Poetry by Don Foran
Anthology
Image by Takeshi Obata
A Boy on a Roof
(A Sestina for Stanley Kunitz)
The years like layered clothing slip
Gracefully from the shoulders of this gentle man.
His aging is a gradual unburdening.
Like the Wellfleet whale,
He sounds his depths and ours, imagination
Scanning each fresh and salt- watery world.
The poet, not the whale, embraced his world
When he, a lad of five, slipped
Up to the rooftop, his young imagination
Fired by Halley’s comet. A child, father to the man,
Clad in a flannel nightshirt, observed a whale
Of a tale: the end of all, the ultimate unburdening.
Now, ninety-four years later, this unburdening
Continues. The layers of his life, the blooming world,
Fresh objects of inquiry, other species of whale
To interrogate, to love. Nothing slips
Entirely past him. A curious boy and man,
Tracking the snakes of September with imagination,
And the flight of Apollo, and fire stick imaginings.
That the end might come, the ultimate unburdening
All cataclysmic, final, would now dismay the man,
Dismast his garden-lovely terra firma world,
Send shivers down his spine, or slip
Into his springtime thoughts, a wintry whale
In his Provincetown living room. The whale,
Be he sign or portent, imaginably
From krill-rich fields of plankton slips
Through alluvial silt. The poet, unburdened
By his poet’s words, sounds out his world
Living in its layers, not on its litter. Man
As transformer, pelagic boy then man --
It was he sat on the rooftop, mastered whale-
Roads. The comet came, and went; the world
Lurched on. He lived to celebrate, his imagination
Transforming us and him, unburdening
Us all at last. Though time delivered many a slip
‘Twixt poet’s cup and lip, a man worked, imagined
And lived. Whale, comet, unburdened
Friend, he this world shall slip.
Afternoon
There is a tiny “click here”
At the bottom of the unsolicited page,
A fragile log to cling to
In a sea of spam.
Utilizing it, I free myself
From subsequent solicitations.
I click and smile as almost
Immediate confirmation
Appears across my screen.
Click, and that too disappears,
But now I’m left without
Communication, my machine
A voiceless parrot
In a shop where crowds
Surge by desiring some
Token riff from this exotic
Bird who invaded my life
Years ago and now sits
Silent on my table top
A grim reminder of
The loneliness of poets’ lives
When they wait, ruefully,
For a next communication
From beyond the pale
Pale perimeter
Of the book-lined
Photo-filled walls
Of their prosaic offices.
Alchemy
Poets, not unfamiliar to the art,
Do transmute dross to gold by magic means.
With fictive flair they fashion might-have-beens
More true than truth. These moderns, for their part,
Find alkahests that Paracelsus sought;
Knowing a coda can redeem life’s play,
They vanquish imperfection in new day.
And thus derive from dross a golden thought.
At Ploughboy Campsite
That single fallen tree, burled, craggy,
Which glistens above the surface to my right,
The one around which monarchs twirl, is a bit like me.
It’s been settled now long enough
To appreciate gratuitous serenity.
Maggie and I hiked in here an hour ago, perched
On logs and let the breeze play with our hair.
We are not ready yet to swim.
A lone boat sits quiet on Upper Priest,
A father and son intent on catching and releasing
A Dolly Varden or two. A shocking-blue dragonfly
Bips up and down over the sand.
I’m looking straight up the lake to the layered
Mountains – green, then slate, then gray
The more they recede into Canada.
A few leaves blow into my lap and onto Maggie’s back.
A light breeze blows the lake water into gentle slappings
And the white birch on the hill behind us soughs quietly.
The Venezuelan plane crash, the earthquake in Japan,
The carnage in the horrific Iraq war seem far away.
A dipping gray-white swallow skims twittering over the water,
And I pause to praise the God who embraces our daughters,
Our families, and our friends, and so soothes our tattered hearts.
Cat Talk
They have it right, those cats:
Eat, sleep, cuddle, sleep some more.
They wonder why we fuss, plan, hurry, or watch football
When we could give them undivided attention, love.
Take Mickey, for example. We’ve been his people
Ten years now, enough time for him to know us,
Our quirks, our chatter, and our flaws.
I tell him, sometimes, what I’m grappling with,
What project looms, what back pain, what angst assails me.
He purrs, shifts himself on my lap
With studied nonchalance. He shimmies
Up the long body now invading his couch,
Plants himself at that perfect spot, my shoulder,
Just below my chin, the one place, he knows,
Where I cannot read my book.
He looks me in the eye and speaks:
“Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis
Recipitur,” he says. Whatever is received is received
According to the mode of the one receiving it.
“That’s plagiarism! I shout. He smiles –
Cats do smile – and licks, as always, my nearest ear.
Crazy Jane Still Talks to the Bishop Even Though Old Yeats is Gone
‘Tis yer theological courage I’m doubtin’
When a body-soul fission ye’re ever bespoutin’
Sure, the joys of the flesh ye summarily blacken
(When ethereal heaven indeed may be lackin’)
Do you reckon God likes it when mortals are apter
Ta discount earth’s pleasures and yearn fer the rapture?
Aye, what’s good fer the body is good fer the soul,
‘Tis a tawdrey salvation when none are made whole!
So leave me here sittin’ in my sweet excrement.
Jesus, Bishop, yer preachin’ is verily spent
God’s flowerin’ children are bloomin’ aplenty
Relax! There no need now to wax sacramenty!
DOMINICA IMPRESSIONS
ON A WINDSWEPT DOMINICAN HILLSIDE, FLOWER-SCENT AND BIRDSONG BLEND.
I LISTEN AS DOVES' COOS PUNCTUATE THE MID-MAY CARIBBEAN EVENING.
SIMPLICITY, NOT GRANDEUR, IS THE ENGINE WHICH DRIVES THE WOMEN'S LIVES
WHOSE GIFTS OF CHERRY JUICE, BEAN SOUP, AND TENDER, HEALTHY FARE
ARE SET BEFORE ME WITH BOTH CARE AND GENTLENESS.
DURING MY TWO SHORT STAYS, I BATHE IN HODGES BAY, AND, CALMED,
RENEW APPRECIATION OF GOD'S SMALL GIFTS.
THE CLOTHES BLOW WILDLY ON THE LINE BELOW THIS QUIET HOUSE
SIGNALING FRESH THOUGHTS FAR SANER THAN OUR WORLD'S NOISY ADS.
IT'S DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE THAT MORE CHIRPING BIRDS, MORE PERFECT HIBISCUS
INHABIT ANY OTHER ACRE. BIRDS FLIT AMONG THE FLOWERS, SOAR,
AND IN THE DISTANCE, DROP INTO THE SEA, CONFIDENT
THEIR NEXT FINE MEAL WILL BE EVERYTHING THEY NEED, AND MORE.
Attribution
If I can feel the wood and know who’s whittled,
Read paragraphs and know the author’s name,
Can hear one riff and know Grapelli’s fiddled,
Or sense in silhouettes the dancing flame,
Why can’t I scan for style erratic lines
And temperamental scribblings on earth’s page:
Consistent inconsistencies, design,
Caprice, rich legacies of tenderness and rage?
Perhaps the world I cherish is chaotic,
Perhaps its pedagogy is insane,
But if it is sufficiently quixotic,
The signature, for students, will be plain.
Ah, crazy-witty worldlings, pitch a tent,
Absorbing and translating sacrament.
Epiphany
I had asked who knew what the Epiphany referred to
And a lone student recalled the church feast
Celebrating the coming of the magi to the crib.
I explained the word is Greek, from epiphanein,
For “coming to light,” “revelatory manifestation.”
I even wrote it on the board in the original,
Odd letters, epsilons and phi’s and iotas
And no fraternity or sorority in sight.
I mentioned that James Joyce employed the word
In Dubliners when a protagonist had a moment
Of sudden, often painful, illumination,
And I summoned up the image of Hulga
In Flannery O’Connor’s story, stuck in that loft,
Her prosthetic limb packed away in Manley
Pointer’s bible case alongside the glass eye
And the booze and the pornographic cards.
Most nodded, the shock of recognition
Registering, and we returned to the text
To start another story, to hunt,
As English teachers do, for other tidbits
Of erudition, the better to hold the literary
Mirror up to our many human quirks.
After class, the gum-chewing chatty blonde
Who never did well on tests came running,
Yes, literally running to my desk. She asked me,
Much to my surprise, if I would please like
Write out on her note page that like Greek word
Epi-something for her. She exuded gratitude.
I was, to say the least surprised, a bit mortified
That I had so misjudged a young woman’s
Intellectual curiosity. It was then
She told me it was perfect, “perrrfect” for
That new tattoo she’d like to have (I knew not where)
Then she was gone, light playing on her hair.
For Roethke
The light did take the tree;
In fact, it took a great many trees.
The breeze too played its part
Allowing now-bright boughs and leaves
To shimmer as they danced.
Life’s like that.
We shine when others shine on us;
We dance when breezes make us bend.
The flies and spiders play
In shafts of sunlight.
In shadows, tiny creatures flit,
Though hidden without sunlight.
Today all nature says “We are.
We are here. We are what we are.
We steal light from the sun so gold
And give it back a million-fold.”
For Malamud
Life may indeed be, Bernard,
A tragedy filled with joy,
Or, as my Irish ancestors knew,
A beautiful world some ways sad.
Yet, we agree, I suspect, that life, ultimately, Is gift.
Ideal relationship, empathic
When the heart is sound, opens
Us to the hearts of others.
The ren, ‘twould seem, is neither
Yin nor yang, mustard seed nor tree,
Just circle of white in swirled dark
And dark in swirled light.
Gaggio Montano: Liberation from Germany, 1945
At thirteen, the grandson,
Braces on his teeth,
Gangly, alert, affectionate,
Is beautiful.
His grandfather, Fabbio, a man
Seventeen years older than I,
Is touchingly obsessed. He wants
Us to feel, to touch, history,
Those fierce days at Riva Ridge and
Gaggio Montano. He pillages
Cabinet after cabinet, showing
Artifacts: Grenades, unopened packs
Of Lucky Strikes, tooth powder, and
A full array of uniforms the Germans, G.I.’s,
Italians, even the Brazilian Battalion, wore.
And here he stops, a tear in his eye.
He holds a faded photo of a soldier
From Rio de Janeiro, “mi caro amigo”
He intones. The grandson says in English
What we had already understood.
Then the old man affectionately tries to
Place a Mussolini youth corps hat on his
Reticent grandson’s head, and he resists,
Playfully: “No, no, no,” he insists.
His grandpa doesn’t argue,
Just reaches somewhere else and
Hands me a medallion from 2005
Celebrating the 60th year of peace.
The boy’s sweet smile now illuminates
The scene, restores a bit of light
To a small but cherished room
In the mountains of now free Italy.
Dreams
Dreams, it seems, are portals, but to what?
They swirl unbidden from the depths of sleep,
Linking strange images to one another.
Many of these images are fresh, electric, incandescent.
Some evoke the past or cause anxiety about the future.
Dreams from forty years ago still linger:
Sometimes I sang a song with others,
Written down, chorded, sung again.
Sometimes I wrote a play I dreamt
Or lectured, brilliantly or catastrophically,
Then typed the scene out in the morning verbatim,
Or so I’ve felt. Sometimes the dream was
Grist for further imagining, other scripts.
Some venues were revisited: family outings,
With my parents, I a child, or with Maggie and the girls,
Novitiate conversations, classroom interactions,
Disputations and reconciliations.
Some harrowing escapes, of course, took place,
Some embarrassing failures and futilities.
Some births (yes, I even was the mother once),
Some deaths took place which had not yet occurred.
These events, persuasive, odd and
Substantive or insubstantial flicked or flickered,
Awoke me or plunged me into deeper explorations.
What might be learned from dreams I do not know.
Without them, life would perhaps be tame,
More arid, less dazzling and sublime,
My uncertainties more circumscribed.
I might even begin to feel that life, apart from dreams,
Is truly what it seems to be, not what it, inconceivably, is.
Largesse
Every August West Olympia is rife with blackberries.
Though a case can surely be made about invasive species
Assailing domestic plants, I derive great pleasure
Standing for an hour breathing in the sweet fragrance
Of the ripe fruit I calmly pluck at some risk to my hands.
I reach through the prickly vines for the plumpest,
Heaviest berries. Rather than drop each berry into my bucket,
I love holding ten or twelve in my left hand
While capturing more, then still more, with my right.
It is the abundance, the sheer bounty nature provides,
Which feeds my serenity, warms me through and through.
I rarely eat when I’m picking. The expectation of later
Rewarding myself keeps me picking. The fattest, firmest berries
Plop into my bucket. I spy yet another vine, then another
Higher up, further in, laden with fruit.
I find myself whistling or singing after a while.
Sometimes I realize that time has passed without thought.
This has been, I now reflect, the essence of play,
The beauty of just being, free from care.
Yes, it is a luxury, but one which even the burdened,
Even the poor might share.
Does the bear rejoice as I do when he forages among brambles deeper in the wilderness? Are not the bees happy drawing nectar from the berries? I cannot imagine that they are less grateful than I for this largesse.
The Half-Light
(For Jeanne Lohmann, poet)
She said Death wants a clean house,
Is a woman intent upon her work,
This bright-eyed, life-filled poet
Knowledgeable about death, having lost,
As we must all lose, someone we love.
Here she was, light-hearted, chiding
John Donne, who also took Death
Down a peg or two. She tutored us
In the uses of fresh language.
Might it not take a woman’s eyes
To see Death as she is, not some grim
Reaper, but a noisy neighbor,
A fissure in her coffee- cup,
Mildew on her driveway flowers,
Too many saucers on her serving tray?
I don’t have the eyes to see my pant leg
When it bunches up around my ankle,
Or the kitten’s tail protruding from the bed
The second before my foot falls upon it;
How will I notice an inadvertent elbow
Flying toward my shoulder in the half-light
As I leave the theater still reading credits,
Still fumbling for my coat
Yearning for the next meal I might or might not eat?
Or a rumbling semi fishtailing toward me on the ice?
Iconoclasts
Writers, of course, court insecurity,
Knowingly shatter forms,
Sensing life itself is but a series
Of destructions.
The new emerges, if it emerges,
Phoenix-like, from ashes.
Healthy iconoclasm I applaud:
Exploding idols, righting wrongs
In defense of human dignity,
Leaving much-traveled paths,
And taking the heat or, worse, the cold
When integrity is less than fashionable.
Poets sabotage the strict iambic beat.
They forge, Walt-inspired, on, testing limits,
Annihilating limits altogether.
Dickinson dares defend her lively line,
While Kafka speaks truth to power,
Even to his unimpressionable father.
Heaney seeks dank moss in deeper wells,
Rich dives into the watery wreck
While Hughes assails the Waldorf-Astoria
and Ginsberg hunkers down at, say,
Some supermarket in California.
The Leopold Bloom in Us All
So Paracelsus sought an alkahest
(the words make lovely music in my mind).
He taught a universal solvent’s best,
Its value obvious, a kind of test.
And that seems apt to me, a man who finds
As Paracelsus found, his alkahests
In elements which quite subsume the rest
Of life: complexities and quirks refined;
Some think a universal solvent best.
Solutions hold the worst bits and the best.
They loose, it seems, even as they bind,
Thus Paracelsus treasured alkahests,
The cure being in disease and peace in stress.
So we muck on, not knowing what we find,
Not reading Nature, timid when we guess.
The healing alchemy a blessing blessed,
And “dirty cleans” as Bloom somehow divined.
Yes, Paracelsus sought an alkahest
Taught us a universal solvent’s best.
* Paracelsus is listed as one of the 'many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity' in the 'Cyclops' episode of Joyce's Ulysses.
Lines
The heart’s eye grieves, says Hopkins,
But God knows (and I know) it delights
As readily as it grieves. What tends to the
Elegiac can as well prompt celebrations
Of what always is.
All things do pass, and all things do remain,
For the heart’s eye brightens
When it beholds the sky afresh
Or smile lines around
Our aging eyes and lips.
Lit Crit
Though I don't ascend my desk
Or balance, to the wonderment of all,
Bolt upright on my professorial pate,
I often wrest attention
From all corners of the room.
I tease out comments from the shy,
Die noisily when silence meets
My best interrogation.
I dramatize the sizzle of each meaty text,
Unmasking Melville's doppelgangers,
Mimicking Stevens' "bubbling of bassoons."
And when, as happened yesterday,
A question from an unexpected quarter
Breaks the silence like a seagull's sudden yawp,
I strain to hear, then stumble as I run to intercept
This token of intelligence, this gift.
I gladly let the student snatch
Whatever morsel I have snagged
In my own beak. It's hers and hers alone!
We celebrate the find. Then, having used
This bait to tease out other thoughts,
I wheel smoothly to the literary curb
To scavenge other tidbits from the text,
Some line to share, some metaphor to prize.
Particularities
The smell of newborn babies,
Salt air, the way one’s eyes
Light up -- these unique particularities
Are the very heart of the universal.
How then, having been educated
By things we see and feel,
Do we yet fail to reverence earth,
Loving its every copse and pool,
Its every tremble, tang, and spark?
We long for love and fail to comprehend
Manifold loveliness. Life is in our hands,
But we must explore our heart of hearts
To understand its worth.
Photograph
The seven pears lay on the backyard bench
Green, scabbed, irregular,
Perfect. The bench itself was weathered
And dilapidated, its original wood
Blackened almost to the color of its
Wrought-iron arms.
Late summer sun caught the pears
In a fleeting embrace, just enough to lend
A dull-gold hue to the flat-green fruit.
My daughter took the photo in the exuberance
Of her early experiments in composition.
The fruit would later languish
On the kitchen counter, uncelebrated,
Nowhere near as appealing to the eye
Nor to the appetite as when they graced
The broken wood.
In the photo album, where they now reside,
The pears are cunningly displayed,
Triangular black corners off-setting
The white borders and the subtle still-life
Of a waning evening. The pears appear
Luscious, graspable, even elegant
Upon the weathered slats,
Fact and artifact in our family history,
Lovingly arranged for one star-turn
Already receding from memory
Like the diminishing summer light
Which once ennobled them.
Skateboarder
Once, twice, three times his left foot
Caresses the pavement of the
strand.
His lithe body balances beautifully
As he displays in time and space,
Like two-page reproductions of
Greek art,
All postures on the urn.
Blond hair wafts out, wheels sing,
And, leaning slightly back,
This slender youth arches
To meet with grace
The passing of the years.
Reciprocation
God, Rilke says, loves most of all
Those who need Him as they need
A crowbar or a hoe, perhaps to access
Treasure or break through earth
So seeds might grow.
I like to think we need God
As we desire a spouse or special friend,
Someone to help us lever new imaginings.
Our hearts, battered though they be,
Pump on. Passion and laughter
Rock our hearts by turns.
Our human touch gladdens the heart of God
Who, needing us as much as we do Him,
Keeps covenant in ever fresher incarnations.
Silence
(Hoh Rainforest, 10.17.12)
Hungry for communion
I entered the Hall of Mosses.
A lone bird, silent, glided
over the bracken pond.
I entered that sanctuary, silent,
feeling the reverence therein,
soon veering into the maple grove
where I stood for a silent hour
watching in awe as the slanting sunlight
took the ancient moss-draped trees,
their drapery slipping toward the ground
as though, like I, stunned into worship.
One tiny fern, attached to one of three
grey-green giants, glowed not ecclesial red
but brightest green, a sanctuary lamp glowing
in a cathedral more silent than Chartres.
Silence wrapped around me, plunged deep
into my heart, as nature’s sacred wafer ate me
just as I had eaten it, a silent eucharist, a legacy
of light and growth and tree, now me.
Siren Call
Warned by Circe of the sirens’ subtle lure
Odysseus bade his sailors strap him down.
His sensual nature left him insecure,
His common sense impelled him to stay bound.
Perhaps his spirit yearned to penetrate
A mystery not himself, a oneness with the gods.
Perhaps his absence from his patient mate
Or need to see his son increased the odds
That he’d return. At any rate, his life
And that of all his crew was spared despite
His yearning for release. Their ears sealed shut
With wax, his men kept on, through dark, through light
To Ithaca. The sailors cursed; they cut
The sea with oars. The hero wept in pain
And, restless, knew he’d wander yet again.
Smudge Pots
We often smelled the smudge
When visiting family in Orange County.
I was five then, and marveled at the strange method
Of protecting oranges way back then. Two years later,
In 1950, we left L.A. for the Northwest but the smell
Of smudge lingered a bit before fading away.
Of course, millions of oranges gave way to millions
Of people in Garden Grove and Anaheim, and little
Remains of the fruit and citrus culture there.
Thinking of smudge and oranges this morning,
Sixty-five years later, I recalled marching down
Carmona St., L.A., giving Rosemary a bloody nose.
I only remember that my only brother Billy had
Run home crying, his nose bleeding. He said
Rosemary hit him. That was enough for me.
Hardly violent, and not very courageous either,
I apparently gave Rosemary a reciprocal bonk.
I’m sorry, Rosemary, wherever you are today.
Farmers created artificial smog to protect
What they didn’t want to freeze. Perhaps I felt
I could redress a wrong or two myself.
I’m just sorry I belted a girl who had never injured
Me. The incident did, it’s true, create a brother-bond
Which endured as long as Bill’s life held out. He’s
Gone now, having paid the price of having smoked
For decades, inhaling another kind of smudge,
Succumbing to forces I could not protect him from.
A Universal Theme
“Wash me in steep down gulfs of liquid fire”
Shouts the Moor,” his heart sinking, sunk.
He’s learned how untrusting, in his ire,
He has been. He’s lost his love, drunk
The draught he himself prepared
Though another handed him the vial.
No wonder he’s demonstrably despaired:
He knows, beyond the slightest doubt, the wiles
That brought him to this point, and yet he sees
That he alone has slain his dearest, freshest friend,
The one who loved him even as he doubted. “Please,
Please come back!” His sad heart sends
This message to a corpse. No smile, no loving heart,
No fresh response survives, just art.
An Unimaginable World
The one lovely world we know, sensible,
Tangible, yes, and habitable, has the capacity
To be lived in, touched, smelt, seen, felt, loved.
Swept up as we are in an unimaginable world,
We fail to see it, know it, as it is: a sheer
And shimmering network of interdependencies, fragile
Compared to the imaginable worlds which make nice believing
How little the real world impinges, impacts upon our
Best constructions, those reductions which delude us
Remove us from the cries and the music, the stench and sweetness
Of a now known truth tomorrow poeticized, not lost.
Who We Are
If I could play that Dvorsak, YoYo Ma,
Excruciating sadness yoked to joy,
I’d play it for all children of this raw
And dangerous world, the ones who most annoy
The very rich. I’d hold each note an hour
And place my quaking finger on the fret
Until my sweat ran free and sour;
Till tears flowed too, both mine and ours. I’d let
The world know that music with its charm
Redeems, somehow, much pain and many long
Long hidden wrongs, assuages grief and harm,
And sounds, at last, a plaintive, hopeful song.
Thus are we saved. You stir new mindfulness
Of who we really are and whom we bless.