The Long Journey
in the moon, on the moon, through the dark front hall of the abandoned asylum, in rodeo dust, against the white forehead of the nun who smacked Teresa with a ruler, under the backseat of the Dodge Dart, next to the wheat pennies and the stubs of candy cigarettes, along the highway with the needles and the beer cans and the forgotten pelt of a long-dead squirrel, beside me, beside the heart thunking wetly inside the cavity of my chest, under the slow brush-beat of a snare in the green-tinted club on Logan Street, above the bantam rooster crowing on the wheelbarrow, above the sick child breathing harshly in his sleep, in the memory of the song we heard in Canterbury Cathedral, it was Beethoven, we cried, and the pilgrims came and went and loved and died, and time opened its ears and listened and time fell silent before it sang again.
I could see nothing but air on air on all sides, nothing but warm impossible space and the whole of the beast I was on: That floats and swims and wheels and descends slowly as departure, a series of departures, into the breath of the rising Wind.
—Dante, The Inferno
A sigh, exasperation or sorrow. A breath, long and slow; a wheeze, harsh as bricks. The cough, below stairs, of a woman who will die in a year; wail of a newborn, who will die in ten. A breeze over the sea, waves as high as museums, waves as wide
as cornfields, waves as deep as the tale Homer sang one night, while a goat bled out in the courtyard and slave women whispered in the olive grove.
A wind, whining across the plains, whining against the empty, glittering tracks, against the first railroad cars, against the raw new towns, against the cities of industry, against the interstate highway, against the steel walls of semi-trailers. Battering against the penitentiaries and the churches: a gale, scented with blood, with jasmine, with rot, with mornings, with butter and bacon and the snow-tracks of sparrows. A gust, sifting the alleys of your ancient fortress, fingering your stripped meadows, your pine forests, your empty sky. Snare it, pin it to your breast, beg it to tear you away.
My house is a badger’s tunnel
twisting and turning among roots and ledge. It is an empty osprey’s nest, it rattles in a high gale.
I wake in a heap of feathers and bone. Hope puddles under the floor.
The days ebb. I sweep blizzards and sand as neighbors prowl under moonlight, hunting for breakfast.
In the mornings some of us are missing, never to be seen again.
My house is a cavern of echoes. It is as vast as despair, as shiny as coins.
I cannot find a door, yet windows are everywhere. Each one hawks a different tale—
sing this tree, eat that sky. But when I pull the curtains, darkness slides out like an eel.
Then I hear, very faintly, the slow, slow drip of my life.
We were like you once, but now we are alders and sumac, we are tiny pines choking in the under-light.
But even if we had the souls of snakes, of roaches, your hand should have shown mercy.
Still, you have learned something: When you tear off a little branch darkened with blood
I will cry out. And then you will cry out also.
the winter moon dangles among the branches like a half-flat basketball & i say to myself i am tired of writing moon poems; this is the third one this week. the problem is that the moon is so interesting, the way it sulks in the sky, cheeks pouting like a baby’s & on another night it’s an egg rolling off the edge of a counter & then a toenail clipping a-gleam on the tile. the moon is like that roommate who always pays the rent late but not late enough to get kicked out, the one who fills the refrigerator with bottles of milk he never drinks. the moon is made of green cheese, he mumbles, & puffs a stratosphere’s worth of pot smoke into the front hall. this guy, this guy, with his long-with-love-acquainted eyes: i forgive him everything, but can he clean a bathroom? of course not. have you noticed how grubby the moon is, all that caked-on dirt & three-day stubble, all that languish’d grace? i’m going through some things, explains the moon. have i told you about my mom? asks the moon. can i borrow a hundred bucks? i’ll pay you on friday, promises the moon. if it’s that time of the month, he’ll spend 23 hours a day in his room with the door shut, muttering pale laments & plucking time’s arrows from his breast. the moon is unevictable—he is here to stay— & once in a while he even washes a dish or two & his smile is mournful & gorgeous, like paul newman’s, & his laundry is all over the couch. with how sad steps, o moon, thou climb’st the skies & with how wan a face. i venmo him his hundred dollars & i push his dirty socks into a corner with my foot & i worry that daylight will arrive before he knows it, before i know it. i cry out: wait, o moon: stop, o moon: o wait, & pardon earth’s ungratefulness but, alas, he has his headphones on & will not hear me. alas, alas, he is always out of reach.
The usual thing: Time stood still for years, then fell off the table.
This is a portrait of what I was, and wasn’t. Parched throat, tears exploding.
I stumbled over every cat on the stairs. Who else could I be?
Twenty-six letters equaled not enough words.
There was sleep. And simple memory. I sewed Simplicity patterns and wished for beauty.
But what is perfume that no one opens? When I lifted my violin, the men at the bar begged for Skynyrd, not Coltrane. So I volunteered to be lonely.
Dear sir I request attention to whom it may concern which is my concern dear sir dear colleague I beg a favor I suggest a strategy:
Destroy after reading in re my thoughts I attach a graph kindly do not photocopy dear sir dear sir I am your obedient servant:
I beg you to reconsider do not forward for your eyes only I request your presence your signature your identification code do not repeat:
Remain prudent highlight in three colors file under routine under top secret under to be shredded dear sir:
I lie upon your blotter fold me spindle me you know they are listening at the door:
Memos from Troy
In re matters of fate:
Do not forget to assume that your chariot wheel will break during battle. The axe that lopped your brother’s spine will likely split your skull. The gods delight in spectacle, so never disappoint. Bleed into dust. Spear the entrails of your foe. Do not go home.
* Dear sirs:
I believed you were shepherds until you sprang armed from the storm clouds. Now our bodies are piled high for burning. The stench of our rot floats like a herald to your mountaintop.
* Attention, beloved: Divine my thoughts. They are the same as yours. They are walls, breaking. When next we speak, I will be a pyre on the sand, you the slave of another man.
* Subject: The dead Now, go forth, clutching some thin burden of the past. Now, pause, and stare back at the hollow roofs. Now, turn your face toward the valley. And walk on.
*
To whom it may concern: Sunlight assails the earth. Waves shatter on the salt-scarred beach. The gods have ambushed your life.
Notes & Acknowledgments
The book epigraph is from Edmund Spenser, “The generall argument of the whole booke,” in The Shepheardes Calender (1597; facsimile ed., London: John C. Nimmo, 1895). I’ve silently modernized the original typography.
“Air”: The epigraph is from Dante Alighieri, canto 17 of The Inferno (1314), trans. Stanley Plumly, in Dante’s Inferno: Translations by 20 Contemporary Poets, ed. Daniel Halpern (New York: Ecco, 1993).
“moon poem”: The poem borrows and paraphrases lines from Sir Philip Sidney, sonnet 31 of Astrophil and Stella (c. 1582), in Selected Poems, ed. Catherine Bates (London: Penguin, 1994).
“Self”: The epigraph is from Sylvia Plath, “Totem,” in Ariel (New York: Harper and Row, 1961). The poem is dedicated to David Dear, who emailed me the lines and dared me to use them.
“My soule a world is by Contraccion”: The title is from William Alabaster, sonnet 15 (1597), in English Seventeenth-Century Verse, vol. 1, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: Norton, 1963).
“Waterloo”: The epigraph is from Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Hölderlin” (c. 1915), in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1989).
“Rules for the Direction of the Maid”: The poem reworks the language and structure of René Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind” (1628), in Descartes: Philosophical Writings, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1954).
“The bog is multitudes”: This poem is dedicated to Teresa Carson, who created the prompt that led me here.
“Rags”: The poem arose from a 1955 photograph of Emmett Till’s mother looking at her murdered child.
“A Month in Summer”: The poem was inspired by the diaries (1862–1908) of Isabella Maria Hoffses, a resident of Waldoboro, Maine. It does not in any way tell her actual life story but is deeply indebted to her words, her syntax, her selfquestioning. At times it quotes directly from her entries, though almost always in fragments, erasures, and meldings. More often it borrows her syntax and grammatical style as a framework for my own words. The diaries are in the collection
of the Maine Women Writers Center at the University of New England, Portland. For general background on period farm life, economics, language, and social relationships. I also consulted Judy Nolte Lensink, ed., “A Secret to Be Buried”: The Diary and Life of Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1858–1888 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989).
“Clytemnestra”: The epigraph quotes from Homer, The Odyssey (c. 8th century b.c.e.), trans. Emily Wilson (New York: Norton, 2018).
“A History of Wash Day”: I gleaned facts about laundry from Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Henry Holt, 1982).
“Ode to Four Words I Plucked at Random from a Book of Poems”: The epigraph is from Alice Oswald, “Dunt,” in Falling Awake (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016). The four random words are also from this collection.
“Desk Work”: A section of the poem borrows language from the Declaration of Independence.
“Like Cures Like”: The poem’s title refers to a fundamental principle of homeopathy, first suggested by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century.
“Wealhtheow”: Wealhtheow is a character in Beowulf (c. 850), queen of the Danes, married to Hrothgar.
*
My work on this collection was financially supported by the American Rescue Plan’s Maine Project Grants, a sub-granting program administered by SPACE Gallery for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Thanks to the editors of the journals and anthologies that published poems from the collection, often under different titles: At Length, Beltway Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, deLuge, Hole in the Head Review, Live Encounters, Longfellow Days, Maine Arts Journal, On the Seawall, Poetry Is Bread, Scoundrel Time, and Vox Populi.
Many of these poems were first drafted during community writing sessions with the May Street Writers. Thank you, Catherine Berce, Gretchen Berg, Amy Bergen, Heather Day, Lily Greenberg, Zanne Langlois, Marita O’Neill, Lucia Owen,
Sue Scavo, Arly Scully, Betsy Sholl, Meg Stout, Noel Tague, and Maureen Thorson. I’m so grateful for your vigor, your friendship, and all that cheese you bring to meals.
A number of poems arose during the Frost Place Studio Sessions and the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Thanks, especially, to Teresa Carson, for the complex prompts you create in your classes. I’m also grateful to Patricia Smith for bringing the Emmett Till photo to the Frost Place and reminding us that we all have the right and the responsibility to speak.
Several poems germinated during my work with students at the high school studio writing program at Monson Arts. I’m so thankful for these brilliant young colleagues.
“A Month in Summer” would not exist without the prescience of Cathleen Miller, an archivist at the Maine Women Writers Collection. When I asked to read something by “a disappointed woman,” she looked at me for a moment, then handed me the box of Isabella’s diaries and changed my life. I’m also grateful to Jefferson Navicky, another archivist at the collection, who invited me to speak publicly about my experience with the diaries. As a stand-alone manuscript, the poem was a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series.
I’m grateful to readers of early drafts, especially Linda Aldrich, Colin Cheney, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Marita O’Neill, and Betsy Sholl. Thanks to Nate Fisher for always responding graciously to sloppy new poems. Thanks to Teresa Carson, Maudelle Driskell, and Jeanne Marie Beaumont for our fizzy, head-spinning Zoom sessions. Thanks to Angela DeRosa for offering to be this collection’s first reader. Thanks to Arielle Greenberg and Kerrin McCadden for their complex, generous thoughts about the manuscript.
Thanks to Teresa Carson for being my best friend in poetry.
Thanks to the readers of my daily blog, who keep the conversation alive.
Thanks to this book’s dedicatees—for loving me, for loving Tom, for loving our children, for inviting us to park ourselves in your lives, for all these many years.
And deep love, as always, to my family. You know who you are.
