BBly's VSC Reading


Arguments About Poetry

My wife reads poems by this guy I know;
I find them charming, resonant and true
She thinks they are not poems at all, but just
Some words in funny shapes upon the page.
She does not fault his honesty, his eye,
His ear, the words themselves or what they say;
She only thinks a poem should be more 
Than merely what it says or what it sees.
The words must bear not only weight but fruit:
Who reads must find as well as see and hear.
It ainıt enough, she says, to point and say,
Hey, look at this ‹ a button in the mud.

I have a friend whose chapbooks pile my shelf;
His poems are opaque as leaves to me.
He says it doesnıt matter what you write
At any given moment: poetry,
Like painting, is an ongoing, long-term thing.
He gave up fretting over single words, 
Refuses utterly to interfere
With poetryıs real action: to express
The inexpressible, the things we know
That cannot ever be put into words.
And so he just sets down what comes to him
No matter whence, or how, or what, or why.

Iım not sure what I think or feel about
These sharp, intelligent imperatives:
In this aesthetic argument Iım dumb,
Or rather simply tongue-tied and abashed.
I think I know what poetry can be
And has been and may someday be again:
A word we say among ourselves to tell
Each other who we are, to recognize 
Each other in the dark, to grab and hold
Each otherıs hand or heart or mind and say
Yes. This is what we come from, where we go.
Weıre taking you with us. Pay attention.


The Fish

At the weigh-in I was under,
He was half a pound too much.
For the next hour he sucked his gums and spat
over and over into a dixie cup, 
sitting on the crapper, pushing, pushing,
his coach murmuring above him.
He finally made weight by smiling on the scale.

I was a rookie, him they called Gramps --
I was fourteen, he was twenty --
my mouth was full of braces, 
his was full of stumps.
My coach said, Just go after him.
He's starved so long he's weak as a girl.
All you have to do is last.

I loved  to wear the red tank top
that buttoned snugly under the crotch,
I loved the tights with padded knees,
the square white shorts, the thick white socks,
but most of all the high black shoes, 
light as gloves, only allowed to be worn for the match.

I had wind and strength to spare,
I had youth, I had brains,
even a kind of virtue:
this was manly, this was fun, this was healthy,
a boy used this to grow on, mens sana
in corpore sano.

What Coach didn't say was this:
He's poor, he's dumb, he hates you.
He wants to kill you,
and he's going to try.

But I saw it in his eyes
above the center of the mat,
and it took me down
and pinned me under him,
wriggling and twitching like I had no arms or legs.


My Father Loved His Death

1.

At first he loved its distance
the way he loved my mother sitting, reading,
in the white frame house in Pittsburgh
while he slithered, pop-eyed and reeking,
through the Philippine jungle.

Later, sitting on the sunset porch,
he loved the way the sky like a rag 
soaked up dark from the earth; 
the moon and stars fell into it, 
the birds went quiet one by one.
Then he would turn his chair to face 
the window into the golden rooms,
and look, only look.

At last he loved its coming,
the rounding mouth, the dark, inside,
downness of it; he fell away,
peripeteia, in every direction,
my mother could not catch him,
no one could catch him;
his eyes now sought the dark 
as they had once sought the light 
when first he fell 
face-first down
into his life.

2.

On a ship pitching west
across the Pacific, toward tomorrow,
toward Hell, he retched and retched
into his helmet.
Behind him his wife and me and his baby girl;
behind him the house he had just built,
abandoned now to strangers;
behind him his return from
the real war six years before,
the shirt pocket ripped off by shrapnel
washed and folded in the bottom of his kit.

Ahead lay Korea,
where he would fight, and freeze,
and endure,
things he didn't know yet.

But it wasn't what he didn't know
that made him heave and roar
into that overturned metal skull,
staining the canvas ligaments
the color of brains.

3.

I imagine him on the golf course
when he sees his death for the first time.
It's a blind par five; his drive
has hit the crest and gone over.
The other three have scattered their shots
across the face of the hill;
he refuses the cart for the straight walk to his ball.
Coming down off the tee, his left foot goes funny
and he staggers, but goes into a little trot
and pulls out of it.
His partner, still close, asks,
but he's fine, fine, and he is.

The carts hum away;
quiet flows around him like rising water,
except for his spikes combing through
the long grass of the rough, a sound that reminds him
of his Janie's fingernails on his scalp
as they lay in the narrow bed, 
eyes inches apart.
Then he's on the fairway,
and the earth spreads out around him,
the real world, the one that bears us up,
that bears us,
and tears take him,
for he loves to love.

At last he tops the rise.
"Oh!" he says. "There you are."


Ashes

1.

We cannot find it till we give up hope;
I'm already at the turnaround, certain that we're lost,
when my wife says, "That's it" --
the cemetery can only be seen
when you get there.

"This waste," she says inside the gate,
seeking further words, "This wasteŠ"
the city child marvels but approves:
"We need it."

We're early. We don't speak of him.
My father's been everywhere for days.
In the slim shade of a spruce, we sit
on the ground, cropping clover with our fingers;
looking over each other's shoulders,
we squint against the baking glare.

2.

When it's time, a man in a suit comes to us,
a box like a trophy base in one arm, easy as a melon.
He speaks before I can; we are pulled 
into his wake,
in a moment we're in the parking lot,
calling over the roofs of cars.
Alone, up front, he drives ahead.

Not alone, we realize.
"That's him," my wife observes.
Our cars float down the drive like two skimming birds;
we alight at an open place between groves of trees.
The man gets out, shifts the box, extends an arm --
"This way," he says, and starts.
"That's him," I say; he stops. "I'll carry him."
He hesitates, then passes me the box.
I pull it against my side,
rest it near the hip, the place one perches
the straddling kid who cannot walk any farther.
My wife comes up, eyes big on me,
I smile: so far, so good.

The grave is a two-foot square hole
in the ground; down in there, 
a black metal case with a lid. 
We look. I bounce the box once. 
At no signal I can see, the digger kneels,
seems to dive into the hole, tips off
the case-lid. Two sticks of gum slip out of his shirt, 
smack on the bottom of the vault.
He snatches them back. I say, 
"Maybe you should leave one thereŠ"
the digger's face, when he gets up straight,
is red as any drunk's.

They all look at me: "Well, old guy," 
I say to the box, now holding it 
between my hands like a baby's face.
There's really nothing else to do,
really nothing else. I gaze around,
to see where he will be --
it looks like a fairway: that is well.
I give my father over, give
him away, give him up; let
the ashes take their weight, go
down, stay under.

3.

We cannot go right back, we have to stop;
for neutral ground we choose a fast food joint.
I want nothing; go, stop, 
stand, sit, here, there, all the same.
I stare out over the cluttered street,
but see only that spread of quiet grass
with its attendant trees respectfully apart;
what makes the tears rise is leaving him alone.
He wanted this the way I'd wanted
to run away from him, from home,
from everything that never worked;
now I abandon him to that desire,
and cannot have him any more.

My wife takes my face between her hands,
weeps for my weeping.
We wonder if there is a heaven;
I think not: not elsewhere, here if anywhere;
not where the angels live, not a place at all,
but what they guard: each of us the locus
and the substance of love. 
The unbroken cannot be cherished, only feared or adored.
We must be able to perish.


Say Goodbye

Say goodbye to dark walls 
of long, fluid fingers,
goodbye to the dark, the big dark
starred by neuronic sparks alone,
night of no moon: you are the moon.

Say goodbye.
Here when you return
desiccated, burned,
blasted by wind and smoke,
a sack of stones and dust, busted and spilled,

Air will have sung you,
fire made you glow.
Now earth takes you back,
slick fingers once more
press and caress.

Bill Bly
172 St Pauls Av
Staten Island NY 10301
917.691.9511
bbly@infomonger.com
www.infomonger.com/bbly/