ALL RESPONSES |
| --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
My neighbor, Victoria Schwing, is 98 years old. She still remembers a few words of German from her parents, named Weber, who ran a tidy farm southwest of Mankato and raised four children. Victoria's husband, Jason Schwing, died 32 years ago, but she has been well cared for by her two sons and daughter, who now have children and grandchildren of their own. There are Schwings living in or near Truman, Mankato, Inver Grove Heights, Shakopee, and Phoenix, Arizona; all of them related.
Victoria was married twice before she met Jason. She attended the University of Minnesota, Ball State University, and taught art history at St. Cloud State University. She moved back to Mankato when she retired, and remained there. Her children visit her often, but gardening is what keeps her going. She continues to plant seeds, pull weeds, and harvest the results of her hard work. There are plenty of relatives and neighbors to help with chores she may no longer feel up to, such as tilling and raking. Several years ago, I volunteered to till her sizable garden, with the understanding that I would be allowed to use her heavy, ancient five-horsepower tiller to break up my garden as well. This works out well for us. She is generally a very kind woman, but she takes her gardening very seriously. I found that out the first time I went to work for her, on a clear day in May.
She insisted that I bolt the outer tines onto the tiller and double-till the entire garden. The soil had to be powder perfect and level for planting. She stood there, arms crossed, calling my attention to spots that seemed a little lumpy, or rows that weren't straight enough. I wondered how her husbands felt, pushing the tiller, never getting it quite right, going around and around again and again until hearing “Oh, I guess that'll do.” After all, I had only come over to help her out.
And I still do. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
They lived in the first house
on the edge of town
up the bank of Shagawa
where the river
went around the bend
I never saw any of them
except Rusty
who was older than I was
He was a swimmer like me
They said he had a sister
behind those dark window shades
She’d had a baby out of wedlock
so her parents gave it away
They said she lost her mind
begging for that baby
and she never left that house again
I was too polite to ask questions
so it’s a mystery to this day
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
In response to Memory of Terrorism
there are people born since
who can't know, wouldn't know
except for the news
and what they are told
by their parents
on birthdays
alone after the candles are
blown out, every last present opened.
there will be a sigh,
a sadness,
smoke and crumbs still filling
the air,
a limp partially deflated
balloon hovering over the table
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
a person lived here once i see him
in a picture from 1968 he has wild hair
his arms are flailing in air
i read his third grade report card “Buddy
is regressing” it reads
i hand it to him ask if he wants
to keep it, his mother must have kept it
to prove she had a son once
his eyes say yes though
his mouth says “pitch it” along with his stepfather’s
WWII burial flag
i place the report card on the table next
to his cigarettes, the twice filled ashtray
and a yellow bag of M & M’s
there are two empty tuna cans
this morning when i return, they weren’t there
yesterday the bag of food i left is full
his mother’s name was Polly she rose
and died in 1989, no mention of where
she’s buried even though i ask it might
be in the walls, i can tell Buddy loved,
misses his mother
i threw out his leather coat yesterday, spiders
were living in the pockets, enjoying themselves
in his leather pockets
Buddy tells me he is fucking mad
about the coat, tells me the .38 revolver
in the pocket is now gone and what
is he going to do when strangers come
in the night for his bones
i tell Buddy about the spiders, how they lived
in his leather coat pockets
Buddy says to hell with you
I’m gunless now & another sword
of civilization has cut my trust
with him
i tell myself i will keep trying:
i leave another sandwich, a bag of yellow
cellophane potato chips
the next morning a possum is in Buddy’s
closet trying to live, the food i left still
on the dark counter
i throw out the possum, he of skinny tail,
by the tail, its red eyes screaming at me
with hate, with the rest of Buddy’s things:
glassware, tax returns from 1983, screwdrivers,
a jar of mayonnaise
everything goes into the dumpster, sitting like
a tar pit in his driveway, everything Buddy has
ever known will soon be sealed within its pitch:
toxic, highly-flammable, a perfect color |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Really, someone should give name
to the kind of sorrow
of feet creaking wooden floors,
sounding out empty rooms.
This is the dwelling
where I first discovered poetry
in the dark recesses
of this gloomy closet.
Within this room once mine
light and shadow first
tumbled together in tryst,
an affair of everyday life
and uncured dreams.
But I didn’t expect it
to take this much time
or to have to say goodbye
to waning daylight pooling
on the floor as if playing dead.
This house will be put on the market
as soon as we clear it out.
But I should have come here drunk,
seen this place in the way a stranger
would walk these echoing rooms,
noticing what needs to be repaired
and pointing out selling features.
I should have ignored this closet
stacked with photos, letters, diplomas,
paid bills starting from 1960’s up,
and all that we gave to her:
handmade valentines/birthday cards
scrawled in immature penmanship,
reminders that long before anyone else
our mother was the center of our world.
Yes, it should just be mere junk,
not items that meant something:
these childish cave-man paintings,
these hieroglyphs crudely recording in story
the language of my family.
Then it shouldn’t have mattered,
all that rose up with the dust
in the sticky heat of a closed up room,
sorting out our lives
like a mathematical equation
into separate piles for myself
and each absent sibling,
piles knee-deep in history
already being rewritten as myth
down at my feet.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
She said she walked away due to dorm strain
that resulted in irreconcilable differences
and
to
make
matters
worse
the drain in the back closet
that was once a bathroom
backed up and caused chaos throughout the two-story
to
include
blamingshamingstaining
so much so that the elders upstairs
prayed
for
it
to
rain
upon which the sky opened to let the storm drain.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Atop the hill out back
past the hidden, fenced road
with posted signs promising
to prosecute trespassers
and rumored to lead to a sanitarium
(where crazy people were sent)
A large estate, of unknown history,
spread out
its two-storied U-shaped
wing of guest rooms
surrounding a one-time pool
now filled with only leaves and brush --
the detritus of unheeding time
Past the crumbling pool
to the main house that fronted it
I followed the boys
who too easily
found ingress
Though emptied and hollow
its interiors insinuated somehow
that we were violating sacred dust
as if stumbling over bones
in an upturned grave.
What more,
after all,
is death,
it whispered
but a space
that life
has abandoned?
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
From The Lido at Dawn
I've seen my Adriatic face
gods, temples, blood dripping from altars
Dante, riding the ferry to Lido
I found Lord Byron's footsteps
in the sand of centuries
walking on salty water
The reflections of popes
cross over the sea
ghosts, singing arias to thee
a better death
would I have never known
but for Giotto, in the teeth
of pigeons |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
There are times when it’s best
to get out of a house and into
the belly of another whale.
Its comforts won’t require--
sparse though they may be--
any forgiveness later on.
Since there’s nothing inside,
the interior is at peace
knowing where everything is.
Restlessness fades to sleep.
All the tumult outside roils
in its bleakness without your eye.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Under a day moon
trapped in blue time
the raspberries' color
foretold the sunset
that would hang
cherished in the sky
as the berries themselves
picked with haste
eaten with prudence
and swallowed by night
the berries stain hands
as birthmarks
and their seeds
hide between molars
till they
wiggle
themselves
out
like poems.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Subtle aspects of past grandeur
stretch out long on the uncut lawn
like pieces of glass once gallantly
existing inside
past peace creeps in strange angles
of deception
shadows proliferate,
pass through the half-light
they look for something blue, thin
and sharp to the touch.
Fondly we shall recall the games played
in the backyard
the nightly cries of joy spreading
like wings down the roof top
followed by cold winters
immeasurable frequencies of an after-life
come to both scorn and warn
a home’s inhabitants.
Today the remains walk a distinct walk
of loss and imposed silence
befitting an immortal.
Beauty is met only with squalor
breath with exhalations
of last gasped sentiments
for what was a mystery shall remain so;
the ripples on the pond speak to it
but no one chose to look very hard
and those who escaped moved on
in search of something
more suitable to their modern tastes. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
In the late December dark
sunlight is only visible
slanted and delicate
on the southward facing
walls of houses
latticed by slumbering trees
tentative light the same color
as smoke that rises from chimneys
then is forced by cold air to slink
away through low branches
as if the outside is remembering
a Tuscan kind of inside
color of pollen and wings
a step into golden flagstone
and yellow rooms
where a woman in love lives
with the canvases she painted
in steamy places
Hong Kong, Bhutan, Cambodia
her inside life
that thing within the thing
that changes but does not change.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Buddy lives there, stoned
& flaccid, near the buried
clams for which people search
he took a tranquilizer (twice
and sat in his chair, the only
piece of furniture to move
for thirteen hours (he told me
night folks came to him last
night to pilfer his possessions
last night he was awake all night
until the sun rescued his (paranoia
from another night not unlike last night
when the night folks came (or so he said
this all occurred while the spiders hung
from his glass chandelier like strange thoughts
and possums celebrated living (in his walls
Buddy tells me he sometimes talks to them
like brothers he never had, not one picture
is in the house like no one (has lived there
except Buddy and his short term memory |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
This remains:
the fog rolls up the channel
from whale-belly Whitefish
curtain lifts
to reveal a small fishing boat
I hear its motor whine before
I see
my young sons wave from it
their small crooked arms turn
like gulls wings
I am one with the water fearing
shore watchers in my genes
grandmothers
I watch the land reach out
for them and watch them squinting
come back to me
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
My father
would have loved to own
one of those stately, turreted houses
They remind me of stranded ships I had seen
while sailing with him.
They seem much out of place
here, on the Minnesota prairie,
or the abandoned one,
on the bluff above the city,
and its garden, where you and I
snuck in once to do some necking
yet afraid to do more.
I suppose
living in one might have helped him
to ease the pain of having had to
give up the sea.
After the war ended
he refused to travel anywhere
even remotely near the coast,
and I can see why.
The time
you and I stopped, in Massachusets,
at some small town
with many houses like that,
some with widow's walks,
and its harbor
abandoned now, just like that house,
I could still smell, above the salt,
the dried fish, the ropes and the sea-worn timber.
I too have dreamed of owning
a house like that,
for I then could
stand by his grave and tell him
I bought it for him,
but those who own them are unwilling
to sell until restoration becomes impossible.
I am still hoping, but
the first thing I would do is
tear down that god-damned garage.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Time
glides through our abodes, spills
over the highest sills, crawls
through the finest chinks-—no,
not the unexpected flow
of air in autumn,
of sleepless nights
causing shivers-–time,
the transparent angel moves
through the rooms of,
past and over,
around and near
that unguarded house, that castle
which is the heart.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
one voice,
shot into the dark
one voice,
set the
first stone
in a curve
one voice,
added a window,
staked a claim
upon this land
&
over time,
the dirt and
stone came to
sag into one
another
a level of comfort
not known by
living things
over time,
relationships
ignored by
humans whose
needs
bound and warp
like a funhouse
mirror
one voice,
generations
removed,
now an echo
in a forlorn
hallway,
seen and
ignored,
everydayness
settles in.
in the quiet,
before the storm,
the mortar
mumbles
of neglect
& returning
to the earth. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
no mail is delivered in the four days i am there
no phone calls
no hot water, no ice is in the house,
all the windows are covered in spider
shadows
Buddy pleads for his Lazy Boy,
like his life, to be placed
in the emptied space
of his living room
for a day and a half
i wash his glassware in the street,
the only things of real value
Buddy owns,
watching neighbors come and go
like October moths
banging into cold night
porch lights
at the core there’s something to be said
for living ugly,
for even a dried vine will hold on
to its grapes
ask anyone who’s nearly finished
with something they’ve never really wanted to do
in the first place |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
.jpg)
