The poet [INAUDIBLE] but there's a great deal of activity
going on in the next few weeks.
Our last reading will be a week from tonight
in the terrace lounge in the Student Union.
And it will honor the undergraduate students
whose work has been accepted for Persona Magazine.
An Israeli poet Ada Aharoni, is visiting the campus
under the sponsorship of Hillel Foundation
and is doing some readings tomorrow.
I put some sheets advertising her readings
on the refreshment table in the hall.
Also, Friday night of this week, it's a night of women's poetry.
8 o'clock in the Student Union junior ballroom and I
put some sheets about it on the table too.
In addition to our reading next week, the English department
is sponsoring a reading by Gary Holthouse and that's Tuesday
afternoon at 3 o'clock, Student Union, 283.
Pima College is sponsoring a reading, Thursday night
by Jim Zimmerman.
A fine young poet who teaches at Northern Arizona University.
On Easter Sunday, Steve Orlen and Tony Hoagland
will be reading at the dinner where
artists' cooperative gallery 7:30 in the evening.
It's in conjunction with showing of paintings and pastels
by Gail Marcus Orban.
The second Tucson Poetry Festival
would be in the last weekend in the month.
That's April 27, 28, and 29.
I brought over a stack of our last newsletter
because in case you didn't get it,
there is an article about the Tucson Poetry Festival in that.
And it gives a number where you can get more information.
And a very special performance is
being done by the University of Arizona Readers Theatre.
A chamber theater production of C.E Poverman's novel
Solomon's Daughter.
And that will be next Friday and Saturday night
at the U of A theater.
Now there will be a short quiz.
It's a great pleasure to have Henry Carlile here
and I hope you can stay after the reading
and meet him have some refreshments.
He's published two collections of poetry.
The Rough Hewn Table with the University of Missouri.
Press and Running Lights with Dragon Gate Press.
His work appears in many magazines and anthologies.
Since 1967 he's been associated with Portland State University.
His honors include a National Endowment
for the Arts discovery grant.
A Devin's award.
A National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and PEN
and Syndicated Fiction Award.
You have a great treat in store for you
listening to Henry Carlile.
Can you all hear me.
OK.
The sound is all right.
I thought I'd start with the poem which
was on the announcement,
The Fire.
In Portland, I went flying with a neighbor of ours who
has a light plane and he let me fly it.
We were flying at night.
I had flown light planes before with other friends.
I like to do it.
And this poem was about the experience
of looking down trying to discover which house was ours
knowing that my wife and daughter would
be down there someplace.
Flying sometimes late at night, dozing over a book.
The fire low and the wind high outside.
I hear above the moon in the wires, the lonely motor
of a small plane and I wonder who's up there
or if through the overcast he sees our lights
and can find his way safely down the blue runway.
I have been there once or twice, hunched over red instrument.
Intent on some horizon at an unfelt altitude.
How slowly the night passed beneath my wings yet
the airspeed indicator read riden to.
One of those lights down there was home.
Small, indistinguishable in the darkness and someone pointing
the star that moves, that's your father.
I'm going to go back to an older poem.
Which I stopped reading for a while
because I got tired of it.
But I've started reading it again
because since Jerry Falwell and others of his persuasion
have been so vocal.
It seemed the right time to read this poem.
It's about my grandmother.
She had a religious conversion of the low church border
after having had 13 children.
Which makes that kind of suspect, doesn't it.
But she threw my grandfather out of the house.
She was very difficult woman.
After this poem first appeared in the book.
I got a letter from a woman down in a little town
called Glide Oregon.
And she was concerned because she felt that I was godless
and I needed saving and she wrote me
this very concerned letter and sent me
a lot of religious literature.
And I wrote back to her and I said, I'm not against religion,
I'm against fanaticism.
And she sent me a whole bunch more.
Grandmother.
No one remembered when she first discovered God.
Her conversion was sudden as a slammed door.
Outside, my grandfather beat the door jam with his fist
but she God furious, would not relent.
Shut up like an oyster on a speck of dirt.
She praised God in her bed clothes.
Read the Bible like a French novel
and dreamed each night of Christ the Savior.
The lightning bolt of Revelation forking at her
from the black cloud of her Bible
and the Godhead stirring inside her like a sick sea.
Overnight, her skirts grew longer and her temper shorter.
The black buttons on her boots crept higher and higher on legs
that had never seen the light.
Whenever she rode the cable car downtown,
she pulled her bonnet tight around her ears
to let no evil word hiss through.
Her eyes magnified by scripture, split
by the seeing lens and reading lens which
could never look together.
Beholders of two worlds, one black and one
white, negative, censored and unprintable.
A damned world bleached of color.
Stern is an iron stove, she drove her children off
to church.
Beat their bottoms with a willow to make
them kneel like 13 sinful [AUDIO OUT]..
Recalcitrant, flatulent, bleeding at the altars,
pinched upright in their pews reciting alphabets of sin.
While the preacher, a red faced Russian
with a beard as black as God gospel
from the pulpit and the congregation flat
their tongues.
Prophesying improbable forgiveness but nothing
ever was.
The family scattered out like rabbits
from the sawed off shotgun of the true faith.
While grandmother rocked in the cradle of belief.
Reading and praying, reading and praying.
Copying scriptures on tiny scraps of paper
that peep like mice or children from every nook
and cranny of the old house.
From cookie jars and table drawers and kitchen cupboards.
Even from the Bible itself.
Marsupial with misconceptions, threatening every minute
to explode.
Until one day her heart did and we hunkered
in the shadow of her death.
A bad luck come to nothing family.
Wrong census.
This next poem is from the same book.
My first book, The Rough Hewn Table and it's a request.
I'm going to dedicate this one to my friend
John Anderson, who asked me to read it.
And I'm only going to read part of the poem.
If I had to write this poem over again,
I'd revise a lot of the first part of it.
But it came out of an experience in part, at least.
Which is described in the poem.
But also from a couple of quotations that at the time,
meant quite a bit to me.
One is from Luke.
I believe it's chapter 11 verse 34, if I'm not mistaken.
The quotation is, the light of the body is the eye.
Therefore when thine eye is [AUDIO OUT] thy
whole body is full of light.
But when thine eye is evil thy body also is full of darkness.
And also from a quotation which seems similar,
from a letter of Van Gogh's to his brother Tale.
Which goes, let us pray that our eye may become single
and then our whole body shall be full of light.
And this is the third and fourth section of the poem.
Midway-- excuse me it's titled Narcissus a Notebook.
Midway between the hugest red star, the smallest electron.
I can't turn my eyes from this world and don't want to.
Flowers and nova's.
Snowflakes and diatoms.
Observable and immeasurable explosions of species.
Brief love affairs and words confuse me.
Looking for it with a mind in chaos.
Considering all the physical evidence of a fear.
Letting the light fall past my hearing.
Letting the eye mislead the eye.
That afternoon we walked through the badlands
and saw the Earth forgetting itself and believed
in those scars.
Believed weather might reveal us.
And in the Wind River Canyon, in a lightning storm.
We saw the same colors, only this time more intense.
And stopping to look, found the red shafted flicker
trapped in a ball of line with a fish hook through its leg.
Together we held it and cut the hook free
then watched it fly off between lightning breaks.
Coming back from the river, where I'd
washed the blood from my hands.
I found the dried remains of a young Kingfisher.
Ants crawling from its eye sockets, didn't tell you.
That night in the Tetons, I lay awake with my hands
over my eyes.
Clouds filled all the mountains.
Part 4.
After they had prepared his funeral pyre.
They turned and found where his body had been.
A flower of gold with white rimmed petals.
Narcissus, Narcissus.
We are what we long for.
Now, you are everywhere in spring.
Under trees and flowering shrubs,
among ground cover plantings.
Near water in rock gardens and patios or in borders
by secret pathways or naturalized and sweeping
drifts.
Wherever light and space are available.
When I was very young, we lived in Seattle.
My mother was always getting married and divorced.
She married four times which is a little confusing for me.
But at the time that this poem refers to,
we were living in Seattle.
And they had street photographers then,
who would take your photograph and then hand you a card.
And you could send a $0.25 or whatever it was then
and it was very inexpensive and get your photo.
They weren't very good, just snapshots.
But there was one of my mother and myself
that I'm especially fond of.
I was being very bad that day.
I had a little wooden sword and I was really--
I guess I was about five years old then maybe.
And I had been cutting up rather badly
and my mother was very cross.
And at the moment that the photo was taken,
passing under a theater marquee.
And I thought that the titles of the films were rather funny.
The poem is titled Grace, which is my mother's name.
You look away as though to pretend you
can't see the man aiming at us.
He must have stood for hours.
Focusing, shooting, holding out his card.
Perhaps, having already decided who should pass and who stop.
Why are you dressed all in black?
You were never religious.
No one has died.
You told me past the theater, errant
night, feet skipping off the pavement.
How famous we seem with that caption above our heads.
Two big features, The Grapes of Wrath of mice and men.
After all these years, I seem to see us reversed.
I, the little angry mother and you the son, unruly as always.
Aiming sword down the camera's muzzle.
That breath fixed and burning, that petrifying light.
The Grapes of Wrath was one of my mother's favorite films
and she took me to see it three times when I was a little kid
and I hated it.
I thought it was the most depressing film I'd ever seen.
Of course, I love it now and I understand
why my mother liked it.
It meant a lot to her and it describes some of her life
to her, I think.
She drifted around the country looking for work,
much the way Steinbeck's characters did.
Anyway, I in part had that landscape in my mind.
I don't know why the Midwestern landscape
has meant a lot to me.
We had a horrendous trip from Minnesota out to California
once.
Which was like a replay of The Grapes of Wrath.
And it was during the Second World War
and we went through to [AUDIO OUT] out there.
When you couldn't buy tires or anything.
It was awful.
But in some way this poem is about fathers, I guess.
But also about that period.
A lot of the imagery is about that period titled, Depression.
He's pushing a Black Ford through an empty street.
A car like his father's that beat the flat roads like wind
in summer and brought him here.
He never forgave his father.
That was the year he left home.
Then there was talk of weather and everyone was packing.
Windmills were stopped all over Kansas.
He is thinking of father's, the ways they never forgive you.
Withholding love like lust.
But they quit, they stop like pumps.
There is no way to set them working again.
He is thinking of Mother's.
How she could not know, how he half followed
girls down darks of his heart.
How that loneliness is passed to sons, to the fathers of sons.
He is pushing a Black Ford.
Its problem is such a heart, you cannot give it enough care.
Like a father it will quit and there is no end to this.
My real father was Spanish.
He was born in Havana and Carlile is my adopted name.
When I went to get a passport once, I had a lot of trouble
with the passport agency.
Because when I presented them my birth certificate and
with my real father's name which was Pareto, on it.
And it said born in Havana and boy that was enough.
Never mind that I haven't seen him since I was two years old.
But I started this poem in free verse.
It's titled Havana Blues.
And it seemed to want to go into couplets
and even though it seemed to me that some of the rhymes in it
were terribly obvious.
I thought I'd just go with them and see where it went
and I left it this way in couplets.
There's a Senator alluded to and here
was Senator Eugene McCarthy.
The right McCarthy.
Tonight, I thought of you as I smoked
a cigar smuggled in from your birthplace
by a Senator who gave it to a friend, who gave it to me.
Why speak as though to someone I could see.
I try to know why fathers leave their sons.
Why it is easy to forget.
It must be, when you've never written me to say you're well.
If you're alive and wish me well.
Would like to visit when you have a chance.
Were you too proud or grieved?
The evidence suggests you were and so I
understand and must forgive.
If you would only send a card to say, hello again, your father.
But I'm talking to myself, why bother.
You might be dead for all I know or care.
I care and yet I must confess, my fear is finding you.
Not knowing what to say.
I'm talking to myself, a game I play with words.
Your face the paper that I press blank, father, ghost.
And if I miss you now, I miss for both of us.
At two, a small imperfect replica of you.
I read this in one of the classes last night.
I hope you'll forgive me if I read it again.
It's titled Spider Reeves.
And it has a reference in it to Damascus twist.
Which is a kind of tobacco, but also a kind of steel
that shotgun barrels used to be made out of.
It's an annealed kind of wire which is wound in a spiral.
And it was designed for use with black powder.
And smokeless powder shotgun loads
used to have warnings written on them that they shouldn't be
used in Damascus twist barrels.
Well, my friend who had a shotgun,
a double barreled shotgun, one barrel of which worked,
did it and got away with it.
He was always taking chances.
And I knew that one day he would die young.
He did.
He went out-- he was a commercial fisherman.
And he went out on Grays Harbor in a storm
when all the other fishermen were sitting
at the dock playing poker.
And everyone told him not to go out,
and he went out anyway, got outside then the breakwater
and saw it was too rough and turned his boat around
and started to come in.
And he broached and drowned.
But unfortunately, a lot of these misadventures
which are described in this poem are
ones that I was involved with.
And he scared hell out of me.
Spider Reeves.
But for the broken firing pin, would it have lived elsewhere.
You could have blown it out with your breath.
Poked it out with a stick.
But you liked to see its many eyes gleam from the chamber,
each time you opened it.
The next door chamber, took in noisy tenants, threw them out.
What the spider thought of that loud eviction.
It next door to death, no more a damned fool than you.
Smokeless powder, Damascus twist.
Lucky you didn't poach your own head instead of the dears.
One night you shot it eyes and fetched a scream so shrill,
you thought it was a woman's.
It was a ring tailed Coons.
Who else but you, would plug a punctured gas
tank with a match.
Patch a leaking boat with gum.
Get lost in fog on an ebb tide with the wind building.
In school, they called you spider.
Not for the spider in your gun but because you snagged
passes with your sticky hands running so many directions
at once.
It seemed you had eight legs.
Now you run with the tide.
So many lost molecules.
A gleam in the dog shark's eye.
A diatomaceous spark.
You were not very bright.
You could have learned to live.
My third step father, I do lose track sometimes.
Was probably more of a father to me than anyone.
My mother finally found a man she could be happy with
and stayed with him for many, many years.
But several years ago, he had a terrible accident
with a propane gas tank.
Which exploded in their camping trailer.
And he had a bad burn.
40% burn, first, second, and third degree burn.
And since he was very old, it's rather dangerous.
There are all kinds of side effects from burns as you know.
But I used to have a very happy dream about my stepfather.
I alluded to it on the first book.
I'd dream that he wrote an absolutely perfect book
of poems.
A small selected poems.
And it always made me terrifically happy
because it would be like one of those dreams
where you have a big house and you forgot all the rooms that
are in it and you find a little room in it
that you're happy in.
I would forget that my stepfather had
done this marvelous thing and then I would remember it
and it was always great.
But then when this accident happened,
I finally deciphered the dream.
I realized what the green book was
and I've never had the dream since.
And it really bothers me because it was a happy dream.
I wish it would come back.
Anyway, the poem is titled The Book of The Deer, The Bear
and the Elk.
You never wrote the small green book
like the poems of Edward Thomas.
It was a book I dreamed.
But watching the green report of your heart on the monitor,
it came to me as I stood like one of the doctors
in my cap and gown.
Home where you've lived like a bachelor,
at the far end of the house.
There is a green diary, the book of the deer,
the bear and the elk.
With snapshots of Julian and Bob and Harry.
Old hunting friends, dead as the game strung up on poles
or duped across fenders.
I think you are the only one left.
And still you fight to stay breathing, the scorched air
of the burn ward.
The sweet stink of your own charred flesh.
Stepfather, don't go.
73 years is not the end of the book.
The letters you never wrote because even
before you blistered your hands, the act of writing pained you.
It took four shots to bring it down.
Your father never praised you.
Rising in awe that night, he beckoned toward the woodshed
where the skinned deer hung draped in burlap.
Then he whipped you with a belt.
Don't ever bring home meat shot up like that.
One bullet is enough.
I saw you kill a running buck at 300 yards with one shot.
It's a brutal art that fathers passed to sons.
When the propane tank ignited, you
took the flaming cylinder in your arms like a lover
and fought it out the door.
Now you dream each night of the trailer burning.
My mother screams and beats the fire out of her hair.
She was not burned like you, twice
and three times for your care.
Now the deer are safe from us.
I have one photograph to add to our book.
A doe running through a field.
My best shot.
Somewhere in the grass behind her, a fan is hiding.
You can't see it but it's waiting
for its mother to draw us away.
Later, she'll return and the two of them will be saved.
Step father, father, be like the fan.
I used to write a lot of bird poems
and I was explaining this in class the other night.
Because I couldn't seem to write directly about experiences.
I was too shy.
So, I would pick some ridiculous looking bird.
Like a coot or a blue Heron or something and write about that.
And it sort of expressed-- it became
a sort of metaphor for a certain stage that I was going through.
And it was inevitable I guess, that I
would write a poem about the dodo, the extinct dodo.
I really empathize with the dodo sometimes.
It was a big dumb pigeon and it had no chance.
And there's a sad story about the dodo.
There is no complete dodo any place in the world.
They have stuffed passenger pigeons,
I think and other species that have gone extinct.
But they have no complete dodos.
They make up replicas of them, you know,
what they looked like.
They have pieces of dodos but they
don't have enough pieces to put them all together
and make one dodo, see.
Right.
Anyway, after I wrote this poem a friend
sent me one of the stamps.
It was a lovely stamp.
It's one of my favorite.
It says, save the dodo before it's too late.
Dodo.
Years they mistook me for you.
Chanting your name in the streets,
pointing grubby fingers.
Today, in the Natural History Museum,
I saw why dodo you look the way I feel.
With your sad absent minded eyes and your beak
like a stone age x.
Even your feathers dingy and fuzzy.
What woman would want them for a hat.
With a name like dinosaur neptis, where could you go.
Wings too small to fly with and feet so large and slow.
You were not very palatable.
Men slaughtered you for sport.
Hogs ate the one egg you laid each year.
Sometimes, I think I know how it feels
to be scattered over the world.
A foot in the British Museum a head in Copenhagen.
To be a lesson after the fact, an entity in name only and that
taken in vain.
Poor dodo.
In Oregon I've always been interested
in eccentric hermits, various kinds.
There was one called John Terno, who lived
near where I did as a child.
Who ran off into the Olympic Peninsula
and became a wild man.
And they haunted him for years and after he
had killed a bunch of people who had tried to capture him
they finally shot him.
And he was one of those local mythic people
who became a legend.
I've alluded to him also to hermit
I knew, who was a terrible smelling old hermit.
He would come out of the woods every once
in a while to buy supplies.
Everybody called him posy flowers.
I don't think that was his real name, however.
But the other one, the most recently who was interested me
is called the Birdman of Redmond.
And they first did a local series on him
and then later he was on one of those awful television
shows like faces and places or are real people.
I guess it was.
But he has some marvelous gift with birds.
For some reason, they trust him and he
can walk outside his old trailer and just say, here birds, here
birds.
And they come from miles around and land all over him.
He's been fighting a long battle with some companies,
to build a rock crusher.
And he's been fighting this single handed battle
to try to keep them away because he's afraid they'll scare away
all his birds.
Anyway, I wrote this poem about him and then
not having ever seen him, except on television.
And then, guessing about some things.
Later, Kim Stafford, William Stafford son went to visit him
and wrote an article on him.
And I found and I said, well, I hope
he's never read this poem because there
are a couple of things in it that might hurt his feelings.
Like something about filthy, you know.
And I didn't know if that were true or not.
I thought it was but Kim said, Yeah, he really is.
He smells awful but he's a nice man.
Anyway, the Birdman of Redmond.
He will not be told the rock crushers legal weight
or why the courts consider the rights of birds worth less.
Worth less than gravel or money.
Therefore, he may stand a few more days
with his arms spread in the clearing,
crying here birds, here birds.
As the flocks gather for crumbs.
I have known others like him.
Filthy, kindly men.
Living alone, friends to deer and chipmunk
no longer able to speak sensibly of the world outside,
though they babble to anyone who comes.
One I heard, took to the trees and was found years later,
his face chewed by rats.
Some swore him a genius wronged in politics or love.
Sometimes, I think there is in each of us
a simple place with its fire.
A place of refusals to forget whatever we came here for.
A face no matter, surely some awful failure.
Some call it the self, we must lure as slowly
as the eyes that come each night to circle the fire.
Most never find it.
I have dreamed such a place for years.
A room I had almost forgotten in the house so huge
it was hard to remember each room in hallway.
I want so much to believe in it.
Because I know that others have seen it too or some such place.
There are too many rock crushers.
Too many tempers that break every hardness but our own.
Just once, I'd like some gentleness to win.
It may not, which is why we have these places in ourselves.
These rooms we barely remember.
Well, time to read some new poems.
These are our recent written since Running Lights.
The first one I'll read is titled, The Cloud and The Plow
and The Meaning of Rhyme.
And it's kind of a playful response to something
that my wife wrote once.
It was an essay that she wrote that interested me a lot.
About why we write in lines because
we plow fields in straight lines and so on.
It was kind of an interesting organic theory of poetry.
Something about the poetry coming naturally out
of experience and sort of arranging itself.
And I believe, there's a great deal of truth in that.
But I started writing this poem late one night.
And I guess playing with the language
and just having a lot of fun with it.
You think the cloud will come closer and make
everything clear.
That's what you think.
But it is elsewhere making someone else rain.
The man in the cloud colored suit,
cannot undertake his own shadow.
It follows like a dog of rhyme.
He puts out the light and he is everywhere.
A shadow in the shadows.
He turns on the light, his shadow
starts from him like gray business.
Why did you start this enterprise of rain?
The reasons for rhyme are everywhere.
You were not thinking of unplowing the fields.
You'd like the furrows to refrain
like a concentration of exact foreheads all nodding as one.
The bell calling every man to mass on the same note,
an absolute disaster.
Grief that embezzlers and runs spending from real to real.
Bringing on blades, helping the hogs
that pour from their pens and your own pet grasshopper.
All new and yet there is some precedent for this.
As after great thunder and sin, you feel refreshed.
As after hard rain, you see the steam rising from fields
and hear the birds starting up all over again.
Their fierce little engines, strange, you even
knew they could sing.
A gay friend of mine I like a lot.
Confessed to me with a characteristic self irony
that he felt himself to be in an untenable situation.
He's getting old and fat and he's still hopelessly addicted
to athletic young men.
So, I wrote a poem for him titled Keeper of The Towels.
Which is really an off, it's a derivation from Rilke poem.
It's written in form so its titled Keeper of The Towels
after Rilke.
His site from ever peering through the showers
has grown so keen he thinks of little else.
And he is always present, like the evening hours to shyly seek
what elevates his pulse.
Thigh, shoulder, calf or thrilling bum.
Divine torsos of Larry Bruce and bushy.
He combs himself by dosing up on valium.
Fearful to be forward, might prove touchy.
His loitering bespeaks a hidden poignant need,
in which the will to act stands paralyzed.
Careless do they know what lusts they feed so easy
in themselves, so idolized.
A couple of summers ago I was teaching
at the Centrum Foundation in Washington
and after the conference I decided to go salmon fishing.
And while I was fishing I saw a poseidon class submarine
coming up the Straits.
I didn't know what it was at first because you
can see the black conning tower on one
of those things for miles.
It looks like the dorsal of a killer whale.
And that is in water where there are a lot of killer whales
and I ran my boat at it and flew a band, the trident flag.
This was a month before the USS Ohio came in.
It didn't seem right somehow for this thing that
can annihilate most of the major cities in the Soviet Union
to be in a beautiful place like that.
And of course, it automatically makes it a target
by its very presence there.
It makes a target out of a place that
is very important to people who live in the Northwest.
So, I wrote this poem of Port Townsend, the month
before trident.
Down Haro Strait in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
The killer whales would broach and roll.
Lifting tall dorsal, free of the water.
Breath popping like steam valves on old boilers.
Black and white they were, like a giant string quartet.
Not vicious as we'd thought but teamable and captive.
Aiming only to please.
Once lonely sailors rocked by their music
through a ship's hull, mistook them for mermaids.
Now, if you put your ear to the water,
you might listen to the hiss of electrons.
The turbines deep nuclear hum and pulse
of propellers at each revolution.
Whispering no to the hope of cities.
The morning I saw my first poseidon,
I forgot the salmon I had come to fish for
and rammed the throttle open.
Closing at 20 knots, quartering on its bow.
My puny band the trident flag, unfurled.
From their high place surrounded by periscopes
the curious officers looked down.
I was no Bogart.
My boat no African queen.
I only wished to keep this poseidon
safe in some post-nuclear museum.
A tame knows we might pat, disarming as the whales.
But for now it holds course, which is darkened by its pace.
Staining the scenery it slips through like grease.
Tacking from that wake, a bar toward a reef of gulls
and chocolates.
Candle fish and rising salmon.
White sand cliffs were Moderna start and whisper.
Blue sky of red bell hanging on slack tide.
The only black exposed rock, the whale's dorsal.
Once there was a city-state that promised everything.
White is the sand cliffs with olive trees.
Promenades, framed in marble and statues of the old cruel gods.
Poseidon was one.
His weapon the trident.
Names we thought we could use because they meant nothing.
You know and finally with a poem titled, The Four Seasons.
I've loved Vivaldi's music.
This poem may not have that much to do with Vivaldi really.
It started just one day looking out a window at a view
and it begins instead of in spring, in the winter.
Somehow, this is not an intentional reference
to go from a submarine poem to a submarine metaphor.
It's really the way the frost looked on the window.
The Four Seasons.
In the shape of a submarine, frost lengthens on a window.
Outside, winter sparrows perch in rhinoceros colored trees.
Mare's tails chase Whiteley past brick chimneys.
I have seen those lights before.
Small, rectangular eyes of far buildings.
One church steeple, darkening the blue sky.
Looks like a stopped gray heart, if heart sport
such delicate scallops and trees wear hearts on their sleeves.
Now, the first swaths of spring emerges.
Its wings a transparency of fish scales.
Old eyes and glass or vein fretted windows.
Wings of the first untranscendent angel,
sentenced to death by the God frost.
How can some later spring reclaim this paper city
or repair its walls damaged in the long drop
from the 120th odd year of a tree.
The sky wears that color through which
you expect the tornado's black drill.
Only cicadas try the air.
The scratching that cannon could not silence.
Beyond the barn with three silos and the wind
pump stopped like a 10 Daisy.
Carp lit the surface of reflection
in this paper city of repair its walls, damaged in the long drop
from the 120th odd year of a tree.
The sky wears that color through which
you expect the tornado's black drill.
Only cicadas try the air.
The scratching that cannon could not silence.
Beyond the barn with three silos and the wind
pump stopped like a 10 Daisy.
Carp lit the surface of reflected sky.
The promised violence.
I always imagined that place as an orchard on a mountain top.
It's summer delicious freckling to a sunset by Sara.
But the last time it was fall.
This year grass bent one way toward a gate.
Is though a great wind had swept down
stones of the garden walls.
Two posts bent where the orchard had been.
Their purpose obscure they stood, I think.
Where flowers had rivaled, deepest
in their colors and sense.
Thank you, very much.