Poetics and Ruminations

Father's Day: The Recurring Dream

THE RECURRING DREAM

for Luigi, in memoriam.

(Listen t Lewis Turco read his poem, "The Recurring Dream."

 

   I seek my father — that minister

of the deep — among the furniture

      of my childhood.  I step out of waking

   into this room and know

that time has passed.  The windows are webbed

   and moonstreaked.  A lamp with a glass shade,

 

   green and saffron, burns

on a brass stem.  The bookcases hold sermons

      and silence.  My aquaria

   stand among tumbled

tomes and testaments.  The dust rises

   into the amber darkness.

 

   I disturb a desert of hours,

search for the fish that glide

      in musty waters — blue scales

   glint under my glance,

their eyes are corals budding

   among rusty blades of sea grass

 

and swordplants.  I remove the glass lids

and dip my hand into the water —

      it is what I have feared:

   shadow of a shadow, dim air

flowing from corner to corner.

   The fish rise along the curtains

 

   to swim about me in the air,

their black fins wavering.

      I dig in the gravel stranded

   among the shelving,

the decaying books.  I dig,

   and here, in the root

 

   of the largest plant, blooming

from a socket of bone, I find my father

   where he has scuttled,

at last to be brought back, smiling.

 

From The Familiar Stranger, poems by Lewis Turco,  Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press (www.StarCloudPress.com), 2014, ISBN 978-1-932842-78-4, paperback. Available from all booksellers.

The Golden Shovel

 

OMEN

 

The Golden Shovel Anthology

New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooka edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith with a Foreword by Terrance Hayes, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2017.

 

OMEN

 

By Lewis Turco

 

They were not fools: our parents always knew

The mores, ways and words of all the white

Folk that surrounded us. Even their speech

Was not beyond us – it was not the how

That we found useless, but we were never to

Become our “betters,” we could never make

Our skin turn white. We would always sing a

Song that’s black and blue; we’d always look

The way we look. We had to learn an an-

Them of our own and follow our own omen.

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The Pilot

THE PILOT

by Lewis Turco

 

Calais, France, May 18, 1968 (AP) — Low tide yesterday uncovered a plane, presumably of World War II, with the remains of the pilot still at the controls. Its origin could not be determined immediately.

 

          It has been

a long flight. Like flak,

the seagrass exploded

beneath me as I fell

          out of light into

an older and a heavier air.

 

          My planing

continued in the tide.

When the scavengers had

done with my flesh, I found

          that still the stick would

answer, though more slowly than before.

 

          So I flew,

and am flying still, back

to the beginning. In

my marrow direction

          lay. Now the sea has

released me, and I have been constant.

 

          But I was

wrong. You see me at death's

controls, in the primal

mud where our flight began,

          but it has not been

a fleeing, as we have long supposed.

 

          I see that

now, with these sockets where

fish have swum. You, rising

from the shore, have shown me

          what the snail tried to

tell: the journey is the other way.

 

Turn me around. I am with you still.

 

"The Pilot" was originally published in The Saturday Review, lii:23, Jun. 7, 1969, and collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, copyright © 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper. Also available in a Kindle edition. All rights reserved: may not be reproduced anywhere for any reason without the written permission of the author, Lewis Turco.

The Old Comedienne

Joan Rivers

The new issue, No. 14, Fall 2015, of the periodical Trinacria, edited by Joseph Salemi, is just out with my poem titled, “The Old Comedienne” and, as a bonus, a review by the editor of The Hero Enkidu: An Epic by Lewis Turco, New York: Bordighera Press (www.BordigheraPress.org ), VIA Folios 107, 2015, 101 pp. ISBN 978-1-59954-098-6, trade paperback. Here is the last paragraph:

“Taken as a whole, The Hero Enkidu is an amazing and admirable accomplishment by a poet whose record of achievement is indisputable, and which is now capped by this vigorous modern re-imagination of an ancient myth. It is exactly the kind of tour de force that we would expect from a master craftsman such as Lewis Turco.” – Joseph Salemi.

And here is the poem, a rondeau listen to Lewis Turco read it: The Old Comedienne --

 

THE OLD COMEDIENNE

(With profound apologies to Paul Laurence Dunbar)

 

She wore the mask that grinned and lied:

It hid her wrinkles, the hair she dyed.

This debt she paid to hone each wile

Merely to get a crowd to smile

If not to laugh through jaws spread wide --

 

No mots were bon, her cracks were wise,

Mostly smothered under flies.

We watched her work for decades while 

          She wore her mask. 

 

We smiled sometimes, but her ghost flies

To entertain fans in the skies.

We sigh because her clay is vile 

Beneath our feet. She's out of style 

Although some may wish otherwise. 

          She wore her mask!

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Letters to the Dead

LETTERS TO THE DEAD

In Memory of Luigi and May, John and Bertha

 

OUR HERO

Here is our Hero, opening his eyes.

The daylight rises like a welling tide

And floats him out of slumber into time.

Two eggs and toast; coffee in a cup

Of thermal plastic; the thermostat turned up.

Slowly blood and temperature rise.

 

Shower and shave, and then his socks and pants

Crawl up his flesh to lock his shirt-tail in,

Though waking is his habit, and the sun

Clothes him like armor forged against those dreams

He's left among the linens — so it seems,

Or so he hopes. At least he has a chance

 

To down the darkness, drown it in the dawn.

For he is of an age when sleep comes hard,

But when it comes there trails behind its edge

A specter host, a horde of attic shades

Risen from the Nether Regions' glades

To walk again upon a morning lawn.

 

He'd buried them upstairs in trunks and cartons,

Their eyelids weighted down with trash and lace,

Mathoms and mementos: every face

Lies in its album while the hornet croons

Among the rafters summer afternoons

Or as, in spring, the maples fill with martins,

 

With greening leaves that fall to earth in fall —

But worst in winter. Then the photographs

Give up the ghost to cold, the petty griefs

Of dust as chill as snow. Their images

Arise, and then descend like salvages

Of musty seasons to our Hero's hall.

 

They walk the paisley carpet as the night

Fills with the moon. They pause before his door.

They enter, cast their shadows on the floor,

Loom over him. Then, one by one, they slide

Into his sleep — he recollects the stride

Of one, another's stance, their darkness bright

 

As candles guttering. The dreamer's lake

Has swallowed him — nevertheless, he sees,

His lids like film. The phantoms do not speak,

Nor does he speak to them, but words in spate

Sluice through his mind. He tries to close the gate

To capture them. He struggles to awake....

 

Here is our Hero, born to second sight.

The daylight rises like a welling tide

And floats him out of slumber into time...,

Two eggs and toast; coffee in a cup

Of thermal plastic; the thermostat turned up.

He takes a pad and pen and starts to write.

 

Two Epistles to Children Drowned:

 

LETTER TO A DROWNED BOY

He wants to write a letter to the child,

The boy drowned on the beach when he was young,

A boy himself. The letter is overdue.

Dear Friend, he writes. I recall your body flung

To that Wisconsin beach. Your flesh was blue,

A pallid blue. The day was dark, but mild —

 

Or was it dark? If so, why would my mother

Have taken us to swim where you had drowned?

What kind of darkness was it, has it been

Since first I saw you there where you'd been downed

By death, the first death I had ever seen?

Why had she let me see you? Did my brother

 

See you also? I have never asked,

But he was there, seven when I was twelve.

The firemen pumped you out. Their motor churned,

But darkness stalked that beach and, in its stealth,

Stole the march on all of us. I turned

Into a mortal. I saw that life was masked,

 

And underneath the mask I saw the bone.

I saw your chest sucked inward, then forced out;

I saw the blot of water on the sand

Under the hose. I saw you were without

The thing that made you you. Time waved its wand

Over the water — we blinked, and you were gone.

 

I don't remember feeling. I was cold.

I must have forced myself to turn to stone.

I think the crowd was small — a weekday crowd —

but since then you and I have been alone.

The Pulmotor drones, but silences are loud;

You took my hand; I cannot break your hold.

 

Your stillnesses encroach a ripple more

Each hour upon my sands, this beach-head birth

Allotted us, that now erodes away

Until I feel dark water sucking earth

From underfoot. The motor sings. The day

Fills my lungs. My ears begin to roar.

 

LETTER TO A THREE-YEAR-OLD

Ontario was calm that afternoon,

Still as the photograph of a summer day.

The beach was a fall of stones sloping down

To the water's edge. It was no day to drown,

The sun in the sky like a hazy red balloon.

Your father had been watching you at play

 

In depths that reached your waist and touched his knees.

The other picnickers sat on the shore

Or waded lazily not far away,

Watching you and the other children play.

The sailboats on the lake moved by degrees

Almost too small to note. One might ignore,

 

On such an afternoon, the shadow on

The imperceptible swell — the scudding cloud

That threw its umbra there, casting color

Along the lakeside. One might well ignore

The picnickers, the children in the sun,

The hazy heat that settled like a shroud

 

Impalpably on the water. Then,

Without a word or sign, summer faltered.

The silence you became still echoes loud

Upon Ontario's stones, under the shroud

Of haze and scudding cirrus. We hear it often.

The quality of stillness has been altered.

 

LETTER TO A GRANDSIRE

Dear Grandpa,

                           Here I am at forty-five,

And you've been dead for years. When I was twelve

I came to visit you at great remove

From my home town. I caught you by the barn,

Committing an act of nature, but reproof

Was lost on you. You turned as though to warn

 

The empty stalls of danger. Tall and thin,

Thereafter you left the room when I came in —

You imitated smoke. I'd see you there

Beside the iron stove; you'd start, a look

Like prey upon your eyes, then disappear.

You never held a job or read a book

 

Your whole life long, I've heard my mother claim.

You sired nine before time quenched your flame —

Or, much more likely, grandma's. Six were sons.

They all grew up inside that shell of boards

You called a house. The sunny, windy seasons

Belabored it. The autumn fell in cords,

 

And you were sapped by spring, became a ghost

Who fled from grandsons, that unruly host

Sprung from your loins. You opened up your fly

And soaked the barn. You saw me watching you,

Then turned and faded off. Was it my eye,

My look of accusation? I guess you knew

 

That in your daughter's world, therefore in mine,

Such things did not occur. You were a swine

Cast before pearls. I blush as I remember,

Not your simple act, but my disdain.

Grandpa, I cherish that familiar member,

That glimpse of greatness, your prolific reign.

 

LETTER TO A BARITONE

Our Hero is remembering his friend

From second grade and high school. He recalls

The early days — on weekends they'd pretend

That they were pilots in The War. The walls

Fade out about him in his reverie,

Fade into the quartet's close harmony.

 

Dear Curt (he writes),

                                How long have you been dead?

I don't remember. Last weekend I went back

To visit our home town. A passing dread

Lies waiting when we double in our track,

But this time I picked up the telephone

And called our choral teacher. Pure cornpone,

 

I know, but hearing him I felt relieved —

He sounded as he used to. I had brunch

Next day at his house — hard to be believed,

But he was just the same. I'd played a hunch

and won this once. We spent a splendid day;

We quipped and talked, and then I walked away.

 

He had our pictures, Curt, down in his den

Upon his desk, and on the wall as well:

That barbershop cartoon that I'd forgotten,

Drawn by our tenor but signed by one and all.

He tried to give it to me; I demurred.

I couldn't take it, but I nearly heard

 

Those chords again, spellbinding when we blended

Into a single voice of chiming parts;

The ringing silence when the song was ended —

This pen pursues its way by fits and starts.

"How maudlin this would sound to anyone,"

I think at first; then, "Lord, we did have fun."

 

The ringing silence when the song was ended:

No doubt that's what we've heard since you've been gone.

Tony and Ed became what they intended,

And so did I. We work, we mow the lawn,

Drive the kids to the dentist, wives to the store,

But we never get together anymore.

 

LETTER TO A GARDENER

Uncle Alfred, skinny as a pole,

Deaf as any post, blind as a vole,

You felt your way through age along the rows

And hillocks of your garden, furbelows

And furrows. Maine potatoes were your eyes,

And corn, your ears to hear the grackles' cries.

 

You felt your way through age along the rows —

You laid the autumn straitly in windrows

After your harvest, green and gold and brown,

Peered out of Mason jars all over town.

Your labors rested with us winter-long;

Now I will pay you for them with a song.

 

After your harvest, green and gold and brown,

I helped to bear your burden, Alfred, down

At last to harvest home. It was as light

To me as sun by day or dew by night,

Uncle Alfred, skinny as a pole,

Deaf as any post, blind as a vole.

 

LETTER TO A HALL-OF-FAMER

Our Hero reminisces, half awake.

The radio is playing, and his cat,

Black as midnight, is making up to him.

He wants to write a letter for the sake

Of auld lang syne; however, he must trim,

First, thirty years and more from all those that

 

He has accrued. He must remember when

The summer morning broke across a street

Of elms and maples.

                                  Mr. Walsh, he writes,

I couldn't have been more than nine or ten.

I slumbered soundly through such dreamless nights,

And rose up early, anxious to compete

 

With time, discover which of us should last

And which succumb. None of my friends had risen;

The street was mine — until I saw your pickup

Before the enigmatic shack we passed

Each day that we played ball. We used to kick up

Dust in the lot beside the shack. A dozen

 

Times when we had started home that summer,

We'd stopped before the dusty window panes,

Cupped our hands and tried to peer inside.

We thought we saw machines. We lived on rumor —

When we thought of it. Our interest died.

And then I saw your truck, all dents and stains,

 

Parked at the curb that dewy summer morning.

I found you bottling milk with your machines,

Racking bottles. You were a quiet man,

So tall that, as you loaded up, the awning

Brushed your head. So that's how they began,

Those early hours filled with brilliant greens

 

Along the bumpy roads outside of town

Where you were hailed as "Mr. Walsh" or "Ed"

By customers who met us at the door.

The milk was winter white — it wore a crown

Of cream beneath the cap. Those mornings wore

A luster. Your obituary said

 

That you were Big Ed Walsh, the Hall-of-Famer,

The White Sox great, best pitcher in the world

When giants roamed the diamond. I rode

A summer milk route with a forty-gamer

Who never hinted that he once bestrode

A famous mound and, like a titan, hurled

 

His smokeball past a batter. I've since gone

Driving through the hills to Cooperstown,

Mr. Walsh, down to the Hall of Fame

To see your plaque upon a wall of stone,

But you were not transfigured by your name —

All I recall is milk that wore a crown.

 

LETTER TO AN EDITOR

Our Hero conjures up his ancient friend,

The literary Weaver, editor

And correspondent, in his printery

Belowstairs in the house where East Cleveland

Becomes the Heights. He was the guarantor

Of evenings filled with printer's deviltry

 

And conversation — nights that otherwise

Would have been lost in smog and Erie mist.

     Dear Loring, he implores, I've missed you well

These several years. I know that you despise

Shows of emotion. Forgive me. You don't exist,

So I must follow though I go through Hell.

 

I dream about your office down below;

The flywheel of your press turning around,

The fonts of type, the tubes of murky ink.

Upstairs your fabled wife treads to and fro —

Hart Crane's aunt, billowing like a mound

Of lace and lavender, attempts to think

 

Of one more bar of music to compose.

Turn off the press — it rumbles to a halt.

We sit and talk among those paneled walls —

Cleveland recedes and starts to decompose.

The strokes of fate are muffled in your vault,

And we can barely hear her siren calls.

 

I count it as a personal offense,

Loring, when someone dies, someone I know,

Particularly you. What did you get

Out of this retreat? It makes no sense.

How can I calculate the tab I owe

And pay you back? You've buried me in debt.

 

I must resort to dreams. I turn within

My winding sheets and wait for you to come

To stand beside my stead. You proffer me

A book you've set in leaden type, but on

Those pages there is emptiness. I thumb

The volume through. I read that you are gone.

 

Interlude:

 

SLUMBER

Our Hero is exhausted, and his head

Is reeling from his labors. He glances to

The clock upon the wall. He sees the night

Is far advanced. He switches off the light

And sits in darkness feeling shades of blue —

He has been writing letters to the dead.

 

 

It's time, he thinks, to rise and go to bed.

He wonders whether he has laid to rest

Any of those ghosts who populate

His dreams — descend the attic stairs and wait

Beside his pillow. He understands their quest;

Therefore, he pens these letters to the dead.

 

He knows that everything was never said

Among them while they thrived; he further knows

That somehow he must say it, or his debt

Will grow until, entangled in its net,

He drowns within the depths of what he owes.

He gathers up his letters to the dead,

 

Shuffles them in darkness. But, instead

Of getting up and going to his room,

He hefts them in his hand. The slender sheaf

Feels as though composed of moss and leaf.

Then, thinking that he smells a grave perfume,

His eyes close on his letters to the dead.

 

He dreams his words are waiting to be read.

They lie upon the earth, begin to brown

And crumble into loam. Out of their mold

A herb begins to grow. Its leaves unfold

To drink the night. A bud swells at its crown;

Balm blossoms from the letters to the dead.

 

When he awakens, an incarnate red

Transfuses the horizon: it is dawn.

The letters, scattered on his morning table,

Show palely forth from under umbral sable —

The shades still linger; they will not be gone —

He must resume his letters to the dead.

 

THE OBSESSION

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem 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.

 

REFLECTIONS IN AN ATTIC ROOM

A Sonnet Redoubled

 

As if one needed to begin to write;

As though one had to have a pen at hand,

Paper smoothening to the touch of night,

Light sifting across the page like wind and sand.

 

This is the scrivener's fallacy, the hour

Abraded by sand and wind, by willful words:

They scrape at vision, they scarify and scour —

The urn becomes a scattering of shards;

 

The wind, a voice freed of its hollow shell

Noting nothings echoing in the bone

Bleaching among the dunes of time that swell:

They shift, remembering they once were stone.

 

Sit stony-eyed; watch the words curl and come

Still-born to life between the joint and thumb.

 

Dear Father: You are dead. What's there to say?

Yet I'll go on to say it, as you know,

Or may not, as the case may be. Just so,

Our monologues continue on their way,

Two streams of silence rising out of clay,

Passing each other in the essential flow

Of stars and atoms. Watch them rise and go,

Falling in vortices of night and day:

 

The grass grows green, the suns and planets turn

Upon a field of sable. Brine turns to blood,

I turn to you as day turns into night,

As flesh turns in to earth. I cannot spurn

The flame you gave to me upon the flood

As if one needed to begin. To write

 

Is useless. "Poetry makes Nothing happen,"

As Auden said. It happens anyhow,

Rising upon the eternal tide of Now,

Engulfing everything — the field, the aspen,

Herb, rock and furrow. So we sigh, grasp pen,

Ink and paper, then we sit down to plow

Another row of letters. We endow

The meadow with another seed to open.

 

And when it does, what will the blossom be?

Another flower in a sea of flowers?

A blooming and a withering of the land

That once was ocean, that once more shall be sea

Rising to blood again to invest these hours

As though one had to have a pen in hand?

 

Here in an attic study rising to

A peak in the winter dark, one thinks at times

Of love; one thinks of synonyms and rhymes

That come as close as words are wont to do

To what it once was like when the flesh was new

And closed with flesh in torrid zones and climes.

What was it like? Whose were those pantomimes

Between the sheets that got the rave reviews?

 

Those sheets — those wrinkled sheets: they press in close

Upon recall. The books that line these shelves

Are filled with love songs yellowing and trite:

Verbena pressed between the leaves verbose.

Our sheets untwine, leaving to our selves

Paper smoothening to the touch of night.

 

The attic listens to the scratching pen.

Outdoors, the wind has sunk. The snow is deep,

The neighbors in their steads are fast asleep,

Dreaming of when they will awake again.

Nothing is happening, nor will it when

They lift their lids to look into the deep

Trance of wakening. The ink will keep

The stillness that inhabits books and men,

 

Will keep it and disgorge it as the leaf

Turns, veined and sere, and then begins to brown

Under the rooftree, beneath the moving hand.

The words accumulate, become a sheaf

Of seasons as the silence filters down,

Light sifting across the page like wind and sand.

 

Imagine this: a battering at the door;

The voice of anguish pleading, "Give us curds,

Crusts, crumbs of meaning — pray you, give us words!

We need the Secret Name, and so much more —

A sense of purpose from your ample store

Of synonyms and antonyms! Rewards

Undreamt await if you extend towards

Your fellow man a portion of your lore!"

 

But the knocker lies against the stolid wood,

The panel does not echo. The empty hall

Contains but peeling paper and a sour

Smell of waiting. It must be understood

There is no understanding, only gall:

This is the scrivener's fallacy. The hour

 

Is late. The atmosphere is thick. The earth

Is running down. The fishes in the sea

Are drowned in silt. Each blade of grass, each tree

Is blighted. There has been a monstrous birth,

And plenitude has been transformed to dearth —

The Magi slouch away from Galilee.

"The pen is mightier than the sword," but see

It beaten into shares of slender worth:

 

It settles in its rut and plows its row.

The poisonous sun and parching raindrops slough

From brow and temple. Emaciated birds,

Before the wrinkled seed can sprout and grow,

Seize it for ivied towers wearing down,

Abraded by sand and wind, by willful words.

 

Go, little book, and bear thy wordy freight

Away from me as fast as e'er thou may —

I'm sick to death of everything you say.

I wrote you out in sundry hours late

When I long since ought to have hit the hay —

But did I seek sweet dreaming? Did I sate

The wingéd Pegasus on an early date,

In a timely moment? Nay, I say you, neigh!

 

I entertained the nightmare in my room.

I watched that grim old nag bend to devour

The grain of bitterness, the oats of doom,

The silage of depression. Little, sour

Book, I loathe thy messages of gloom —

They scrape at vision, they scarify and scour.

 

Build me more stately vessels, O my Soul!

I have a pot to piss in, sure enough,

But I've a fancy for more fancy stuff:

Amphorae full of oils, a wassail bowl,

Kraters of flowers. Ceramics is my goal:

A funerary urn, built good and tough,

Of alabaster so that, when I slough

This clay, my ash won't end up in a hole.

 

But what is this? I look into my heart

And find a crock chock-full of feeble words;

A thunder-jug beladen with a fart;

Stained paper, and a nest of nestling turds —

And as I watch, the paper falls apart;

The urn becomes a scattering of shards.

 

I wrote a book called Curses and Laments.

There was, it seems, a modicum of scents

In such an exercise, but only that:

A modicum, for it relieves frustration,

But changes nothing else in God's creation.

You pucker up and whistle in your hat;

You break a little wind when you're intense —

I wrote a book called Curses and Laments.

 

You take a certain pleasure in the smell

Of fire and brimstone. They can go to Hell,

Those bastards that have muscled you around.

Leave them a curse and then go underground

To breathe the air where you have loosed to dwell

A wind, a voice freed of its hollow shell.

 

What will we talk about beneath the stone?

"I have a little dust stuck in my eye."

"Today the worms are restless. I can feel

Them turning." "Pardon me, I have a cold —

I cannot stop my coughin'." "Thought I'd die

Of laughter when my nasty neighbor went

Out in the rain and caught her death." "I saw

Pale Ryder the other day — he's looking old

And out of sorts." "I wait for the telephone

To ring, but my children never seem to call.

Perhaps it's out of order — the reaper-man

Doesn't service the equipment he has sold."

Perhaps it's much like life — we'll merely lie

Noting nothings echoing. In bone-

 

Yards poets slowly accumulate.

I sometimes wonder if, on Judgment Day,

We'll all rise up in glory to afflate,

Converse, and each recite his latest lai.

Can rime be so perverse? In Plato's State

We'd all be banished — even the great Good Gray

Poet. But where in God's name could we go —

To that grand Writers' Conference Below?

 

But even there we would, it seems to me,

Be welcomed none too warmly to pause or dwell.

There'd be the Devil to pay, inevitably,

For there are limits to tolerance in Hell.

If we are left alone with our poetry

Bleaching among the dunes of time, that's well.

 

So Limbo's won and Paradise is lost.

My attic room is filling up with smoke:

I sit and talk with Geoffrey, Will — a host

 

Of my confreres. We pass the time with joke

And bawdry. There is little else to do —

The centuries lie heavy as a yoke

 

Upon the roof; the crackling of the glue

In all our bindings shatters this still air.

Our words and verse go whistling up the flue.

 

We pilgrims to Perdition sit and stare

Into the silence of sere marrow-bone.

I proffer the hemlock cup — they do not dare

 

Accept, for if they drank I'd be alone.

They shift, remembering they once were stone.

 

And in my pipe smoke I can just discern

The outlines of a sonnet redoublé,

A skeleton of what is my concern:

The meaning of it all. My smoke is gray.

 

I ponder carefully these artful rounds

And think about the things I have to say —

I try some lines aloud. The noise redounds

To my House of Fame, and meters ricochet

 

From the sloping walls to die upon my ears.

Where are the hare of soul, the baying hounds

Of the Apocalypse? Where are the tears

Condensed from feelings language seldom sounds?

 

My room is silent; my pen is chill and dumb.

Sit stony-eyed with words that curl and come.

 

Now it is almost done, this foolish thing

That I have penned. The lines have nearly jelled,

And I must ask if I have felt compelled

To write, or merely willed myself to sing

 

This song that few will ever care to read.

And was I born, or was I merely made,

Concocted of myself — the man of trade,

Not the Bard God conjured out of need

 

To cure the universe? I do not care.

To be a poet of whatever sort

Will help to pass this journey to the Court

Of Ultimate Decisions. This is fare

 

I pay and eat — these lines that fall and come

Stillborn to life between the joint and thumb.

 

LETTER TO MOTHER

Dear Mother, writes Our Hero, You won't dread

My writing you this letter to the dead —

Not even if you read it. You'd not recall

A word a moment later. You've built a wall

Between the world and you, a wall of glass

Opaque as pearl, through which no moments pass.

 

You lie in one position all day long,

Oblivious to silence as to song.

You'd like to die, but you have been betrayed

By your own body. Death has been delayed

Because the flesh is not yet ready to

Give up the ghost — it will not take its cue

 

And ring the curtain down upon this play

That has no climax — the scene just seeps away.

Imperceptibly the footlights dim,

The heroine held hostage by the whim

Of fate and accident — not even age

Will help you in your exit from the stage.

 

There is no need for me here to rehearse

The acts in your decline. It seemed perverse

At first, and then I thought you must be ill,

But you were not. It was an act of will,

Wasn't it, Mother? You just gave up, gave in,

Threw up your hands — you lost the wish to win.

 

But who or what is it you've really killed?

Much of your past, and part of mine is stilled,

Lost to one-half of our common memory.

Time's siling hands have scoured it like emery

From your mind, and I am not your son

In some essential way, I'm not the one

 

I was when you remembered who I was,

But someone less. This is what dying does:

It murders the survivors, cell by cell,

Until we too fall victim to the fell

And fragile flesh. We owe it to each other

Not to give in until we have to, Mother.

 

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE

Our Hero has been writing to the dead

Because they have been coming to his room

During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.

They never speak, however, and it seems

That if he hopes to send them back to Doom

He must write missives which must then be read.

 

 But how can he be sure they will be read?

He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,

Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.

But have they been delivered, or is there room

For a sure and certain doubt? He sighs. It seems

There's nothing for it but to resort to dreams.

 

He goes to bed and enters into dreams.

He stands before a building made of red

Incendiary brick lost in the seams

Of cobbled streets. Office of the Dead

Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum

And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom

 

Had cracked upon these boards. "Is this the doom

Of writing, then?" Our Hero asks, "of dreams?"

For he has forced the door, stands in a room

Hollow as any novel he has read,

Empty as any poem, and as dead.

There are no letters here, or so it seems

 

At first — but then an envelope that seems

To have been spared for solitary doom

Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;

It is addressed to him. Our Hero dreams

He opens it and reads. What he has read

He understands...but only in that room.

 

When he awakens in his own bedroom,

He cannot think of what it was he seems

To have understood in the epistle that he read

There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom

Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams

Echoing in the Office of the Dead.

 

These two interlocking series of poems, "Letters to the Dead" and "Reflections in an Attic Room" are from The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842-43-2, trade paperback, 115 pp; copyright © 2019 and all rights reserved by Lewis Turco; may not be reprinted in whole or in part by anyone, anywhere, without the written consent of the author.

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The Forks in the Road, by John T. Sullivan, Jr.

With an Introduction

By Lewis Turco

        This is a book about neighbors written by a neighbor. John T. Sullivan, Jr., was born in 1947 in Oswego, New York. He graduated in 1964 from Bishop Cunningham high school; one year later my family and I moved to town where I began to teach at the State University of New York College at Oswego.

        John went on growing into his shoes while I began settling in at the College. After receiving his degrees at Syracuse University John married his wonderful wife, Charlotte, and began his family. When two of his three daughters were in high school our son, Christopher, dated the youngest, Julie, and John was elected Mayor of Oswego in 1988.

        This introduction is not the first time John has asked me to write something – the first time he did he asked me to write an inauguration poem, which I was happy to do. I recited it at his ceremony. The One-hundred signed copies printed on parchment paper were distributed as keepsakes of the Inaugural, “…which,” John wrote me, “still hopefully adorn the walls of many Oswegonians to this day (which at least mine is, and it is numbered 1)!”  The poem was also published on paper in a broadside that was circulated widely:

                                            OSWEGO

                                It lies in the curves of the lakeshore.

Across Ontario the last of the sun breathes light

           out of the horizon, turning the clouds shades

                         of red to the west. The water darkens,

                         splits over the stones where the spiders live,

                  where the gulls alight to conceive of evening.

                                Hardwoods rise on country roads, their  limbs

 

casting tall shadows into the silence deepening

           among the tumescent milkweed and the cattails.

                         A twist of goldenrod runs into fields,

                         to the apple orchard fence where ravens

                  give voice to the dark quality of waiting.

                                The cries of geese are incipient

out of the north, over the great water, the turning

 

           of another season. The thrust of wings, the high

                         call of flight before the changing wind, will

                         fall soon to Oswego's waters, send frog

                  and salmon deep, beyond ranges of color

that fades now as the light falls onto Ontario,

                         and a dream of summer settles along

                  the stone coast road like a fleet of waterbirds.

 

          Subsequently, Mayor Sullivan proclaimed me honorary Poet Laureate of the City of Oswego.   Needless to say, I was deeply honored to be asked to contribute in this way, but John soon followed up by asking me to do a harder job: correct and revise the City of Oswego Charter as Secretary of the city Charter Revision Commission. I won’t go into the particulars of all the grammatical, punctuational, and typographical errors one had to address, but they were legion.

         John Sullivan was by far the best and most active mayor the City of Oswego has had while I have been a resident. He was instrumental in cleaning up the Lake Ontario waterfront which was a shambles when my family moved into town. Wright’s Landing, the River Walk, the Town Hall center all were spruced up and turned into beautiful and livable environmental attractions.

         Not least of these innovations was Harborfest, one of Charlotte’s pet projects. It was not many seasons before this festival was attracting enormous crowds to town during the summer, and it is still doing so. But all great mayoralties must come to an end.

        John went on to become Executive Chairman of the State Democratic Party from 1995 to 1998; he was one of the founders of the Democratic Rural Conference. He served as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Watertown office from 2003 to 2007, and then he accepted a position as Deputy Inspector General and counsel for legislative matters with the state Medicaid Inspector General’s office, relocating to the Albany area where he lived in Saratoga Springs.

        During all this time John Sullivan never lost touch with his Oswego roots. He visited town often, gave programs frequently (my wife Jean and I attended one at the town library in the spring of 2015). Just after the mayoral election in the fall of the same year John’s picture appeared in The Palladium Times with the new Republican mayor, twenty-five- year-old Billy Barlowe! (Sometimes one suspects that John might carry this being a good neighbor a bit too far.) (Just kidding.)

        John kept in touch also by writing essays and articles, including the profiles in this book for various and sundry periodicals in the Albany area and elsewhere, but particularly for Oswego’s daily newspaper, The Palladium-Times. I don’t need to say more because those who enter these pages, even if they are strangers, will soon feel as though they know the City of Oswego down to its roots and have themselves become neighbors of my dear friend, John T. Sullivan, Jr.

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The Hero Enkidu: An Epic by Lewis Turco

Thom. Seawell, Printmaker, In Memoriam.

 

          SUNY Oswego over the course of thirty-one years I collaborated with two printmakers; the second, George O’Connell, died this past spring, and I celebrated his life with an entry on this blog.

          The first printmaker with whom I worked, however, was Thom. Seawell who died on Friday, August 28^th, just before midnight. He and I collaborated on three poem-prints, and on a book, The Inhabitant, which was built on his very large print, “The House.” It hangs in my living-room here in Dresden, Maine, and it is a fold-out in the original edition of The Inhabitant, Poems by Lewis Turco, Prints by Thom. Seawell, Northampton: Despa Press, 1970. It was published in two editions, cloth and paper, both long out-of-print, but all the poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007. Here are two images by Seawell from the book, the cover and "Detail from 'The House: Kitchen,"

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "The Kitchen."

 

THE KITCHEN

 

In the  kitchen the dishwasher is eating the dishes.  The Inhabitant listens

          to the current of digestion — porcelain being ground, silver wearing

          thin, the hum and bite of the machine.

 

His wife does not hear it — she is humming, not listening.  But the

          Inhabitant is aware of movement in the cupboards, of the veriest

          motion — the cast-iron skillet undergoing metamorphosis, perhaps,

          becoming its name: the wives' spider spinning beneath the counter,

          weaving and managing, waiting for the doors to open.

 

Each cup has its voice, each saucer its ear, and the thin chant planes

          between the shelves, touching the timbres of glass and crystal as it

          passes.  The gentleman listens, is touched to the bone by this

          plainsong — he feels his response in the marrow's keening.

 

But the women do not — neither the elder nor the child — sense the music

          their things make.  Their lips move, a column of air rises like steam,

          and there is something in a minor key sliding along the wall,

          touching the face of a plastic clock, disturbing the linen calendar

          beside the condiments.

 

It is as though, the Inhabitant reflects, the women are spinning.  It is as

          though, while he waits, they weave bindings among the rooms; as

          though the strands of tune were elements of a sisterhood of dishes,

          the ladies, the spider in the cabinet, even of the dishwasher, done

          now with its grinding, which contributes a new sound — a continuo

          of satiety — to the gray motet the kitchen is singing.

 

-- Lewis Turco

OFF THE COAST, Fall, 2013

ONE NEVER KNOWS what he will find on the Web. I found this review while I was searching for references to "Wesli Court." I hadn't seen it before, though it has been in print for two years:

Epitaphs for the Poets by Wesli Court (Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, 2012) 86 pages, softbound. ISBN: 978-1-938144-1. $15.

Reading this collection of epitaphs by Wesli Court (the nom d'anagram of poet Lewis "Turk" Turco), one quickly realizes this memorial form is an excellent vehicle for light verse. Nothing like death to bring out the wicked wit! Court, a master wordsmith, generously provides 150 or so British and American poets (and a few lyricists), most of them dead but some still kicking, with pithy hail-and-farewells to inscribe upon their tombstones.

As with the clerihew or one of Bill Cole's terse verse inventions, the epitaph challenges the poet to sum up a lifetime in a handful of lines. Court offers mostly quatrains, almost universally witty/clever, with rhymes that may, from time to time, make you Nash your teeth. Working chronologically by year of birth, he begins with John Gower in the 14th century and ends with Annie Finch (b. 1956), the latter one of a number of poets who have yet to meet their maker, but who, courtesy of this courtly poet, already have a possible marker. 

"Writing humorous poetry is technical work," D. Marbach has noted,* and epitaphing is no exception. The pressure's on: assuming these words will be etched in granite one day, better make each word count. Some of Court's epitaphs are more inspired than others. Indeed, at times the versifying seems perfunctory, even tortuous, as he systematically, shall we say, knocks off the pantheon. 

This book works best picked up from time to time—read a couple of sic transit Gloria Swansongs and then go back to your business. Another way to approach the collection is to turn to one's favorite poets, as this reviewer did. How, for example, did Elizabeth Bishop fair? Well, so-so: 

 

R.I.P. ELIZABETH BISHOP

February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979

She did not wish upon a star, 

But wrote about things as they are

Except, of course, when she would dish up

The visions of a roaming Bishop. …

 

While a few of the featured poets (Morton Marcus, Rhina Espaillat, Joseph Salemi) were new to this reader, most are familiar: Longfellow, Dickinson, Bogan, Booth, Olds. A few of the epitaphs would require research:

 

R.I.P. MAY SWENSON

May 28, 1919 – December 4, 1989

 

May Swenson

Sang the hen song(?).

 

Others border on the objectionable [though true]. Court writes,

 

R.I.P. ADRIENNE RICH

May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012)

 

When she was young she caught the itch

To versify and rime, the which

She lost when she began to switch

To the lesbofeministic pitch,

And this became her lifelong niche.

 

…and R.I.P. LEROI JONES

October 7, 1934 - January 9, 2014

 

Born LeRoi Jones, he hated white,

So took a Muslim name to spite

Every goddam Southun cracka

And wound up Amiri Baraka.

 

Cleverly composed, yes, but not very funny. [Nevertheless, true.] Indeed, few of these epitaphs are LOL, but more of the admire-the-wordplay sort. That said, Edwin Markham's two-liner did prompt a smile:

 

R.I.P. EDWIN MARKHAM

April 23, 1852 – March 7, 1940

 

“Man with a Hoe,” his greatest lay,

Means something different today.

 

An epilogue, "The Mews of Poetry or Chasing Erato," offers epitaphs to beloved cats—Bozo, Reggie, Scooter and other feline friends get their due. "R.I.P. Crazy" is a favorite, with its touch of Edward Gorey:

 

 

R.I.P. CRAZY

 

Yes, he was well and truly named,

Our craziest by far.

Cross-eyed and manic till one day

He ran beneath a car.

 

Here, curt Court is at his Wesli best. 

 

—Carl Little

 

 

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          My dear friend and "artner," the printmaker George O'Connell, Emeritus Professor of Art at SUNY Oswego, passed from the scene on Sunday, May 10, 2015 at the age of 88. George was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1926. He and I collaborated for more than three decades on books, exhibits, poemprints, memorials and Xmas cards -- our collection of these is in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution (www.aaa.si.edu/collections/lewis-turco-and-george-oconnell-christmas-card-collection-13428), By age 86 he had navigated so many health problems and accidents that I had begun to call him "Super George." In his last days he wanted nothing more than to be relieved of pain, and although those who knew him well are sad not to have him with us, we are relieved that he hurts no more.

          I had more than one reason to admire and honor George. Everyone who served in the armed forces of the US during World War II was my hero or heroine. Tom Brokaw called them “the Greatest Generation,” and they were. George O’Connell was a veteran of the War in the Pacific, and it is one of my strongest sources of pride that he and I were collaborators for so long a time. I was deeply privileged and honored to work side-by side with one of my heroes. To me, he truly was Super George.

          We began collaborating in 1976. Our first project was an Xmas card, "The House," the poem by me with "Owl," a silk-screen print by George O'Connell, published by George’s Grey Heron Press in a Limited edition of 130 cards signed by both of us. 

          Thereafter we began issuing more and more elaborate cards almost every year. The next. a broadside titled "A Winter Song," was rather large for a “card.” The poem was a modern version of an ancient Welsh poem by “Wesli Court,” (my anagram nom de plume) with a lithograph by George published by Grey Heron in 1977 in a limited edition of 200 numbered copies, of which 84 are signed by "Wesli Court."  For some reason we skipped 1978 and ’79, but in 1980 we issued two cards to make up for it, I guess -- “Fading Things” and “First Snow,” both poems from a series I was working on at the time titled A Sampler of Hours: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters, published in book form by SUNY Press in 1993. We did more of Emily in 1987:

          Our first book publication was arranged by Charlie Davis, the leader of the early Indiana jazz band called “The Joy Gang” and composer of the jazz classic “Copenhagen.” When he retired during the Depression Charlie opened a furniture store in Oswego, NY, and when he retired from that he took some poetry composition courses at the College from from Roger Dickinson-Brown (who also died this year) and me. In the last class he took Charlie wrote a long poem inspired by William Carlos Williams’ “Patterson,” which I had ordered him to read, and when he’d finished that he published it himself and then wanted to start the Mathom Publishing Company.

          George had in common with Charlie that he was a jazz aficionado and musician; George had begun as a drummer in high school, and he played the vibes in local bands and orchestras. Charlie decided he wanted to publish a book of my poems from Mathom, American Still Lifes, so he asked George to do the cover and several illustrations. The book was published in 1981, the same year as the first exhibition was mounted in which George and I were partners.

          The Albany exhibit was titled, The New York Landscape, Poems by twenty State University of New York poets, with visual responses by twenty State University of New York artists. Our contribution consisted of "Millpond," a broadside poem I had written in Saratoga Springs at Yaddo in 1959. It was printed in handset type on handmade paper by Buffalo Papers, together with "Dusk Light," an intaglio by O’Connell. The exhibit was held at The Plaza Gallery, from 16 October through 30 November, 1981, and at the Pratt Manhattan Center Gallery, New York City, from 18 December, 1982, through 15 January, 1983, with a subsequent tour of New York State. The Catalog was edited by Peter Gordon for the Plaza Gallery.

          This original pairing led to establishment of the Jeffrey Sisson Permanent Memorial Exhibit: "Millpond," in calligraphy by Jean Garvey, together with four prints by George  O'Connell, at the Aurelia Osburn Fox Memorial Hospital in Oneonta, New York, in 1982. Subsequently there was a Chancellor’s Reprise Exhibition of the original show in the South Tower of S.U.N.Y. Plaza during the Fall semester of 1994.

          One of George’s favorite themes in his prints was, of course, jazz in all its glory and manifestations. The poem of mine that he liked best was titled “Lorrie” which I’d written at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs in 1959. This was the poem we used in the 1984 “Xmas card” paired with his print "The Girls Who Sing in the Band" in a limited edition from Mathom of 200 copies signed by both poet & artist.

 

Several years later, in 1989, George did an entire Artist Book on Lorrie, one of my prize possessions; one copy only exists.

          It would take too much time and space to list the rest of our Xmas cards here, but readers may see our 1996 "The Falcon Carol" on-line at

 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/detail/george-oconnell-christmas-card-and-poem-falcon-carol-13219

         We had the opportunity in the spring of 1996 to mount a full-fledged gallery exhibition at the Rathbone Gallery of Sage Junior College in Albany — with the assistance of an S.O.S. grant from the New York State Council on the Arts — of my sequence of poems titled Bordello, issued during the exhibition in a five-copy limited edition portfolio of poem-prints and images, printed on paper hand-made by both printmaker and poet – we had a fine time making the paper in the basement of his home on Baylis Street in Oswego.

          Four years later George O’Connell and I collaborated on a series of black and white monoprints with poetry titled “The Jazz Joint” which was included in a four-person show, Some Kind of Narrative, at the Kirkland Art Gallery in Clinton, New York, from March 4 — April 11, 2001.

         

          A retrospective exhibition of our work, “Collaboration: Prints and Text,” took place at the Tyler Art Gallery on the campus of the State University of New York College at Oswego from November 9 — December 9, 2001.

          In 2009 I wrote a limerick for George’s 83^rd birthday which we always celebrated at a dinner in an area restaurant, and I used his print of my poem titled “Jasper Olson”: 

GEORGE O’CONNELL

October 16, 2009

 

The printmaking artist named George

O’Connell was apt to disgorge

Jazz pictures of ladies

Erupting from Hades

And Satan’s most blistering forge.

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GEORGE,

 and farewell, old friend.

 

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R.I.P. PHILIP LEVINE

 

 PHILIP LEVINE, Jan. 10, 1928 - Feb. 14, 2015

ABANDONED FACTORY

A Philip Levine tailgater bluesanelle

 

Beyond, through broken windows one can see

Barely, through broken panes, can barely see

A lot of subjects for great poetry.

 

Squint your eyes, or close your eyes completely

As you stand enraptured, rapt completely,

And through those busted windows you will see

 

Downtrodden workers…or their darkling ghosts,

The wraiths and phantoms of despairing hosts --

All of them subjects for great poetry.

 

They’re still downtrodden, everyone who labors,

Who toils for pelf, performing manual labors.

Beyond, through broken windows one can see

 

Prose odes and elegies to beaten workers

Written by academics, word-warrior workers

Who find in labor topics for poetry.

 

The mill towns of New England were a wreck,

But now it’s old Detroit that is the wreck --

Through all its broken windows one can see

A lot of Luddites reading poetry.

 

Copyright Lewis Turco 2015. All rights reserved.