Thomas Lux’s To the Left of Time

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I never had the privilege to meet Thomas Lux (1946-2017), but I seem to know an inordinate number of my contemporaries who have. So when I came across this book, To the Left of Time, I scooped it. He writes, among many other topics, about working on a farm as a child, and I have a feeling that I will very soon be writing a hay loft poem of my own. (See his poem, “Haystack of Needles.”) Here is another that made me want to pick up my notebook and start scribbling:

Ode to the Joyful Ones

         Shield your joyful ones.
–from an Anglican prayer

That they walk, even stumble, among us is reason
to praise them, or protect them — even the sound
of a lead slug dropped on a lead plate, even that, for them,
is music. Because they bring laughter’s
brief amnesia. Because they stand,
talking, taking pleasure in others,
with their hands on the shoulders of strangers
and the shoulders of each other.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.
Because if they have two pork chops
they will serve you the better one.
Because they will give you the crutch off their backs.
Because when there are two of them together
their shining fills the room.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.

Thomas Lux, To the Left of Time (Mariner Books, 2016)

Cortney Davis’s Details of Flesh

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Cortney Davis‘s Details of Flesh has been on my shelf since it was first published by Calyx Books in 1997. A couple of times I’ve come close to giving it away, but on each occasion I thought twice. A nurse practitioner, Davis writes about issues that matter to me. Shouldn’t I reread her poems before letting them go?

Short answer, yes. As I read, I thought of the nurse’s aides who care for my mother, of the RN’s who change her catheter twice a month, of the nurses in hospitals who cared for my father after his open-heart surgery, and, ten years later, after his stroke, during his final week in the ICU. Davis often writes of children and young women, but the indignities of the flesh, the beauty of the flesh — these are omnipresent throughout the book. It takes a calling to do such work. Reading about it gives me heart for my own work.

The Nurse’s Task

When I pluck the suture
or pack the ulcer with gauze,
it becomes my task
to introduce rage to this body

that calls me nurse, nurse,
as if my hands were gold.
I cradle the body
like a mother rocks.

I lean close
and let it memorize my face.
Then, I begin.
First, something subtle.

A hasty scrape.
An accidental pinch
as if I might thrust needle
down to bone. The body

raises its hands in disbelief!
This is nothing. I thread veins
with catheters of fire,
I change morphine to milk.

When the body asks why?
I am silent. When the body
whines, I act bored
and turn away. If sleep comes

I sneak in and shake the body
until, angry and squinty-eyed,
it rises on its elbow
and stares at me, at last understanding

that the flesh is everything.
This is the body I love–the one
that laughs down death’s trumpet.
The one that escapes.

Cortney Davis, Details of Flesh (Calyx Books, 1997)

 

Joannie Stangeland’s In Both Hands

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Should you wonder, I can’t italicize words in the post title, which is why the titles of books are not. Furthermore, Joannie Stangeland’s book has “both” italicized, so, In Both Hands.

And this is a book you’ll want to hold onto with both hands — it has flying horses, furious skies, lakes that rise into the air — all in all, a volatile place to lose yourself for an hour or two.

I chose this poem (below) for you to read out loud and savor, because of the final tercet. As the poem begins with “Words tonight fly out as black as crows,” I can guess that the home the poet refers to is language (perhaps more complex than that). But having spent an hour with my mother today, at her care home, attempting to have a conversation with this dearly beloved woman who can no longer carry the thread of a conversation, the poem rings true for me on an even deeper level.  Let me add to that comment, that many of the poems in this book are about mothers and daughters. I have read most of the poems before; and I suspect I will read them many times again. I hadn’t sat and read them all at once, and it was a lovely and resonant choice, particularly today.

Roost

Words tonight fly out as black as crows,
oily and stubborn, ruffled and sharp.
Feathers may litter the floor.

The air holds a fever, a taut pitch,
a howl we hitch to, each unsure
of our turf. Bristling, a hiss—

and it isn’t the kettle or the cat.
But we swallow the rest, stinging
until the barbs wing into the night.

We settle our worries like eggs.
Tomorrow, we draw the same breath
when we see the mountains rising

into morning, as white as clouds.
A crow’s nest is a sloppy mess,
a loose muddle of twigs in a tree.

Love is like that—on a hard day, held
with spit and bits of string—
on a good day, home.

—Joannie Stangeland

Ruth Stone’s Ordinary Words

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I’m so grateful for those of you reading along with me this month (just the blogposts, or your own deep-dive into poetry to celebrate April), but even if I were simply shouting into the void, I’m glad I took on this project.

One thing I learned with this post, is that there is a Ruth Stone Foundation, dedicated to preserving her home and legacy.

It’s been a while since I read her work, and though I often think of Ruth Stone (1915-2011) along the lines of girls in dresses of Alice blue, and mares beneath the apple trees, I was pleasingly surprised at how bawdy Stone’s poetry is. Men line up like silverback gorillas at the counter of the donut shop. At the bus station, “two couples are not just kissing / they are dry fucking.” In these poems we are not allowed to forget that we have bodies. A younger sister lies in the grave, her breasts, “wizened flaps.” A husband dead of suicide haunts the poems (an insistent “you”). Time doesn’t merely pass, but runs through our fingers as we clutch at what cannot be held onto. The title of the book, Ordinary Words, seems to insist on the humble subjects and (sometimes) plain speech of the poems. But I tiptoe through these poems, never sure where a trap will spring open.

Then 

That summer, from the back porch,
we would hear the storm like a train,
the Doppler effect compressing the air;
the rain, a heavy machine, coming up
from below the orchard, rushing toward us.
My trouble was I could not keep you dead.
You entered even the inanimate,
returning in endless guises.
And that winter an ermine moved into the house.
It was so cold the beams cracked.
The ermine’s fur was creamy white
with the last half of the tail soot black.
Its body about ten inches long,
it slipped through small holes.
It watched us from a high shelf in the kitchen.
In our loss we accepted the strange shape of things
as though it had a meaning for us,
as though we moved slowly over the acreage,
as though the ground modulated like water.
The floors and the cupboards slanted toward the West,
the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky.
The children and I sitting together waiting,
there on the back porch, the massive engine
of the storm swelling up through the undergrowth,
pounding toward us.

–Ruth Stone, Ordinary Words (Paris Press, 1999)