Poetics and Ruminations

The Obsession

 

    This poem appeared for the first time in a poetry collection, The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages; BUY FROM AMAZON.COM .

 

         In 1979 “Wesli Court” (a pen-name I use for publication of my traditionally formal poems, an anagram of “Lewis Turco”) took advantage of the obsessive quality of the sestina's repetitions in "The Obsession," one of the poems in a sequence titled Letters to the Dead that rings the changes on the rhymed iambic pentameter sestet. The first line of "The Obsession" contains all six of the teleutons (repeated end-words), and the same basic line is repeated incrementally as the first line of succeeding stanzas. Each time the line is repeated the syntax is transposed by hypallage; nonetheless, the line always makes sense. Because all six end-words do appear in this line, a particular problem arises at the envoy, for it cannot be of the required three lines.  Instead, the refrain line reappears a seventh time as a one-line envoy rather than as the normal triplet, but with the sense of the original first line reversed:

Listen to "Wesli Court" read The Obsession

 

 

Last night I dreamed my father died again,

A decade and a year after he dreamed

Of death himself, pitched forward into night.

His world of waking flickered out and died —

An image on a screen.  He is the father

Now of fitful dreams that last and last.

 

I dreamed again my father died at last.

He stood before me in his flesh again.

I greeted him.  I said, "How are you, father?"

But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed

We were together, older than when he'd died —

I saw upon his face the look of night.

 

I dreamed my father died again last night.

He stood before a mirror.  He looked his last

Into the glass and kissed it.  He saw he'd died.

I put my arms about him once again

To help support him as he fell.  I dreamed

I held the final heartburst of my father.

 

I died again last night: I dreamed my father

Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight

In doing so.  But what was it I dreamed

In fact?  An injury that seems to last

Without abatement, opening again

And yet again in dream?  Who was it died

 

Again last night?  I dreamed my father died,

But it was not he — it was not my father,

Only an image flickering again

Upon the screen of dream out of the night.

How long can this cold image of him last?

Whose is it, his or mine?  Who dreams he dreamed?

 

My father died.  Again last night I dreamed

I felt his struggling heart still as he died

Beneath my failing hands.  And when at last

He weighed me down, then I laid down my father,

Covered him with silence and with night.

I could not bear it should he come again —

 

I died again last night, my father dreamed

 

         For a while I thought that this poem had exorcised the dream, but eventually it returned in changed and various forms. I am an old man myself, now, only two years younger than my father was when he died, but still I dream about him, bringing him back to life draped in night shades and the mists of remembrance.

Listen to Wesli Court read his poem The Obsession

  

  

From La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, by Lewis Turco, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON

 

The Forest of My Seasons

A Sestina

Desire today is a cavern of snow;

   ice rimes all limbs with synonyms for wind.

      Yesternoon it was goat-time, time for horns

         rampant on a field vert under the woods

            quartered in a southern compass.  Toucan

               tones rose close beneath the surface of shade,

 

               threatening rupture.  Poet, draw your shade

today upon a mirror made of snow

            shadowed.  Men may hibernate if bears can.

   Desire must sleep in a cavern of wind

         till it may be harried awake by wood-

      pecker beak and Pan's sunsharp or ramshorns —

 

      Too many words, like girdles built of horn,

               confined in an attic.  How to say shade

         but make it mean more, as: tiles of the wood

laid for light to walk on; and to have snow

   imply more than God's linoleum.  Wind

            is wind, but direction matters.  Who can

 

            help me?  Where's my muse today?  Shake your can,

      you errant Echo, and get home.  My horns

   sprout long as the cuckoo's song while you wind

               your own clock and make love with your own shade

someplace up a cavern or down the snow

         where wild Narcissus buds among your woods.

 

         The forest of my seasons grows strange woods

            sometimes; this fall of words grows as it can,

not as it ought.  My pen is cold as snow:

      its ink runs like chilled honey from the horns

               of silence.  Lie you down, lie down in shade,

   word-warbler.  Sleep sound with your mistress wind.

 

   And while you sleep, dream.  Dream of the south wind

         needling you awake with slivers of woods:

               birch and pine, maple that sweetens in shade;

            oak on the white hillside.  Dream, if you can,

      of gray moles, brown mice, winter's hunting horns

blown to silence.  Dream no longer of snow,

 

for time and flesh shall do more than wind can

to blend your words with woodwinds and woodshorns.

There will be tonics.  It's time for shades now.

 

 

  

"The Forest of My Seasons" appeared originally in The Northwest Review, iv:3, 1961 and was gathered in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

.

 

Sestina in Indian Summer

"Everything is good in its season."

 

After the frost summer returns and settles

Into the orchard.  The sluggish yellowjacket

Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,

And the leaves begin to color our landscapes

The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.

This is no time for us to think of winter

 

And its white song, no time to sing of winter,

Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,

Running along the backlog turning ocher

And crimson.  The chestnut falls from its jacket

Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.

We listen in the night to hear the wind fall

 

And wonder when it will rise again to fall,

To take the leaves and pile them into winter

Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.

It is enough for now that the wind settles

Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket

Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or

 

Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,

Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.

Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket

Along the brook, and we will not now inter

Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles

Among the rushes.  The warmth of the land escapes

 

Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes

And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker

Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles

Into the sand.  We wait and ignore the fall

Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter

Impending.  We hear the late yellowjacket

 

Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket

Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,

Knowing that the allcolor of our winter

Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.

This renaissance of summer is but windfall.

Soon we will hunker down upon our settles

 

In sweater and jacket.  Backlogs of oak or

Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes

To the winter weather that falls and settles.

  

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages. Originally published in The Southern Review, xxvi:1, January 1990; reprinted in Heartbeat of New England, An Anthology of Contemporary Nature Poetry, edited by James Fowler, Charlestown: Tiger Moon Productions, 2000 and in The Book of Forms, Third Edition, Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2000. 

 

Tsunami (1)

The world was washed away by a wall of water

That first became the horizon: a rising wall

That pulled the shallows outward and away

From the shores. The coastal sealife washed

Out to sea with the boats. For a moment there was

Stillness everywhere, and then the world

 

Listened to a roar that became the world,

The sound of a thousand thunders, not of water

Merely, but of the fluid earth. It was

Then that liquid turned to stone, a wall

Hard as rock that rose before it washed

Ashore and tore the screaming child away

 

From the mother, lifted the father, whipped him away

From the place he worked. The ocean became the world,

Crushed the buildings along the beaches, washed

Limbs and torsos into the trees. The water

Filled the wells with salt and blood. A wall

Of bricks became a gristmill grinding what was

 

Lying behind it into a paste. It was

Mud and plants and trees spun away

Into a maelstrom of single items now all

Things undifferentiated, whirled

In eddies and backwashes of polluted water

Where everything and nothing could be washed.

 

What could float, floated, what could be washed

Away was washed away, out to sea, was

Caught in a tree that held, held above water

Or drowned or buried in mud or floated away

Into who knew where? It was a world

That was unsafe ashore, but at sea the wall

 

Did not exist. It was safe above the wall,

On the surface of the wave that rose and washed

Away the earthen world, the solid world,

The world where creatures breathed an air that was

Lighter than liquid. It sent them far away

From breath, from sight, from the living world.

 

Instead, it gave them a whelming wall that was

Scoured into the minds of those not washed away

From the world of earth into the world of water.

Lewis Turco

Copyright 2009. All rights reserved.