The Dog Days

Photo:  The burdens of leadership.    David Graham

One of the great pleasures of teaching writing is watching young writers catch fire and develop their own voices and visions.  Today I'd like to feature a poem by a student who just graduated from Ripon College about a week ago, John Ingemann.  I've been following his development as a poet for several years now, and have really come to admire the zest, imagination, humor, and surprise that his poems display.

The Dog Days

Often I look out my window

during a summer thunderstorm,

dull and black, thundering

without rain, leaves shuddering,

me left wondering, has God started snoozing

during his favorite action movie?

A series of imploding explosions

light up His living room, the TV glowing on

an unopened guide, tonight’s scheduled programming,

a half eaten dinner snoring, cold burger and fries,

tomorrow’s glorified leftovers, a bonus,

a window cracked, the fan humming,

His omnipotent face, tired and warm,

the heat up in heaven so searing

as the Almighty sleeps deeply.

If only an angel or spirit would tap his toe,

nice and slow, not to scare him with

a whisper in the wee hours of morning, “It’s late,

the storm has passed.” DVD load screen rerunning,

God yawning, eyes crusted and weary,

shuffling across the moon’s rays

and into the crescent, muttering

something about a dream he had,

bad nightmare, scary something

or another, whatever, He’s tired

goes to bed, pillow on head,

ten minutes later sleeping

as my mother reels the hose in,

just finished watering marigolds

since God forgot what the meteorologist said.

--John Ingemann

"Leap into summer"

Photo:  David Graham

Two more poems by Barry Spacks for you today--one rather short, one a bit longer, both full of light in true Spacksian fashion.

                                   Listening To Mozart

                                Awake in the dark,

                 the entanglements of years to unbraid,

                      she wakes beside me saying:

                           "It's 4:44...but not for long."

                                              *

                          This & that and hands & feet,

                aware of the pens in the cracked china cup,

                  the folders crammed with papers: lovely

                          life, oh glorious web of time.

  

                                              * 

                     Not IN time says the Teacher, we 

                        ARE time as we tune up the Mozart, leap 

                       into summer, 4:44 in the morning

                                  but not for long.

--Barry Spacks

                                        Ashes

                  O weighty self, chief agonist, 

         every 500 years the Phoenix 

                     flames her nest, reborn from the ashes

                        while you do exactly the same daily, 

                       rising from darkness into the morning. 

--Barry Spacks

Photo:  David Graham

Workers in Suicide & Their Butcher God

Photo:  Et in Arcadio Ego.   David Graham

I admired the poetry of Barry Spacks for decades before I actually met him.  I believe it was in 1973 when I first encountered his work, in a college poetry class taught by Richard Eberhart.  As I recall, Barry was one of the "younger" poets in an anthology assigned for us to read.  Well, we're both a bit older now, and, through the miracle of the internet, Barry became first an email pal and then a friend.  We've been corresponding now for many years.   But I didn't actually meet him face to face until a few years ago, when I discovered that Barry in person is quite as delightful as Barry on the page.

Neither Barry nor I get to count ourselves as "younger" poets anymore, but he's had a distinguished and prolific career since 1973, including many books of poems, some novels, along with numerous essays, reviews, and stories.  He's also had a long career as a teacher.   I'm very pleased to be able to showcase here some new work by Barry Spacks, nearly forty years after I began reading him.

         Workers in Suicide & Their Butcher God  

A friend wonders how these bombers could make their plans

while seeing real people walk the streets,

buy food, choose books at the library.

Ah, Mary Ann, to them the Other isn't real;

the sand-mouthed taste of their work

requires hatred of human smarts and verve,

they’ve invented & worship a butcher god,

"The Absence of Light" is his not-secret name, 

and Unbelievers’ sinews line

his teeth. O god of darkness and pain,

(so they pray) we die for your sacred cause

the beauty of ugliness, scent of horror.

O grind, hard Lord of Correctitude,

these pulverized children. O, behead,

de-limb unrighteous fathers, ruin

women displaying their loveliness, 

kill them for sake of swelling male eyes, 

O god of fear and choking dust,

patron of veils and stonings-to-death,

O let it come down, let it all come down

in the name of shame and nothingness.  

--Barry Spacks

Photo:  Shades of meaning.    David Graham

Against Dust

Photo:  Dust unto dust.   David Graham

One of my own poems today, this one dedicated to Josh English, who asked. . . .

Against Dust

In the gush and lilt, onrush

of errand and appointment, leaky

faucet dreams, dog dish full of clouds,

the loneliness of a lukewarm shower,

small ratcheting routines, songs

jazzed with static yet still holy,

in arrested dreams, billowy fog

of a mind at rest, knees and elbows

creaking like a winter house,

in the wind from page after page

of a photo album flipped through

a thousand miles or months from here,

in the little squeal of a stopping car,

chipmunk chittering across your roof,

headache from wine downed a decade ago,

in the ghostly rustle of paper

that forms the continuo of your days,

laptop error chimes beeping,

in the paltry tumult of your heart,

much to do, much to do, much to do,

surely some portion of this life remains

inviolate, a lump of pure gold

or at least the grinning rock of a skull

to outlast your twitches and oozings,

surely it won't all be swept away as dust,

but some dust, at least, will seed clouds

and rain will fall across unseeable fields.

--David Graham

Full Tilt

Photo:  Free market economy.   David Graham

And another poem today by the wizardly Martha Silano, who often proceeds at full tilt. 

Full Tilt

Hopefully you’re not pinned between a cable

and a crashing gondola, hopefully not on the clock

but busy catching bulldog stargazers, reckoning the cloud

above you resembles not a sheep but a giant wad of Orbit.

Here it’s a Saturday at the Full Tilt Arcade & Creamery,

cases freshly loaded with Mango Chili, Golden Guernsey Honey,

Vegan Coconut Chunk, quarters jangling in my pocket, poised

to be shoved into the slot for a round or four of The Simpsons/

Pinball Party, and just as the first ball pops on deck, in walks a woman

asking for vacuum cleaner bags. Everything’s digitized! I yell between slurps

of Roxbury Road, between gentle bumps with alternating hips

to increase my chances of getting the ball to land smack-dab

on Homer’s light-up nose. Why don’t you program your vacuum

to empty itself? But this only confounds her more, this gal who

must've snuck up through a crack in the pavement direct from the Menlo Park

Woolworths, which shuttered its doors in 1979. Maybe Target, I offer.

You would think, she scowls, making her way toward

the treacherous, cream-less, ping-less street. You would think.

 --Martha Silano

Autumn Break

Photo:  The Map & the Territory.   David Graham

One final poem by the inimitable Josh English.  

Autumn Break

My mother read the same cheap thriller

to my father in whichever town’s library

after the day’s long drive.

In rough chairs or on crates

my mother incanted

in her heavy Nordic accent.

My father, elbows on his knees,

rubbed his hands slowly

with the sound of swept sand. 

He called the book tommy gun trash,

but listened on, watching blooms rise

and fade on her cheeks, her lips dry.

Her consonants landed cold

and hard as the ice blocks he’d load

into the truck four times a week,

over which he’d toss handfuls of sawdust

then stack the open eyed, frozen cod

in rows.  By the haul's end they’d

be as splayed and soggy

as the tomato seeds

she’d make my brothers and me

spit out into a cloth then set on the sill

to harden and dry.  Spring’s thick fruit

we’d cut open and smell in the red meat

the powdered milk of winter.

In cramped libraries,

they’d wander through

milling clusters of tired townspeople,

searching for a private isle--

art books on one side, atlases on the other--

and she’d open and begin to read. 

When he closed his eyes,

he’d see the mild skylines of the towns

his route drove him past,

towns that, were he placed in their center,

would be a mystery.

They bowed toward one another

when her whispered narrative dropped

to the edge of silence like snow on water,

their foreheads touching.

--Josh English

Photo:  Sunset Fond du Lac.   David Graham

Three photos by David Graham

Photo:  Strange fruit.  David Graham

Photo:  Forgotten history.  David Graham

Photo:  Strait is the gate.  David Graham

The fallacy of bifurcation

Photo: The fallacy of bifurcation.  David Graham

Cold Sentiment

Photo:  Car Crash Close Up.  David Graham

Again it is my great pleasure to offer a poem by Josh English.

Cold Sentiment

I over-estimate the trajectory, the ball’s red stitches

signaling through falling snow like a code I’ve misread,

and swat to make a barehanded catch.  And I feel

nothing.  I look at the ball buried in my blunt hand.  Nothing.

A shovel a block away hacks at the ice glazing everything.

Already, the insinuations of peeved nerves snap up my wrist. 

By the time I hear the leather slap of Seth’s catch,

I have thrown my own glove down, as if it were the culprit,

the unsteady nurse who pricks and pricks her needle

up and down my forearm, missing the blatant vein.

In winter, imprecision trips pain, but the pain is slow. 

The sedan’s locked wheels as it skidded sideways, a mooring tanker,

into my front lawn yesterday.  The car a crumpled hulk

my neighbor Pete stumbled out of, blood unspooling from his mouth.

When his balance returned he began beating the car,

the down feathers bursting from his torn coat like smoke

over the hollow cannon fire of fists slamming the hood.   

Snow like stone-dust the night ground from walls

of whitened clouds, morning’s ash of a fallen empire

refilling the tire tracks we toss the baseball over today. 

After the sting splinters into ache and disperses, we continue

our game of catch, absorbed by the boyhood rhythms,

so precise I can feel the minutiae of its physics

melting in my arm, the flurries of torque

and curve dissolving as I adjust the out-held mitt,

its center blackened by a dozen years of reception.

The needle punched into Pete’s fattened lip

as he sat on the white hospital bed, the numbing

spreading to his chin, he drooled while a doctor

sewed the pulp of his mouth shut.  It will be a week

before you can understand anything he says.

Now I can hardly see Seth as he cranks back for his throw.

It’s as if snow wants to remind us we are erasable.

In silence, the cars slur through hazard by us,

and the ball cracks in my mitt like a punch

from somebody who remembers what it’s like

to be beaten, how it feels to watch the beating

come right for you, and how, when you close

your eyes, all you see is snow.

--Josh English

The pathetic fallacy

Photo:  The pathetic fallacy.  David Graham