The Lineup: Bargaining with David Corbett

The Lineup is Gerald So's annual chapbook series of crime poetry, and issue #4 is out now, featuring work from such hardboiled types as Ken Bruen, Reed Farrel Coleman, David Corbett, Kieran Shea, Keith Rawson and Steve Weddle, among others. This latest installment is dedicated to the memory of my friend David Thompson, who Gerald writes was "the first bookseller to believe in The Lineup."

For the 26th stop on The Lineup's "So Dark For April" tour, I asked contributor David Corbett to answer a few of my silly questions about his excellent and disturbing contribution, "The Bargain" (reprinted below).

Secret Dead Blog: What kind of creative itch does a poem scratch -- as opposed to say a short story or a novel?

DC: Stories and novels involve dramatic movement. Even if "something happens" in a poem, the basic purpose is to convey a certain emotional moment. And the itch that gets scratched when writing a poem is the desire to find and somehow capture that unique moment. It's like trying to capture a sound or a tone rather than a conversation. Or at least that's how I approach it. I realize that's a terrible description of poetry overall -- it fails to account for Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Stevens' The Man with the Blue Guitar or Jeffers' Roan Stallion or any number of other large, complex or dramatic poems. But that sort of poetry is, frankly, beyond my skill set. So, it's moments for me.

SDB: "Bargain" is fantastic and utterly haunting. You've got a hint of redemption in there, but also a profound feeling of unease. Was there a particular inspiration for this poem?

DC: Well, thanks for the kind words. The poem was originally (and in a different version) written for my late wife when she was alive. My feelings for her were very much colored by my brother's death at age 39 . I realized that life is tenuous, unpredictable. And one day, I just noticed I was being kind to a fly or a moth that I might, at an earlier stage of my life, just crushed and been done with. But I felt a little more respectful given my newfound awareness of mortality.

Sadly, Terri (my wife) also died young, and the poem took on an even deeper, almost eerie resonance for me. But the crime angle only arose when I was asked to contribute to The Lineup, and I stepped back from the more personal aspect and saw it in a whole new light. I frankly couldn't tell you where the inspiration for that addition came from, it just appeared. But I think it does add an interesting element to the theme--of recognizing the fragility of life, and trying in a blatantly magical or ritualistic way to preserve the one life that has come to mean so much, and which the poem's "narrator" is terrified will be taken away suddenly, tragically, wrongly. A circumstance he knows too well.

SDB: Bugs? Did it have to be bugs?

DC: Creep ya out, did I? Bugs are "the least of creatures," as it were. We all too often kill them mindlessly. So changing that mindset, respecting even the lives of insects, means that death has finally registered in a truly profound way. Even bugs gets spared now -- that's what the guy is saying. As though to show he's atoned, that he gets it, and hoping that will mean something in the grand scheme of things -- while fearing it won't.


"Bargain"
By David Corbett

Since we met, fewer insects die.
Today (for example) you were gone
but a fat green fly hammered
blind against the window —
so I cracked it open and off he went:
tumbling wind, sunblue sky.

And last night you were out with the girls, but here
a brown moth scurried hot inside the lampshade —
I cupped my hand, nursed it
all the way downstairs, through the den,
cracked the door open: a tiny dark
flutter whirling toward the porch light.

Before only wasps survived —
menacing hang, throbbing wings,
hard and sleek and all that shiny black.

Her name? Ask the law. Ask her mother
or read the papers from that day
about the man in the shiny black Jag
and his eight-year-old daughter.
He'll be alone, they told me.
One more lie in a hive of lies,
buzzing inside me for years now
like the things I tell myself to
bargain off the ghost that hovers
just a little behind in the mirror.
The face I can't forget because
she wasn't meant to be there at all.

Nine years back, that was.
Turned a leaf, walked away, started fresh.
(Cut loose, actually — no longer much good at the thing.)
Then you came along. You.
So good, so wise, so blind.
Even unknowing, you taught me
the proper weight of things:
fate against fat chance,
in-the-palm-of-my-hand against through-my-fingers,
the smallest life against my own.
Worse, yours.

There's the machinery, I think too much —
can hear the blood hissing through
my brain as I reframe every angle —
sucker's pride, schemer's luck,
the rancid taint in a loving wish,
the entomology of ghosts and
the constant scuttering nearness of:
She has not come home.
She might never.

Copyright (c) 2011 David Corbett