The Collecting Jar
The Collecting Jar
Rob Hardy
Grayson Books West Hartford, Connecticut
The Collecting Jar Copyright Š 2005 by Rob Hardy Printed in the USA Winner of the 2005 Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition Grayson Books PO Box 270549 W. Hartford, CT 06127 www.graysonbooks.com ISBN: 0-9675554-9-3
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To Clara
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Acknowledgments “Cicadas” and “Packing the Creche” appeared in The Christian Century. © 1998 and 1999, The Christian Century “River Bend,” “Entomology,” “Instructions for Silent Prayer,” and “You Were Never in the Army” appeared in 33 Minnesota Poets, ed. Monica and Emilio DeGrazia (Nodin Press 2000). “Instructions for Silent Prayer,” “Aeneas,” “Essentialist Poem” and “Index” appeared The Comstock Review “Substitute Teaching,” “Lodestone” and “In a Japanese Room” appeared in English Journal. © 2002 and 2004 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted by permission. “Beethoven’s Seventh, 1978” appeared in The North Coast Review “Food for the World” appeared in The Black Bear Review and was reprinted in Whole Terrain. “Small World” appeared in The Black Bear Review “William Cullen Bryant” and “Daywings” appeared in ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment) “Essential Love” appeared in Essential Love: Poems about Mothers and Fathers, Daughters and Sons, ed. Ginny Lowe Connors (Grayson Books 2000) “Falling” appeared in Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge: Poems About Marriage, ed. Ginny Lowe Connors (Grayson Books 2003) and in To Love One Another, ed. Ginny Lowe Connors (Grayson Books 2002)
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Contents Acknowledgments · vi Cicadas · 1 Ladybug · 2 Entomology (Will’s Poem) · 3 Instructions for Silent Prayer · 4 Aeneas · 5 Beethoven’s Seventh, 1978 · 7 Food for the World · 8 In a Japanese Room · 9 Essential Love · 11 Small World · 12 Substitute Teaching · 13 Lodestone · 14 Essentialist Poem · 15 Falling · 16 Index · 18 Girls’ Night Out · 20 Morning · 22 You Were Never in the Army · 23 Expanding Universe · 24 William Cullen Bryant · 25 River Bend · 26 Daywings · 27 Packing the Creche · 28
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Cicadas Slit down the back like a plastic change purse from which the cicada has withdrawn its body’s glisten, the dry shape still clings to tree bark, pompeiian, surprised by self-eruption, a mold into which one might pour molten insect. It rose in body like heat, its high-tension drone disembodied in the air: song of buzz-saw and drill, as if August were a season under construction, a scaffolding of dry skin on the trees, the sky at dusk a blueprint for fall. Somewhere there has been a resurrection, but the only sign I have is this calloused husk, an abandoned house whose inhabitant has gone to attend the miracle.
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Ladybug To Joyce Sutphen
delicate lacquered pushpin head out of nowhere, enamelled jewel-box escapee embossing the window-pane, skating daylong on the underside of light, candy-coated wing-sheathes reluctantly giving way to black spasms of flight: when I opened your book, a ladybug flew uncrushed from the margins, as if that’s exactly what poems do
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Entomology (Will’s Poem) You came to a place where the woods, you said, were pulsing with trees. Later, coming upon a pair of grasshoppers immobilized in their stolid mating, you told me that they were stacked like bunkbeds. I sit for hours waiting on metaphor, like those grasshoppers, paralyzed by the stubborn urge to create, while you leap about in language, discovering for the first time the pure ecstacy of words. This is what I stopped to think. But you went to find a jar. The grasshoppers looked so vulnerable, locked in their secret knowledge, as if sex were an instinctive surrender to death, but you thought only of the supreme pleasure of bug-collecting, their pale-green bodies uncoupling under glass. Like you, I often feel the urge to enclose every natural act in some clear container, a poem, something to remember by. You came of such an act, such a longing to compose myself into something separate and new, something I can no longer contain: you.
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Instructions for Silent Prayer To Heather Moody
There is nothing more natural, the caterpillar says, than to give birth to oneself— to pull the chrysalis from your body’s ragged sleeve, folded in a glistening transparent stillness while a deeper grace wings itself within. It looks painful: skin split and contracting, this straight-jacket escape, the body peeled away to its volatile core. We never become less physical by such decrements and involutions, only more spiritual. What the body teaches us to love becomes the spirit’s cargo, wings spread to gather up the body in benediction.
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Aeneas To my Father I went downtown last night with Mother and Ellen. We got you a pair of gray pants at Edwards. They are a gray check. You may think they look a bit loud when you first see them, but remember that clothes don’t look as loud when worn as when off. They are a fine pair of pants and I’m sure you will like them. We also got you a literal translation of the Aeneid. Let us know how it helps out.
—Letter from my grandfather to my father at Cornell University, October 19, 1948
You were never loud, only worn and gray, something passed along to us at birth, incidental article of parentage—or so we always thought when we saw you translated into a dead language in our midst. Your epic was a series of small upstate towns—Ulysses, Hector—allusions in the landscape to some heroic faithfulness, some checkered fabric of loss and hopefulness, something not always appreciated at first sight. How often the miles bled from your heart, the highway your martyrdom, the landscape indifferent behind its scrim of rain, kept awake by the self-flagellation of the windshield wipers. You came home to an absence that grew until your return no longer filled it. Exhaustion rubbed the nap from your easy chair, wore away all the surfaces where we touched— we watched you erode. If you were Odysseus, where were your stories? There was no Circe,
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no suitors, no Sirens: only the radio turned up loud enough to keep you awake behind the wheel. There was no war. We never went out to find you. We never understood your sacrifice, always exchanging love for duty, that estrangement which we could never see as the price of your devotion. If we seem to turn away, it is only because you have given us this road, far-flung sparks of smouldering Troy’s self-consuming fire.
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Beethoven’s Seventh, 1978 A pressed metallic iridescence is not the same as the rainbow etched in black vinyl, unravelling to a smooth, repetitive silence. A part of my life was mapped in diamond dust, grooved latitudes compassed with sound, where I slid easily into belonging. Now I long to return to that place two and a half inches in where the Allegretto begins and the needle rides soft waves of abraded sound, like the shuffle of hands rubbed together for warmth. That surface noise was my longing tattooed into the music’s whorled skin, or my own fingerprint rubbing against something eternal.
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Food for the World My mother never said there were children starving in Africa. My mother fed the world. She carried the gross national product of Third World countries in her grocery cart, sailing like a frigate through the well-stocked aisles, archipelagoes of fresh produce, geopolitical cuts of meat, the artificial arctic of the frozen foods. Syrofoam barges of ground beef thawed in the lock of her kitchen sink. She peeled the latitudes from potatoes as big as moons, quartered, gibbous, orbiting planetary roasts cratered with crescents of garlic. We grew as wide as continents while the cupboards emptied out with extinctions. My mother’s cart rolled rib-cage bare through the distended aisles, past starving children reaching from the shelves, their poor bodies drawn up empty like string bags.
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In a Japanese Room Minneapolis Institute of Art
I say, slow down and look. I want him to see how a painting creates focus, distance, and a source of light, how we are drawn into a moment always on the point of dissolution: the knife poised above the cake, the child ready to blow out the candles, the last instant before the smoke and the crumbs and the disappointment. Look at the father, I say, his face a blur of thick strokes, an abstraction, a black suit standing in the doorway. How would I paint them, these colorful groups of first-graders swirling through the galleries, excited to find that beyond every room is another and another room, always leading back to a place where they have already been? I know this will only happen once, this moment, perfect as it is, when we find ourselves 9
in a Japanese room, under the dark, carved beams, where the furniture stands in the foreground of a paper screen suggesting tranquil mountains and light, voiceless birds— an uninhabited space where life is always an art, so uncluttered of everything but what we imagine it could be. Outside, the city, the traffic, the fifteen schoolbuses, West Twenty-Fourth Street, and not a single tranquil mountain. I want to tell him, stay, because I will fail you, because I will never be perfect, and God knows what you will think of me. But he hurries on, just happy to be with his Dad at the museum, looking forward to a picnic in the park, to the world of smoke and crumbs and what comes next.
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Essential Love Place the palm of your hand flat against your cheek, push outward against the inside with your tongue— this is how it feels, only smoother, tighter, rounder. And you know your tongue’s a tongue— but what’s this? An elbow? A knee? In another darkness you began with familiar contours, a specific fondness for the sweet curve of a jaw, the soft inside of a thigh. From these known shapes your touch adjusts to a shared darkness, feeling out the intricate love you have shaped between yourselves. But to these kicks you extend a general love, a love which requires no other definition. Birth will complicate this love, too, with details— but for now it simply is.
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Small World Peter asked for clay. All summer he built himself little chairs, tables, a drawbridge for his fort in the backwoods, dreaming of a bigger world where he could build houses big enough to live in, big enough for everyone. Happiness was a hammer in his hand, saw and nails, everything fitting together snug and square. His seven years had given him strength and skill enough to piece this much together. He asked for clay, and made himself a model of the trade center towers, a place where he had never been. He made them, he said, for remembering: things small enough to hold, like the small white pawns taken from a board, the toy-sized city of ghosts left standing at the foot of his bed while he sleeps and sometimes dreams of picking up his hammer, and of what he would build.
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Substitute Teaching Nothing I could write is as beautiful as you. For you I put out the flower of myself, and you likewise cannot help but blossom. There is nothing more natural than the flourish with which you open into the world, petalling outward in the profusion of yourself as if radiance were the simplest gift. Even the girl on the playground who sits alone with her knees to her chin is a bud of great hopefulness, the center of her own creation. She knows the best thing is to be wanted, and the miracle is that she will blossom so many times, resiliently reaching sunward for her place in the world. It is the same for me, coming each morning to a different set of lesson plans, graphing myself to the arc of your upward growth: for you I am flowering again. For you I have had to relearn everything but love.
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Lodestone In eighth grade geoscience, the boys and girls identify minerals by their streak and lustre, their hardness, heft and cleavage. A girl holding a piece of magnetite asks another girl, “When was the first time it happened to you?” and a boy at the same lab table asks, “The first time what happened?” The girls give him a dirty look, and lean in close to whisper whatever it is that both of them know. A boy can’t identify the streak and heft of their conversation, only that the mineral in her hand is iron, magnetic, and possibly the meteoric trace of life on Mars. He knows it attracts. And girls, he knows, are metamorphic: or are they igneous, crystals from some earthen fire, some deep flow of magma, something volcanic that gives them lustre, cleavage, and a certain hardness?
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Essentialist Poem S is seductive, sidling up, sibilant, softening he, who turns away, who thinks he can make it on his own. She eases into things, sifts and settles. He only halts and takes what he needs. The shape of S is pregnant, sustaining, seeing both sides: spin S and she survives, symmetrical. S makes she the subject, insists on plurality, lives in the present. He objectifies, puts S last, makes it his.
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Falling for Ruth and Jason August 23, 1997
You already know about love. You fall in love. Falling is easy. Maybe you don’t see it coming. Maybe you brace yourself against the wind in the door, see the earth circling below and jump. Falling is easy. It feels like flight. You feel your kinship with clouds, with light, stuff of stars, atoms that float and fall, meteors, stars that still glow with the start of everything. You raise your arms like wings. Butterfly or belly-flop. You feel the earth expanding— don’t look down. Reach for the cord. Falling is easy. But is this love or gravity? Pull the cord. Yes— love blossoms from the weight you carry, the question, the tug at your heart. The parachute pops like a cork. Now you float in the arms of the atmosphere, milkweed floss, dandelion seed, no longer afraid to take root in the earth— but still floating a while, ecstacy and trust, your highaltitude heart settling back into a steadier beat, the tilt of the earth, seasons and days. But here you are floating—buoyed by invitations and arrangements. Now you look down. The ground looms like a date, circled for a landing. The fields look like RSVPs. Your feet touch. The parachute falls around you like a wedding dress.
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You’ve landed together. Dance while the earth steadies beneath your feet. Hold each other up. Now you will walk together into ordinary days. Your parachute may become a maternity dress, a mortgage, a tissue for your tears. It may be divided into diapers, waterproof sheets, a layette, stories to tell your grandchildren. Days may come when you forget how it felt to float. But still this moment of landing lives inside you, when the touch of the ground felt like a vow— I will always be there. I will catch you if you fall.
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Index “Finally, I am indebted to my wife, Jane Anne, for much help with all phases of the book, especially with the preparation of the indexes.” —John T. Curtis The Vegetation of Wisconsin (1959)
mornings, September, New England asters and stiff goldenrod map the old fields with pollen, conjuring prairie from the sandy loam, flares of sumac in the draws: look up the flight of the waxwing overhead, seeding the grassland with juniper, spores of migration taking root, collating the prairie and the pine forest north to south, and you will find Jane Ann Curtis with her index cards, retracing her husband’s footsteps page after page into the undergrowth, among ephemerals
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dying back into shade, and sometimes stumbling on the accidental poetry of how the world comes together: fern, sweet ferns fidelity
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Girls’ Night Out
No matter how much I scrub or cook, housework is never alchemy enough to grant me temporary change of flesh— I’m always the admirable chimera, never resolving into my grosser parts, or never escaping them. The facts are the facts. Our flesh genders us for different conversations and sex becomes untranslatable, nuanced as it is by the experience of our bodies. A conversation about bodies themselves can mean different things in and out of the idiom of desire. In short, I’m left alone with the rhythm of the second hand rubbing the clock toward midnight, rounding to the nearest solitude, nudging me closer and closer to myself. Poor boy, with no story to tell of his first period and likewise never knowing with men how to begin a conversation unless about a tool I need to borrow. Could I get together with your husbands and talk sensitively and with humor about our first ejaculations? It’s not the same somehow, as if there were poetry embodied in your moon rhythms but not in the rough earthsongs we force from ourselves. Go sing yourselves back into bodies and blood. I can only tune myself 20
to her body’s hum, skirling out pleasure like a round, becoming complete with a voice sounding above and below.
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Morning I’m not myself until I’ve had my coffee, but the brown campesinos still complain when I measure them into the coffee grinder. It’s too early for this. For God’s sake, I was kept awake all night by the screams of the darkskinned woman in my closet who was peeling strips of her own flesh to cobble into shoes. All I want is peace in the morning— not the pleading of ordinary things to consider consequences, only the stillness of the thing itself, the smooth earthand fleshtones of the coffee bean, glabrous and infolded, shedding a double shadow in the light from the corner windows. I could do without the clock ticking off the children who died in my sleep, the translucent whorl of fingerprints stitched into the soles of my shoes.
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You Were Never in the Army To John Shaw
When I won’t eat the doubtful chicken delved from the back of the up north refrigerator, or the can of wintered-over beef soup, shelved long past its expiration date, he says, “You were never in the Army.” I don’t reheat coffee the way he does, in a small pan, as if helmet-brewed over improvised fire, day-old, as it was, or may have been, fifty-odd years ago when he was in the Army. I have never lain bloody in the cold Ardennes, in the open sores of blasted snow, nor have I stood at the old world’s end waiting to heal my wounds and build it new after I was done with the Army. I have no scars, and can never fall asleep upright, as he can, as if I’d been marching or waiting night-long in the anxious deep of my foxhole—or simply at peace, having nothing to do with the Army.
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Expanding Universe I can’t find a pen to write your address down or the poem I started yesterday after I watched you go with all your belongings packed into your car when you hugged me goodbye I thought of seeds dispersing on the wind how the light of stars takes so long to get here how everything started out in one place
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William Cullen Bryant My heart is awed within me, when I think Of the great miracle that still goes on. —Bryant, “Forest Hymn�
He was born to the cutting and clearing, the old forests going down around him as he grew into a love of the crepuscular and vanishing, migrations, extinctions, the Indian and bison diminishing west beyond the railhead, the wilderness filling with the immigrant drone of bees. We picture him in twilight, gray as weathered clapboard, his face an overgrown field in which the eyes still burn a clearing, the patriarch of old hymnals and abandoned farms, the one-room schoolhouse and granite death angels fallen among the weeds. But clear away the dust and a forest still covers half the continent, opening onto prairie still unfurrowed by the plow, and the pioneer who has gone further than any white man before still imagines that he is standing at the end of the world or about to go back to the very beginning.
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River Bend These places, like Old Testament miracles, have ceased to exist, waiting for us to recreate them. Like a prayer the snow falls, my footsteps scatter sparrows from the grass, the ducks mumble over their pond. The prairie cups itself to my ear, closes out the empty stomach-rumble of the highway, and I hear the grass voiced like an organ with wind and birdsong, tongues of milkweed pod, winter poised above me like a dark chord. I come here with a heart in waiting, to learn the patience of seeds sleeping winterlong above the frozen earth, the patience of Sarai waiting to be renamed into flower. This prairie is a covenant renewed in the earth, a promise delivered in the voice of fire, just as Moses heard the voice of God in the wilderness. Here I listen to the requiem of snow, the earth awaiting the resurrection of its dead, the whisper of wings making angels in the air.
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Daywings (Ephemeroptera, “daywings”)
In a net of late sunlight, mayflies dip and rise, caught in the brief updraft of instinct and fizzling out in a determined shimmer of wings. What grace they have is reserved for this hour before sunset, the males casting themselves into the current of air, the fly fishing for another of its kind, the females swung up under, hooked into the dance of survival, the air gilded with the light of a thousand couplings. They swarm like static amid disturbance of gulls, morning dun still floating ashore from their watery second birth, their bodies winged for this one dance: dying proof, if we need it, that beauty is the upshot of our mortal business. In the morning they’ll be gone, a million sparks burned down to ash, littering the beach grass with their flimsy one-night wings.
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Packing the Creche Petals scab and peel, blackened afterbirth, poinsettia thinning to a knuckled stalk, winter whitening like a scar. Already the fevered aisles are flush with hearts. By the lectionary, the disciples stare snow-blind at the transfigured Christ, Lazarus dies: but here the Magi wait, the shepherds tune their pipes, the angel of the Lord still fidgets on her thread, the baby Jesus lies cradled in familiar dust. Before the creche is transfigured into bric-Ă -brac, I swaddle the sheep in tissue two by two, old hatbox of an ark, kings and cattle stowed, angel furled, riding the rising flood of available light. An early thaw tempts the earth into expectation, birds modulate into spring. Two shepherds, left high and dry by Lent, still tune their pipes, still look into the undecorated sky for the angel, still wonder where they will find the manger, the child, their own flocks.
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