Resurrections: Unpublished Poems
Sorting through some old papers the other day I came across a sheaf of never-published poems, some dating back over twenty years--works I'd abandoned for some reason or other, but which I'd felt at the time deserved better than just being thrown in the trash and erased from existence forever. I'd completely forgotten about some of them, while others I only vaguely recalled; looking over them now I find that I still like a few of them, so I've decided to post those here.
These first ones are interesting to me because they represent my first attempt at dealing with the subject matter I later covered in my sequence What There Is, released as a chapbook by Argonne House Press in 2002. (The chapbook is long out of print, but its entire contents are reprinted in my Wild Tracks: Uncollected Writings 1985-2014. I believe I wrote the poems below in the mid-1990s, only to abandon them and try again with a different approach some five or six years later. (Historical oddity: the first poem fictionalizes a visit to my short-lived brother's grave--I had never actually visited it at that time--but I finally did actually go there in 2002.)
Simple Math
...could that have been the little shift
I sensed a while ago
as I walked down in the rain to get the mail?
- Billy Collins, "Tipping Point"
Michael, who lived fourteen hours on July 31, 1955,
is dead for forty-seven years when I stand, for the first time,
near my fortieth birthday, over his grave in California
on a summer's day heartsick with beauty.
I've lived (I figure this later with my pocket calculator,
something even science fiction couldn't envision
in Michael's time) something like three hundred fifty-one thousand,
five hundred and four hours in my life--give or take
a few hundred, or thousand. Who cares, in a life
so abundantly rich with hours? Doing the math again,
I learn that at this moment I'm living Michael's life
for the twenty-five thousand, one hundred and eighth time.
The last time I lived his life I stayed up late talking with friends.
I drank peppermint tea, talked with my wife on the phone,
slept well, woke and showered, had toast and peaches
for breakfast, watched CNN, read a short story in a magazine,
and drove out to find my brother's plaque in a lovely cemetery
on an obscenely sun-drenched day.
In the meantime,
for the twenty-five thousand, one hundred and eighth time in my life,
Michael lurched sickly into the world,
gasped, struggled, felt cold and died.
I don't recall--no--each time he passes, nearly twice
a day. But I do remember it today,
Michael, your fourteen-hour life lived before I was born,
and feel in its fourteenth hour--which is now,
as my pencil scrapes along this lined yellow paper--
your small wings beating a question within my chest,
and I pray to the god in whom I don't believe that you hear
my scarred heart murmuring to you its uncertain answer.
Companion
One night by a river my dead brother
appears next to me in my sleeping bag,
ninety if he's a day, limp-skinned,
frail, gasping as old men do, breath fetid
like cancer, like my dad's in his last
months. He's naked, pushed against me
in the tight bag, feet and fingertips
cold, milk-filled eyes darting and
bewildered. I can just see him
in the dark looking at me,
wondering who I am, what he's doing
here, where he is. But when I try
to tell him I realize that I don't know
myself. I look around us: long grass
white in the moonlight, warm wind, fat
stars. Sounds, indistinguishable--
animals? mad killers?--begin to
fill the air all around us, seem
to approach us from all sides,
I'm afraid and want to cry
out. But he looks at me,
this old man, my brother,
wrapped around me like a child,
and I swallow and breathe deeply,
slowly, say softly to him that it's
all right, I'll protect him, I know just
where we are and the sun will be up
soon, we'll have breakfast, we'll
walk or I'll carry him to see
what's over the next hill, until then
shh, hold on, shh, hold on, shh....
Ten Michaels
1.
Deforesting
Ecudaor,
madly rich.
2.
Slowly learning
techniques of
embalming.
3.
Madly in love
with a man named
Buzzy.
4.
Lying
to Congress on
Iran-Contra.
5.
Commune, redwoods,
the name
"Sunflower King."
6.
Twenty years
for abusing
altar boys.
7.
Lacing aspirin
casules with
arsenic.
8.
Tossing Vietnam
medals, pumping
gas.
9.
Streets of DC,
heating grates,
empty eyes.
10.
Wife and
seventeen children--
dead of joy.
#
These first ones are interesting to me because they represent my first attempt at dealing with the subject matter I later covered in my sequence What There Is, released as a chapbook by Argonne House Press in 2002. (The chapbook is long out of print, but its entire contents are reprinted in my Wild Tracks: Uncollected Writings 1985-2014. I believe I wrote the poems below in the mid-1990s, only to abandon them and try again with a different approach some five or six years later. (Historical oddity: the first poem fictionalizes a visit to my short-lived brother's grave--I had never actually visited it at that time--but I finally did actually go there in 2002.)
Simple Math
...could that have been the little shift
I sensed a while ago
as I walked down in the rain to get the mail?
- Billy Collins, "Tipping Point"
Michael, who lived fourteen hours on July 31, 1955,
is dead for forty-seven years when I stand, for the first time,
near my fortieth birthday, over his grave in California
on a summer's day heartsick with beauty.
I've lived (I figure this later with my pocket calculator,
something even science fiction couldn't envision
in Michael's time) something like three hundred fifty-one thousand,
five hundred and four hours in my life--give or take
a few hundred, or thousand. Who cares, in a life
so abundantly rich with hours? Doing the math again,
I learn that at this moment I'm living Michael's life
for the twenty-five thousand, one hundred and eighth time.
The last time I lived his life I stayed up late talking with friends.
I drank peppermint tea, talked with my wife on the phone,
slept well, woke and showered, had toast and peaches
for breakfast, watched CNN, read a short story in a magazine,
and drove out to find my brother's plaque in a lovely cemetery
on an obscenely sun-drenched day.
In the meantime,
for the twenty-five thousand, one hundred and eighth time in my life,
Michael lurched sickly into the world,
gasped, struggled, felt cold and died.
I don't recall--no--each time he passes, nearly twice
a day. But I do remember it today,
Michael, your fourteen-hour life lived before I was born,
and feel in its fourteenth hour--which is now,
as my pencil scrapes along this lined yellow paper--
your small wings beating a question within my chest,
and I pray to the god in whom I don't believe that you hear
my scarred heart murmuring to you its uncertain answer.
Companion
One night by a river my dead brother
appears next to me in my sleeping bag,
ninety if he's a day, limp-skinned,
frail, gasping as old men do, breath fetid
like cancer, like my dad's in his last
months. He's naked, pushed against me
in the tight bag, feet and fingertips
cold, milk-filled eyes darting and
bewildered. I can just see him
in the dark looking at me,
wondering who I am, what he's doing
here, where he is. But when I try
to tell him I realize that I don't know
myself. I look around us: long grass
white in the moonlight, warm wind, fat
stars. Sounds, indistinguishable--
animals? mad killers?--begin to
fill the air all around us, seem
to approach us from all sides,
I'm afraid and want to cry
out. But he looks at me,
this old man, my brother,
wrapped around me like a child,
and I swallow and breathe deeply,
slowly, say softly to him that it's
all right, I'll protect him, I know just
where we are and the sun will be up
soon, we'll have breakfast, we'll
walk or I'll carry him to see
what's over the next hill, until then
shh, hold on, shh, hold on, shh....
Ten Michaels
1.
Deforesting
Ecudaor,
madly rich.
2.
Slowly learning
techniques of
embalming.
3.
Madly in love
with a man named
Buzzy.
4.
Lying
to Congress on
Iran-Contra.
5.
Commune, redwoods,
the name
"Sunflower King."
6.
Twenty years
for abusing
altar boys.
7.
Lacing aspirin
casules with
arsenic.
8.
Tossing Vietnam
medals, pumping
gas.
9.
Streets of DC,
heating grates,
empty eyes.
10.
Wife and
seventeen children--
dead of joy.
#
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