Category: Poetry

El Mercado

Dried fish and sacks of sugar,
rice and beans piled high on sheets,
crushed coffee, frying platinos,
coconut dulces and lemons.

Haitian contraband t-shirts from America,
shoes for an army mis-sized and tattered,
hand-stitched trousers and woven jackets,
straw hats with flowery bands about their middles.

Old women twirling strands of tobacco,
leaves burning in hand-carved pipes;
campo men haggling over burros,
looking longingly at domino bars;
soldiers swaggering with heavy guns,
forcing personal paths through the crowd;
shoe-shine boys tugging at my shirt,
offering to buff my sneakers for a peso.

The massacre of chickens, their feet pedaling
in buckets upside down;
the waiting of mules, picking at the scrabble
on the church lawn;
the chanting of flies, Te Deum hymns to the sun
and strips of meat.

The town I visited in the Dominican Republic had a regional market, which was the most amazing crossroads of goods and services. I had never seen anything quite like it, though I’d read about places like it in Bowles and Burroughs. In my neighborhood now I visit places like El Mercado Central and the Midtown Global Market that have a good mix of things, but no open-air poultry abattoir nor dried meat rotting in the sun.

Coffee

Mercedes gives us the best family china cups
filled with pitch tar from the tin pot,
two heaping lumps of sugar to cut the bitter,
before we bathed in rust-brown water.
It fills the mouth like solid food–
“Petrol por humanos,” John says brokenly–
and slides into the belly warm and black.

The afternoon’s muddy trail cut through
a dirt farmer’s field of platinos and coffee–
we see him lashing his ox with sharp cries
and leather sting, grinding plow in ground–
and I touch a green coffee bean with timid finger.

On the bus going east on the army highway to Haiti,
we passed fields of sugar cane–
nickel-a-day wages for los Negros–
and in our village I stood in a ruined refinery,
its walls pledged to Ballaguer and Bosch both.

I cradle the demi tas in my fingers
as though it were a fragile bird made in Taiwan,
and gently kiss its eggshell lips
while swallowing the black island.

In the summer of 1990, I spent a month in the Dominican Republic, in a village on the Haitian border. It was part of a youth ministries program based in Orlando, Florida; I was an intern at the Green Bay Catholic Diocese, and I was along to gather information to write a grant to support a similar program.

It was a great experience, especially for a middle-class American kid. I stayed with a family in the village, sharing quarters with a priest from Scranton, PA, who was along to determine whether to accept a mission calling. The mother of the family, Mercedes, prepared meals for us, and I especially remember the breakfasts: thick slices of toasted bread, sweet fried platinos, milk with clots of fat still floating in it, and incredibly strong and thick coffee. The hospitality that the village gave us was incredible.

This section of the Dominican Republic is off the beaten track for tourists; we had to get there by bus, sharing space with crates of chickens. On the outskirts of the town was a ruined mansion that once belonged to Trujillo, the Dominican dictator from 1942 to 1961; a little further down the road, less than mile, was the border with Haiti. It’s a dry, dusty, mountainous area, and the people get by as best they can on subsistence farms, and sugar and platino fields.

This is the sort of place Americans ought to see. It’s poor, grindingly so, but also dignified, not at all like the Third World poverty Americans are likely to encounter on the edges of cruise ship destinations. Family and church were very important to the village, and an ethos of mutual aid and support suffused the culture. Isolated from the world and largely ignored by the government, the people in this region did their best to make a civilized life with limited resources.

Monody, after “Lycidas”

for John Milton and Stephen Westergan

I’ve only just planted my seeds,
and already I’m pulling up the harvest–
the seasons have been sped
before the shoots broke soil.
Give me time, let me wait for rain!
See, my dirt is still dry . . .

Perhaps if I stoop to pluck,
some migrant hands will bend with me.
Bright brooding wings might sing
some work song, tragic fingers help
to shake the dust from little roots
still shriveled;
              if Memory serve me,
I’ll serve her one day, reap her wheat
beside her daughters in some redder autumn
after damper spring–
only help me pull back these little seeds
before the coming drought still them withall.

And of what shall the wings sing?
Of the sower, of course, giver of seed
sung of before, praising tunes
that drew me to these fields
the lush crops to admire
and the pregnant fruits to taste.
I took a satchel of seeds from him
upon my back,
             took fire from his lips
that put sweat on my mouth’s indent
which I tasted on my tongue.
Daemon-chased and chasing sower,
who flew through the planting spilling seeds
and coaxing out of the dirt
musical wheat for baking rich breads.

The field is empty now, plow abandoned,
satchel of seed left in the rows empty.
Trees that nodded outside his cottage window
and gave shade to the stalks of wheat
drop their leaves like sighs,
bark curling with grief.

Why could not the bread he grew
nourish him? Why did you,
O Memory, quick the rising of those loaves
and fill his hungry plate with soft crusts?
Where were the other tillers who labored
beside him when his crumbs were spilt?
Where was the wheat?

O futile plowing!
Deep as the metal blade cuts,
long as the seed waits to sprout up,
gentle as the care of hands and rain,
it all came for naught.
Why delve as deep into the soil for rich loan
when scrabble on dusty rocks
feeds most empty bellies?
The textured bread from his wheat
could sop a thousand meaty stews
and still be dry, and a single bite
filled deep hunger and made one hungry still,
hungry for more of those rich loaves.
But now that hunger will not be sated
by dry crusts, though that is now all we eat.

We have new sowers now, and new bakers,
and his cottage is turned dark and empty
as our rumbling stomachs;
new sowers and bakers without wheat and bread,
though possessed of king’s commission–
as though decree could feed us.
Oh, I long to smash their plows and ovens!

I will build him great statues, then,
to stand in his field as he did,
tall and proud with satchels and loaves
like his, I will build him pillars
of marble and obsidian, angelic tall!
But what needs my sower piled stones,
that will not grow even poor scrabble?
No, I will plant for him, bake for him,
make breads as textured and as rich
from wheat as lovingly planted.
I will fill bellies with food and hunger both.

And in my hands will be his
when I strew the seeds on deep-plowed dirt,
when I swing my scythe to cut down wheat,
when I bundle long stalks
                         and when I pull
the flowery tops apart from chaff,
when I grind the seed between stones
and knead soft elastic dough into loaves
to make soft, crusty bread.
And I will send my sower on to other fields,
still chased by daemons, still chasing them,
and together we’ll catch those fiery fiends
and sit them down with us to supper.

Even now I see him, satchel and scythe,
his beard blown in autumn winds,
walking along rural lanes while I make harvest.
Even now I see him, striding ahead,
to make new fields ready for our crop.

Stephen Westergan was the instructor for my class on John Milton; he obviously had a big impact on me, both in the way he taught the class and the example he gave of living a rich life of the mind.

We didn’t touch “Paradise Lost” until late in the semester; before we even read a line of Milton, we were introduced to Greek and Roman mythology, Homer and Virgil, the Old Testament, and Milton’s contemporaries. We had to be prepared to meet Satan, Adam, and the vengeful God; it was a classical education compressed into a few weeks. Most classes, we sat in a circle and discussed what we had read, with Stephen sitting on the edge of his chair, fingers at his temples as he listened hard to what we were saying and guided us along.

Stephen represented the best in college teaching: he had a deep love and respect for his material, high expectations for his students, and an almost superhuman ability to listen and guide and teach. And because of his passion, we students were driven to at least not let him down, even if we struggled to rise to his expectations. Reading and understanding Milton was the most important thing in the world in those classes.

He played cello in the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra, and I’d often see him crossing the Main Street Bridge over the Fox River with his cello case and long coat. He looked the part of a Milton scholar: tall and thin, with wild red hair and beard, always wearing a rumpled suit; he could well have stepped out of the pages of Stoner, or a Renaissance salon. He had an intensity about him, as if he could barely contain all the poetry roiling about in his head, but at the same time an easy approachability.

At the time I took his class, he was still “Mr. Westergan”: he hadn’t finished his dissertation yet, a fact that he occasionally mentioned, like when he explained the “sympathetic fallacy” with an anecdote about receiving encouragement from the wind-blown trees outside his window when he was working on an especially tricky part. The life of an ABD instructor at a liberal arts college is tenuous, no matter how good a teacher you are, and during that year the college started interviewing for other instructors. I was one of the students who got to see these applicants–”new sowers and bakers without wheat and bread, / though possessed of king’s commission”–and I was generally unimpressed, firmly a partisan for Stephen. Replace Mr. Westergan with some diploma-mill hack? That would be like scuttling the course on Milton in favor of a class on modern advertising jingles!

Things have worked out well for Stephen. He’s still at St. Norbert College, with “Professor” attached to his name, and he won the Founder’s Award in 2003. At RateMyProfessors, he gets a 2.2 for “easiness” (that sounds about right), and 5 for helpfulness (though I don’t understand why there’s no “hotness” rating–he was certainly one of the handsomest teachers at the college). It sounds like he continues to inspire students.

Alas, this poem that he inspired has some problems. The central metaphor is muddled (is he a baker? a farmer? is it harvest or planting time? and is the speaker a student or a peer?), and the pastoral form (inspired, of course, by Milton’s Lycidas) feels clunky and forced. Parts of it are more than a little overwrought, and the jumble of classical and Biblical references is a tangled and unfocused mess. But as an undergraduate ode to a great teacher, and a sort of seminar paper on the classics and pedagogy, I’d give it a solid C and ask for a few revisions.

Thunder Poetry

Loon cries tonight became pattering rain,
a water lullaby that rapped me into sleep
cradled in a leafy wind. The prose
of branches groaning back and forth
filled my dreams with conversations;
we lie a “V”, feet together.
Suddenly thunder’s poetry woke me,
Philip Whalen’s booming voice chanting verse,
and I rolled into my pillow counting meter.

Summer 1990; I was reading a lot of the San Francisco school (Gary Snyder, Brother Antoninus, Philip Whalen) at the time.

Frogs

“but the nymphs have thought good that the frog should eternally sing.”
Moschus, Lament for Bion Idyll III, c. 150 BC

I spent two weeks on an argonaut quest
for frogs.
The sandbar by the boathouse had once writhed with them,
a great croaking mass of mottled green
singing out their ballooning throats in summer nights.
As my canoe slid past the thin beach,
only one crippled toad with a too-long leg
clawed at the sand like a soldier at Dunkirk.
My rustling among cane brakes shook out one or two,
which hopped into the trees without even silent protest.
The lilies twined under the weeds by rotted logs
and stretched their green plates out on the water,
naked and empty.
And my daily reports of infrequent sightings
were greeted joyously on land,
though they never amounted a full dozen.

The ranger suggested ozone and climate change,
cabins encroaching on the shore,
offered news from other lakes of silent summer evenings
or a strange void beneath the stars.
Under those lake weeds they must still be,
hiding and waiting,
tuning their eternal song.

Written in the summer of 1990, in northern Wisconsin, when stories of missing and malformed frogs were first hitting the news.

7 poems to have by heart

We’re halfway through National Poetry month. Over at Poems Out Loud, Maxine Kumin wrote recently about the joys of memorizing poems:

I’ve inflicted this practice on students, requiring them to memorize a poem a week and be prepared to recite it in class. Saying poems aloud is an integral part of the process of understanding, even falling in love with the poem. When they groan I tell them that by the end of the semester they will have solid poems in their memory bank to draw on in isolation when they are taken political prisoner.

While I don’t expect to be a political prisoner any time soon, I do try to keep a couple of poems in my head for those times when I’m having trouble thinking of something to think about. It’s a form of resistance against a media-saturated world where snippets of advertising jingles, foul political rhetoric, technical jargon, and pop songs struggle to colonize our brains.

Here are a few of the poems that I’ve had in my head and heart at one time or another. This is a pretty conservative list: all but one are by dead white males, with the most recently dead having gone to his reward in 1963. There are a couple of reasons for this: poems that rhyme, with a strong meter, are simply the easiest to remember, and rhyme and meter were more in fashion a hundred or more years ago; and these are my “comfort food,” the poetic equivalent of macaroni and cheese, the poems I first encountered and love in part because they were the first. I’ll try to come up with a more contemporary and inclusive list in a day or two.

I’ve sorted them in order of easiest to memorize to most challenging; if you’re new to knowing poems by heart, start at the top and work your way down. And if you’re an old hand at storing poems in the memory bank, let me know what you’ve got rattling around in your own head.

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
It doesn’t rhyme, but it’s short (just 8 characters past Twitter’s limits) and evocative. Can’t you taste those cold, sweet plums?
The Chariot (Because I could not stop for death) by Emily Dickinson
Dickinson wrote in a ballad meter, which is why you can sing many of her poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Gilligan’s Island,” and a thousand other songs. And though that makes her poems easy to remember, don’t be fooled by the sing-songy rhythms; the trick to reading Dickinson effectively is to pay attention to the sly wit and those unsettling dashes, which force pauses in strange places.
On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats
This poem was in the Poems on the Underground series when I lived in London in 1989; on the Tube between South Woodford and Mile End, I often sat under it, and it lodged in my brain. It was, of course, Balboa and not “stout Cortez” who stumbled upon the Pacific; but surely it was John Keats who really discovered Chapman’s Homer.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s sonnets are like miniature dramatic monologues; this one in particular–the “trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries” poem you may have been required to memorize in high school–has a small narrative inside it, and as beautiful an arrangement of words as you’ll find in English.
When I consider how my light is spent by John Milton
Milton’s meters and word order can be surprising and odd, but that’s part of what makes him memorable.
Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Yeats’ poems are often incantatory; listen to him read this poem: he chants it like an old wizard calling up a spell.
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The rhythms in this poem evoke the falcon leaning into the wind and catching an updraft to soar heavenward; you come away from it as breathless as Hopkins must have been to see his subject. The enjambment makes the piece a little tricky to memorize, but if you lean into the cadence you’ll find yourself swept up.

I gCuimhne Ar Lís Ceárnaighe, Blascaodach – In Memory of Elizabeth Kearny, Blasket Islander

According to my logs, someone from Dublin wandered here a couple days ago looking for this particular poem; I’ll take that as a request and offer up a clumsy translation.

I gCuimhne Ar Lís Ceárnaighe, Blascaodach

le Michael Davitt

Tráth bhíodh cártaí ar bord,
Coróin is mugaí tae faoi choinneal
Cois tine ar caorthainn;
Asal amuigh san oíche,
Madraí tamall gan bhia
Is seanbhean dom mharú le Gaolainn.

Tráth bhíodh an chaint tar éis Aifrinn
Is nábh í dhamnaigh faisean
Stróinséirí in aon fhéachaint shearbhasash amháin
Is nár chuir sí Leathanta Breátha
Ó Ollscoil Chorca&iaacute; ina n-áit:
‘An tuairgín’, ‘an coca féir’, ‘an fuaisceán.’

Tráth prátaí is maicréal
Le linn na nuachta i lár an lae
Ba mhinic a fiafraí
Mar nárbh fhlúirsceach a cuid Béarla
Is déarfainn dhera go rabhadar ag marú a chéile
I dtuasceart na hÉireann.

Trá bhí sí ina dealbh
Ag fuinneog bharr an staighre
Ar strae siar amach thar ché
Abhaile chun an oileáin i dtaibhreamh
Is dá dtiocfainn suas de phreib taobh thiar di:
‘O mhuise fán fad’ ort, a chladhaire.’

In Memory of Elizabeth Kearny, Blasket Islander

by Michael Davitt

It was a time of cards at the table,
Crowns and mugs of tea by candlelight
Beside the rowan fire;
Ass out in the night,
Dogs without their meals
And the old woman slaying me with her Irish.

It was a time of talking about the Mass
And forming the habit
Of looking bitterly on strangers
Who spend High Holy Days
At the University of Cork:
‘The smiter,’ ‘the haystack,’ ‘the flustered.’

It was a time of potatoes and mackerels
Wrapped in newspaper in the middle of the day
And often the question was raised
In their bit of English
If there would be more killings
In Northern Ireland.

It was a time of destitution
At the window at the top of the stair
Astray out in the world
At home on the island dreaming
And two coming up from behind us:
‘O indeed you’ve wandered far, you rogue.’

Skylines, Highway

I. Milwaukee

There is a great upreaching to God here,
a thrusting of fingers up to God
who presses his wide black belly
against the steeple tops,
and his belly stretches and strains
like tent canvas over poles
until the fabric tears
and torrents of rainwater puddled above
crash down and make rich mud beneath.

II. Chicago

Blunt buildings are flattened by the sky,
black clouds bursting into fire
over skyscrapers and trainyards,
our eyes are cast on pavement,
afraid of the burning air.

When I was at school in Indiana, I used to drive through Chicago and Milwaukee on my home to the Green Bay area. It was the highway through Milwaukee that gave me my master’s thesis topic: from the ramps that loop through the city you see church steeples sprouting everywhere, thick forests of them. A lot of them are Catholic, but their ethnicity was as important as denomination among Protestants: German, Polish, French, Bohemian, they all have their own churches, and their own style of worship.

Pilgrim Autumn

What is this gray stranger
intruding upon the yellow and green,
muttering into its beard portents
of brown and pale coming?

Autumn in its place is a messenger
bearing tidings of north rolling down,
of long nights and cold moons;
autumn takes winding paths,
a slow highway, and often stops
to rest tired bones and short breath;
a sophist season full of words
but short of air, and brittle,
brittle like the bony leaves on its hands,
brittle like its arguments in my lungs.

But this gray stranger,
hale and strong, striding long,
totters not and makes no dalliance,
its arguments thicker than October.

I think I had just learned the word “sophist” in Philosophy 101, and ought to make use of it someplace.

Wives of God

Old hands clutching veil and book
are lit by the plain gold band
that holds her finger tight to the cross;

memories rattle like so many beads,
thoughts of long vows taken,
of the wedding day, marriage to the infinite;
the wedding night,
sheets unstained and lips unkissed
and children unborn christened
Faith and Patience and Penitent Love.
God’s wife at the window
watching for the bridegroom
lantern in hand
and oil kept near

wisps of brittle gray hair
and skin of incense and beaded wax
long for that gentle caress.

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