skirt up in the alley. When the traffic

jams on 110th—a local pain, a family affair—

the Starbucks junkie leans against the glass

and laughs into his hand, a cabbie

sits on his hood and smokes, cops

on skates weave through the exhaust,

billy club blunts bumping against their

dark blue thighs. Everyone’s on a cell phone,

the air a-buzz with yammer and electricity

as the heart of the city pounds like a man

caught in the crosswalk holding his shoulder,

going down on one knee, then blundering

into Central Park to lean over the addled bridge,

the sooty swans floating under him, grown fat

on cheap white bread. Oh heart, with your

empty pockets and your hat on backwards,

stop looking at yourself in the placid waters.

Someone is sneaking up behind you

in an overcoat lined with watches,

and someone else is holding a cardboard sign

that says: The End Is Here.

Heart of Homicide

Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine in 1952. Before getting a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988 she spent time working as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer. Since 1990 she has published five collections of poetry, the most recent, The Book of Men, published in February of this year. “Homicide Detective: A Film Noir” is a poem from The Book of Men that was recently showcased on The Writer’s Almanac. Title is enough to warn us this isn’t a poem about moonbeams and marigolds, and if Wordsworth is your ideal poet it might be good to stop here. Ms Laux’s is a vision well served by its dark crime scene splatter of greasy words.

HOMICIDE DETECTIVE: A FILM NOIR

Smell of diesel fuel and dead trees
on a flatbed soaked to the bone.
Smell of dusty heater coils.
We got homicides in motels and apartments
all across the city: under the beds,
behind the doors, in the bathtubs.
It’s where I come in at 5 AM,
paper cup of coffee dripping
down my sleeve, powdered
half-moon donut in my mouth.
Blood everywhere. Bodies
belly down, bodies faceup
on the kitchenette floor.
¿Donde esta? Que Sera.
We got loose ends, we got
dead ends, we got split ends,
hair in the drains, fingerprints
on glass. This is where I stand,
my hat glittery with rain,
casting my restless shadow.

These are the dark hours,
dark times are these, hours
when the clock chimes once
as if done with it, tired of it: the sun,
the highways, the damnable
flowers strewn on the fake wool rug.

These are the flayed heart’s flowers,
oil-black dahlias big as fists,
stems thick as wrists, striped, torn,
floating in the syrupy left-on music
but the bright world is done and I’m
a ghost touching the hair of the dead
with a gloved hand.

These are the done-for, the poor,
the defenseless, mostly women,
felled trees, limbs lashing
up into air, into rain,
as if time were nothing, hours,
clocks, highways, faces, don't step
on the petals, the upturned hands, stay
behind the yellow tape, let
the photographer’s hooded camera pass,
the coroner in his lab coat, the DA
in her creased black pants.

Who thought
to bring these distracting flowers?
Who pushed
out the screen and broke the lock?
Who let him in?
Who cut the phone cord, the throat,
the wrist, the cake
on a plate and sat down and ate
only half?

What good is my life if I can’t read the clues,
my mind the glue and each puzzle piece
chewed by the long-gone dog who raced
through the door, ran through our legs
and knocked over the vase,
hurtled down the alley and into the street?

What are we but meat, flesh
and the billion veins to be bled?
Why do we die this way, our jaws
open, our eyes bulging, as if there
were something to see or say?
Though today the flowers speak to me,
they way they sprawl in the streaked light,
their velvet lips and lids opening as I watch,
as if they wanted to go on living, climb
my pant legs, my wrinkled shirt, reach up
past my throat and curl over my mouth,
my eyes. Bury me in bloom.