Kimiko Hahn Captures This Moment

It’s been ages since I last posted here, mostly due to personal issues and life changes. But as I am traumatized by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the support for this in “developed countries”, among other things, I found this poem by the wonderful poet Kimiko Hahn captures the moment’s tribulation. I will insert it as a photo to get the formatting right.

Kimiko Hahn is an award-winning major poet: winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the winner of the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the 2007 Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, as well as the American Book Award for her book The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), and more.

Poetry Magazine says “Her work is noted for its intertextuality and wide-ranging subject matter,” and she “asserted that her early exposure to activism and community organizing as well as her racial identity profoundly influenced her approach to poetry.” Thus, in a lecture she mentioned:

“How could my parents have known that in dance class I’d meet Aichi Kochiyama and come to know her radical family (her mother Yuri Kochiyama, well known for her radical politics, held the dying Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom).”

Maybe that’s why her poem is is so prescient and meaningful – and to have been published now, it’s likely the events unfolding in the Middle East hadn’t yet begun (unless publishing processes have picked up speed). Just to help us all see the universality of the human condition and its many struggles for justice, against the enemies of truth.

Lucille Lang Day: Rebel, Poet, Scientist

Lucille Lang Day has been on my radar for quite some time, but today I actually discovered her. Not just her poetry, her 11 books of poetry (as I counted from her website), her many awards and her anthologies, books of prose and memoirs, like Married at Fourteen, not even the poem I had just read this morning which led me to all this from a link in my inbox, not even her scholarly science papers, her degrees, but more than all this it was the discovery of her, who inspired me to come back and post on this website again, after the death of my husband, and of others too, including my oldest brother, and then the losses not by death but estrangement that in some ways hurt the most. Lucy Day’s life story itself is so vibrant, and so unusual, something she embraces to the benefit of all of us. As if her story is telling me now it’s high time to embrace my own oddities, those histories it seems no one could possibly accept. And not just accept, but flaunt them, no holds barred. It is her delightful courage really that inspires.

So this poem kind of exemplifies what I love in her work, the impetuous storytelling, the sense that life is just bursting from the seams, and that we can’t just hold it all in, that it was meant, and so we can make it destined, to be shared.

Return to Acushnet
To my mother, Evelyn Lang

I finally see your life—
a page ripped from a book, 
its meaning, emotions, intent 
fragmentary and obscured.
I’ve found the town where you were born,
whose name you never told me,
and met the family you were torn from,
not as a baby
but as a child old enough to know
your mother was dead,
your father was letting you go.

I ran an ad to find descendants 
of your father’s sisters. 
One lived in a log cabin in Acushnet,
amid red maples, weeds, abandoned cars. 
Her crazy brother lived alone next door 
in the shingled farmhouse that belonged 
to your grandparents when they were young
and raising children, chickens, pigs, and cows.

The fireflies in Massachusetts winked and glowed
in the elms in early summer,
constellations of memories
appearing and disappearing amid the leaves,
your life itself like a leaf
cleaved too soon from the tree.

Out back, a tractor sat rusting in tall grass—
the carcass of an animal,
fossilized, extinct. The barn 
had fallen down the year before. The porch 
that used to wrap around the house
was gone. A notice in the window said 
“Condemned.” The once grand stairs inside
were carpeted with dust. Paint peeled 
from the walls; boxes, bags, and garbage 
filled the rooms. I went upstairs: 
I had to see it all. Pine floorboards 
were loose, cobwebs everywhere.

I closed my eyes and saw bright quilts 
where long ago your father’s sisters slept. 
When I came back down, 
Cousin Ken stared straight ahead
in the kitchen, trembling from his drugs.

Mother, eight years dead, 
your father, aunts and uncle, 
all long gone, are listed on the Internet. 
Imagine it! Ernestine, born first, 
watched the little ones: Valetta, 
Harriet, and Mabel, who quilted, sang, 
and put on plays; Rowland and your father,
Ebenezer, who liked to trick the girls. 
The night I visited the house 
where they were born, Grandpa Eb 
appeared in a dream, lithe 
and handsome, with his big mustache.

“Go back to California,” he said. 
“I’ll come visit you.” I think he wanted
to stand beside me, watching
a Western gull, its pink feet
skimming the crests of the Pacific,
hear Hutton’s vireo call
from the top of a California oak, wrap
his taut arms tight around us both
like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to the mast,
but I knew in the end he’d let go.

Remembering Extraordinary Poet Susan de Sola

It is hard for me to imagine that Susan de Sola (Rodstein) is no longer with us. She was always so vital, the very embodiment of creative energy coupled with a vibrant sense of humor. Although we only met virtually, I consider her a dear friend, who reached out to me because we both have five children, and whose kindness transcended borders and preconceptions. Both poet and critic, her recent book Frozen Charlotte (Able Muse Press, 2019) has met rave reviews, a book so expressive of her unique poetic voice. A winner of the Frost Farm Poetry Prize for her moving poem ”Buddy,” she also wrote a poem in the voice of a rock, indicative of her imaginative style. We had all thought this was the first of many books. A delight as both a poet and a generous, loving human being, I will always remember her, and wish her family well. From her book, these lovely poems:

Eve Sleeps

Each night we form a double C.
Hand rests on hip or curves to breast,
chest to back, his strong legs pressed
to make a chair of flesh for me.
Adjudications of the breath,
Adam’s apple near my head,
we’re stacked for storage in this bed
as sleep suspends us near a death.
Twins in the dark, we knit a seam
from toe to crown, a tensile wire.
Our eyes roll blind, they roll desire.
Locked in body, branched to dream,
we fall into this darker space.
Each cannot see the other’s face.

The Tulips

We bought them at a farmer’s field, so plump
and red—great goblets, plush concavities
which made of content an irrelevancy.
For days we took delight in their post-mortem
magic. What had this red exuberance
to do with death? They anchored down the table,
held center stage, just like an aria,
a swelling note we held against the odds.

But now they start to fall apart, and see,
they deconstruct so cleanly! Diving petals
reveal a pattern on the inner corner,
a three-point wedge of aubergine-black, capped
by arching yellow bands; a stylized print
of itself in little, vector to the ribbed red
flank, which had barely aged. The tiny tulip-
print anticipates its slide to symbol.
The sleekly flattened violet pistils spill
out scarcely any powder. Slim green stalks
with small white crowns stand bare. Abstract.
A Dutch-bobbed slouching flapper of a flower,
so modernist and sleek, a silhouette.
A flower a cartoonist might invent.

I sweep the petals up in great big bunches,
the dustbin blazing; it had never looked better.
But it’s become almost a game. The petals
fall at random—yet they seem to fall
in answer to our conversation, plunging
at key words, thumping downward during our
significant pauses, heard in silences.
Blowsy, lipsticked interlocutors;
drunken smacks, and dried-out goodbye kisses.

Poet Louise Glück Wins Nobel Prize

The extraordinary poet Louise Glück has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, a very well-deserved honor. The New York Times interviewed her here. The most stunning excerpt from that interview, very telling of the kind of transformative poet she is, is this statement about aging, which she describes as “a new experience” from the point of view of the artist as “an adventurer”:

“You find yourself losing a noun here and there, and your sentences develop these vast lacunae in the middle, and you either have to restructure the sentence or abandon it. But the point is, you see this, and it has never happened before. And though it’s grim and unpleasant and bodes ill, it’s still, from the point of view of the artist, exciting and new.“

Her incredibly prolific body of work is so impressive, it’s hard to choose just one poem, but here is one that was particularly meaningful to me.

The Empty Glass

BY Louise Glück

I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.
A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.

O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was
hard-hearted, remote. I was
selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.

But I was always that person, even in early childhood.
Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.
I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract
tide of fortune turned
from high to low overnight.

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,
to celestial force? To be safe,
I prayed. I tried to be a better person.
Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror
and matured into moral narcissism
might have become in fact
actual human growth. Maybe
this is what my friends meant, taking my hand,
telling me they understood
the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,
implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick
to give so much for so little.
Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)—
a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.

I was not pathetic! I was writ large,
like a queen or a saint.

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.
And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe
in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,
a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse
to persuade or seduce—

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

My Review of Talukder’s City of the Beloved Published

Poetry International has published my review of Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s Kundiman Prize-winning debut full-length poetry collection Shahr-e-Jaanaan: City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), a truly gorgeous unforgettable book available at Tupelo Press and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere (including you-know-who – let’s try other places first).

Check out the review!

Remembering Marie Ponsot 1921-2019

Marie Ponsot, who died on July 5, 2019, at the age of 98, left a legacy of elegantly crafted, deeply meaningful and yet entirely unique poetry in five collections, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, among others. From the Washington Post article regarding her death,

Reflecting on Ms. Ponsot’s work, the poet and critic Susan Stewart once wrote: “What she has written of her relation to the night sky — ‘it becomes the infinite / air of imagination that stirs immense / among losses and leaves me less desolate’ — could be claimed by her readers as a description of her own work…

Married to the painter Claude Ponsot, she wrote her first poetry collection dedicated to him, and titled it True Minds, taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. They had seven children, and when they divorced in 1970, she published her second book of poetry entitled Admit Impediment, also taken from the same sonnet: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ admit impediments.” This is the sort of imaginative wordplay one can find in her work, not without its subtle humor either.

She retreated from publishing for about 25 years, although she continuously wrote poetry. She said it just “didn’t occur” to her to publish. There’s also an element of deep humility in her life and voice, which also rings confidently and with both gusto and acumen.

This poem I found particularly gorgeous:

This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo

       In a time of dearth bring forth number, weight, & measure.–    William Blake

Describing the wind that drives it, cloud
rides between earth and space. Cloud
shields earth from sun-scorch. Cloud
bursts to cure earth’s thirst.      Cloud
–airy, wet, photogenic–
is a bridge or go-between;
it does as it is done by.
It condenses. It evaporates.
It draws seas up, rains down.
I do love the drift of clouds.
Cloud-love is irresistible,
untypical, uninfinite.

Deep above the linear city this morning
the cloud’s soft bulk is almost unmoving.
The winds it rides are thin;
it makes them visible.
As sun hits it or if sun
quits us it’s blown away
or rains itself or snows itself away.

It is indefinite:
This dawns on me: no cloud is measurable.
Make mine cloud.
Make mind cloud.
The clarity of cloud is in its edgelessness,
its each instant of edge involving
in formal invention, always
at liberty, at it, incessantly altering.
A lucky watcher will catch it
as it makes big moves:
up the line of sight it lifts
until it conjugates or
          dissipates,
its unidentical being    intact
though it admits flyers.
It lets in wings. It lets them go.
It lets them.
It embraces mountains & spires built
to be steadfast; as it goes on
it lets go of them.
                It is not willing.
                 It is not unwilling.
Late at night when my outdoors is
indoors, I picture clouds again:
                  Come to mind, cloud.
                  Come to cloud, mind.

(Note the wordplay here, evident throughout her poetry.)

Writing poems by hand and putting down ideas on scraps of paper or napkins between changing diapers and all the labor-intensive work that goes with raising children, she is a very sympathetic character, a teacher, translator, essayist and critic. Her poetry shows formal dexterity, imagination, and a delightful spirit.

Here is a beautiful sample of her more formal poetry and her depth of understanding:

Among Women

What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.
Most would, now & then,
& no wonder.
Some, and I’m one,
Wander sitting still.
My small grandmother
Bought from every peddler
Less for the ribbons and lace
Than for their scent
Of sleep where you will,
Walk out when you want, choose
Your bread and your company.

She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”

She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner’s ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grand children, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.

Terence Hayes: Master of Form

When it comes to form, nobody does it like Terence Hayes: he understands the larger view of form as a Force that can drive a point right into your heart. In this New Yorker article, author Dan Chiasson says that the sonnet, a form Hayes calls “part music box, part meat grinder,” became the poet’s vehicle of choice for his recent book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin , because for him,

the sonnet offered an alternative unit of measurement, at once ancient, its basic features unchanged for centuries, and urgent, its fourteen lines passing at a brutal clip.

In the book, the American sonnet both contains and assaults his assassins: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” The form itself being the brainchild of “the L.A. poet Wanda Coleman, who died in 2013 and who coined the term ‘American sonnet.‘” Who considered the term as referring to a more “improvised” sonnet that used jazz techniques and musical patterns.

The language is powerful and immediate, exuding worlds and threats. This is what sets Hayes apart: the combination of power, poetic skill (unique use of craft), unrelenting content, and an intensity of heart that drives all this into a tour de force of words closing in on flesh.

All cancers kill me, car crashes, cavemen, chakras,
Crackers, discord, dissonance, doves, Elvis,
Ghosts, the grim reaper herself, a heart attack
While making love, hangmen, Hillbillies exist,
Lilies, Martha Stewarts, Mayflower maniacs,
Money grubbers, Gwen Brooks’ “The Mother,”
(My mother’s bipolar as bacon), pancakes kill me,
Phonies, dead roaches, big roaches & smaller
Roaches, the sheepish, snakes, all seven seas,
Snow avalanches, swansongs, sciatica, Killer
Wasps, yee-haws, you, now & then, disease.

A list that also serves as ammunition, a kind of automatic fire that thrills with its sheer brilliance and expanse of imagination. And also with its truth, how he disgorges the racist and white supremacist attitudes made flesh in the form of Donald Trump and his followers. To which this collection is addressed, among other things.

“This word can be the difference between knowing / And thinking. It’s the name people of color call / Themselves on weekends & the name colorful / People call their enemies & friends.” 

Trump is a palpable undercurrent throughout the book, and occasionally Hayes addresses the President directly, calling him “Mr. Trumpet”:

. . . You ain’t allowed to deride
Women when you’ve never wept in front of a woman
That wasn’t your mother. America’s struggle with itself
Has always had people like me at the heart of it. You can’t
Grasp your own hustle, your blackness, you can’t grasp
Your own pussy, your black pussy dies for touch.

These poems all happen in the mind, which has been portioned into zones called “I” and “you.” Both assume countless different roles, but what remains constant is their reliance upon each other and their tendency to flip positions. This makes the work morally ambiguous in ways some readers will resist: I suspect that not everybody will recognize “blackness” as any part, even a rejected part, of Trump, a man whose loathing of black people seems unabashed.

Yes, “Hayes isn’t describing canonical melancholy, the pined-for vision of mortality that poets sometimes indulge in. He fears a more immediate kind of danger, which can’t be aestheticized or glorified in verse. “You are beautiful because of your sadness,” Hayes admits. And yet: “You would be more beautiful without your fear.” 

In the form he invented:

The Golden Shovel

after Gwendolyn Brooks

I. 1981

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we

cruise at twilight until we find the place the real

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.

His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we

drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left

in them but approachlessness. This is a school

I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we

are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk

of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.

Standing in the middle of the street last night we

watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike

his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight

Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we

used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing

his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.

The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We

watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.

He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.

He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We

stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,

how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June

the boy would be locked upstate. That night we

got down on our knees in my room. If I should diebefore I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.

II. 1991

Into the tented city we go, we-

akened by the fire’s ethereal

afterglow. Born lost and cool-

er than heartache. What we

know is what we know. The left

hand severed and school-

ed by cleverness. A plate of we-

ekdays cooking. The hour lurk-

ing in the afterglow. A late-

night chant. Into the city we

go. Close your eyes and strike

a blow. Light can be straight-

ened by its shadow. What we

break is what we hold. A sing-

ular blue note. An outcry sin-

ged exiting the throat. We

push until we thin, thin-

king we won’t creep back again.

While God licks his kin, we

sing until our blood is jazz,

we swing from June to June.

We sweat to keep from we-

eping. Groomed on a die-

t of hunger, we end too soon.

——————-

The Blue Terrance

If you subtract the minor losses,

you can return to your childhood too:

the blackboard chalked with crosses,

the math teacher’s toe ring. You

can be the black boy not even the buck-

toothed girls took a liking to:

this match box, these bones in their funk

machine, this thumb worn smooth

as the belly of a shovel. Thump. Thump.

Thump. Everything I hold takes root.

I remember what the world was like before

I heard the tide humping the shore smooth,

and the lyrics asking: How long has your door 

been closed? I remember a garter belt wrung

like a snake around a thigh in the shadows

of a wedding gown before it was flung

out into the bluest part of the night.

Suppose you were nothing but a song

in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to wipe

sweat from the brow of a righteous woman,

but all you owned was a dirty rag? That’s why

the blues will never go out of fashion:

their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of

consequence; that’s why when they call, Boy, you’re in

trouble. Especially if you love as I love

falling to the earth. Especially if you’re a little bit

high strung and a little bit gutted balloon. I love

watching the sky regret nothing but its

self, though only my lover knows it to be so,

and only after watching me sit

and stare off past Heaven. I love the word No 

for its prudence, but I love the romantic

who submits finally to sex in a burning row-

house more. That’s why nothing’s more romantic

than working your teeth through

the muscle. Nothing’s more romantic

than the way good love can take leave of you.

That’s why I’m so doggone lonesome, Baby,

yes, I’m lonesome and I’m blue.

Astronomer-Poet Rebecca Elson Remembered at Brainpickings

Rare indeed is the scientist-poet, gifted in language and math/ scientific thinking at the same time, but this describes Rebecca Elson, featured in this post on the Brainpickings site, a gift from one-woman-curator Maria Popova. Elson’s stellar scientific career, for which she was a natural genius, was cut short by 9/11 funding crises and the scientific patriarchy which did not give women their due at the time. At that point she turned to poetry; and the result is amazing, a collection of poetry, essays, and other writings selected by those who knew her and published as A Responsibility to Awe in 2001. She died at the age of 39 in 1999.

Despite her untimely death, she returned to scientific inquiry and is remembered most for her scientific contributions (52 scientific research papers), although her poetry also remains popular and was highly praised even at its publication: The Economist named her book as one of the best of the year in 2001.

Since I myself wanted to be both a poet and astronomer at the age of 9, Elson’s work holds a particular fascination to me. And as I attempted to explain relativity in college by having people on my dorm floor act it out (or at least one dramatic aspect of it), at which point I had an epiphany about it, I was particularly drawn to this poem of hers from the book:

Explaining Relativity

Forget the clatter of ballistics,
The monologue of falling stones,
The sharp vectors,
And the stiff numbered grids.

It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,
Where space might cup itself around a planet
Like your palm around a stone,

Where you, yourself the planet
Caught up in some geodesic dream,
Might wake to feel it enfold your weight
And know there is, in fact, no falling.

It is this, and the existence of limits.

Edward Harkness: Poems that Listen, Bring Us to Listen

This is a discovery I should have made long ago: Edward Harkness, a poet of place, and so much more, recording solemn and moving histories and keeping an uncommon, quiet faith with the reverence that understands what not to say. I found myself deeply moved by poem after poem. His tone is conversational, elements of the casual somehow imbued with a sense of the sacred. And so one finds truths and openings one otherwise might have missed. He is a teacher, award-winning poet and author of two poetry collections and a number of chapbooks, but most of all a man somehow in touch with his surroundings and aware of both his place and his displacement in them. Let the poetry speak for itself.

Union Creek in Winter

There’s no word for it so far, the word
for what it means to be in love with you
in our sinking world, what it means to hike
through new snow, to hear beneath
the glass of creek ice the flow of winter
percolating its way through the ravine
not quite soundlessly toward lower ground
to join the wild roar of the American River.

The word that means we’ve loved
through the avalanches of our time,
loved while the wars raged, paid for
with our taxes, loved while our loved ones
voted for hatred, for I want the false past I want
what’s coming to me, protected as they’ve been
by their skin white as this very snow draped
on hemlocks in the ravine’s wavering light.

The word that means we’re not alone,
we share that same nature wonder,
for the flicker tapping on a far-off tree,
the delicate calligraphy of a mouse’s
prints along our path, as if Tu Fu
has been here too, who knew, even then,
even in the Tang Dynasty, beauty
leaves behind its faint notations.

The word that means we will go on,
we will follow an earlier trekker’s snowshoe
trail, slog on bundled to keep the chill
from overtaking us, descend again steeply,
then climb again switchbacks above the creek
away from its cold murmurings, to our car
and the long drive back to the war zone
of now. Armed with our little courage,

we must drive straight to the front,
strap on flak jackets and begin the slow
search for survivors, slow search
for the words that might revive them.
Even now we’re feverish to make contact,
to know what to listen for, to learn to hear
those muffled cries from deep in the rubble.
If we knew the words we might save

those most weakened, most in danger of giving up.
If we knew the words we might keep the world,
its rivers, its ice, its bitterroot, its winter wrens,
its hemlocks, its moonlight, its children,
its Shakespeare, its Szymborska, its rosehips,
its green and orange lichens, its Dylan,
its kora players, its humming birds, you,
me, and our Muslim neighbor, Maya, alive.

And this, the title poem of one of his collections:

Saying the Necessary

I read of a Montana man
whose pickup
stalled in the mountains.
Cross-country skiers
found him next spring,
their skis rasping
on the top of his cab
just showing through the snow.
His engine dead, no map,
he’d apparently decided
to wait for help.
His diary calmly records
his life of being lost.
He describes the passing days,
how he rationed his crackers,
an Almond Joy,
built a few small fires at night,
ate his emergency candles,
ice from a pond,
a pine’s green lace of moss.
He hoarded every spark
from his battery.
There’s evidence he wandered
up a nearby ridge.
He might have noticed a marmot,
gold and relaxed on a rock,
or spotted mountain goats
wedged high in grey basalt.
From a pinnacle of broken
lichen-colored scree
he watched the world bend away blue,
rivered with trees.
He might have heard
the whine of a plane
in the next valley,
looking, looking.

Then the cold came.
Frostbite settled the matter
of hiking out.
He wrote detailed accounts
of the weather,
noting the clear, icy air,
little flares of stars
drawing no one’s attention.
Not so frigid this evening.
A later entry read:
Ribbed cirrus clouds moving in.
Then tender goodbyes
to his wife and daughter—
my lilac, my rose.

When the blizzard buried him,
he wrote by his interior lights,
and when the battery failed
he scratched in the dark
a strange calligraphy,
covering the same pages,
the words telegraphic,
saying only the necessary
as he starved.
In the end,
his script grew hallucinatory—
…toy train… …oatmeal…
…farmhouse lights just ahead…—
illegible, finally,
like lines on a heart monitor.
Several pages he tore out and ate.

He must have known
even words wouldn’t save him.
Still, he wrote.
He watched the windshield
go white like a screen,
his hands on the wheel,
no feeling.
He listened to his heart
repeat its constant SOS,
not loudly now,
but steadily—
a stutterer who’s come to love
the sound of his one syllable,
at peace with his inability
to get anything across.
He must have pictured himself
wading through the drifts,
traversing the heartbreaking distance
between voice and any ear,
searching for tracks,
a connector road that leads
down to everyday life.
By glow of moonlight filtered
through snow-jammed windows,
his last act was to place his book,
opened to a page marked Day One,
on the passenger seat beside him.

Remembering Timothy Murphy: 1/10/1951-6/30/2018

Timothy Murphy, formalist poet of the heart, will be long remembered for his inimitable style and formal mastery, the sheer volume and energy of his creative output, his contributions to the poetry community, his love of hunting and of the land, his open attitude about being both gay and conservative, and his strongly-felt re-conversion to Catholicism in his later years. One can’t easily sum up a life really, but this thoughtful review of his most recent poetry collection, Devotions (North Dakota University Press), helps. As does this obituary. And maybe the best of all is this interview, where Murphy talks about the moment, quite a miraculous one at that, when everything changed. Inspiring, no matter what your point of view on faith or politics. Beyond that, let his poetry speak:

Agape

The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp
to hear confession from an Eagle Scout
tortured by forty years of sin and doubt.
You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp.

Handlers, allowing you to hike with me,
followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront
down a firebreak this camper used to hunt.
Through all I said you suffered silently.

I blamed the authors of my unbelief:
St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene,
the Jesuit who raped me as a teen,
the altar boy when I was six, the grief

of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead
by Peter’s Church and all the choirs above.
In a thick Polish accent choked with love,
Te Dominus amat was all you said.

**************
(Notes:
Pope John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, and that night he visited me in a dream. This dream recurred three times. The last time was April 15, 2007—the night Pope Benedict XVI accosted American bishops over the matter of clerical sexual abuse—when this poem came to me in its entirety. I rose and immediately typed it. In every instance the dream was identical, and John Paul’s words were the same. Te Dominus amat is Latin for “God loves you.”— TM)
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”Mizar” and “Alcor” in Winter

Cirrus dispersed. As a black night grew colder,
clearer, I spied the binary in the handle
of the Big Dipper dangling above my shoulder,
a pinprick twinkling by a blinding candle.

Absent the moon, its boreal corona,
I watched the stars rise east of Ellendale,
Guelph and Ludden, then wheel above Verona
and sleeping friends who farm near Englevale.

A thousand miles of road: I’d shunned the pavement
which bears the burdens I no longer ferry,
the cargo of material enslavement.
Six eagles hunted small game on the prairie.

An Arab prince’s fortunes once were measured
by blooded foals, by sons his wives could dandle,
by tributary quatrains to be treasured
and his eyesight: a pinprick by a candle.