ENVIRONMENTAL

Unfortunately rather than grass there was white paste
Or rather than an orange tiger lily there was white white out,
And a lime tree or an outfield? No instead there was white medicine
In a normal tube which over and over had to refill
Itself to cover the whole major league outfield
And on nice brown and black checked sheets with brown pillowcases
There were without mercy each night snow and white glue mixed
With snow in my spot in the bed.
In the morning, we fully awake, the glue was fifty percent
Of the snow that was shoveled from the walk. Each day such snow
Was waiting outside and of each day the first five hours
I shoveled. Tell me yours.

OK. The pets whose names you know well were dead, all fourteen,
The ones who are six years old and the ones who are fifty-two,
Or they were all lost, we could not find out which it was. The people
We know, or knew (and that’s the hard part)
Were also hopefully lost rather than decayed
With no consciousness, and we searched for the creatures and humans
Every waking minute in the endless cities then went to sleep
And as we slept we hoped they were hopelessly lost not dead.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

S-PLAN

Bacon Academy
Colchester, CT
October 31st, 2001

1.

Shortly after 9/11,
a boy who had been stealing pick-up trucks
from a local dealership
and hiding them in the woods
so he could sell them later,
decided to fashion a fake bomb
and place it on the loading dock
outside the cafeteria
on Halloween morning.

We, of course, were all still
emotionally threadbare
and sent into a frazzle.

The first order of the morning
was to stop the buses
before they got into the parking lot,
and not let the kids into the school.

As each top-heavy yellow clunker
pulled its plume of blue smoke into the drive,
we stopped it and tried to explain
what was going on,
without freaking out the vampires,
witches, monsters, and ghosts,
12 buses,
each filled with high school kids
all being something else for the day.

We sent the buses to the elementary school,
where all 800 ghouls
would hang out in the tiny gym
until the danger had passed.

Take a moment here to imagine that.

2.

I thought of my own youth—
different time, same fear—
the old days of “duck and cover,”
air raid horn baying at the spring sky,
and all of us either balled up under our desks,
or standing, boy girl boy girl
against the cool, cool
painted cinder block walls
in the shadowy hallways of St. Mary’s,
the perfume of lilacs
in the breeze that breathed there,

or before me, in England,
the shelters in underground tubes,
railway arches, subways,
and my Auntie Elsie,
staring in dread at the ceiling
in the shelter in her cellar.

And later,
after the Russians did their bomb,
and Yuri Gagarin swirled around in our sky,
General Foods and General Mills
sold dried war rations,
and the nuclear protection suit was a hot item.

Wall Streeters even claimed
that the bomb shelter business
would gross billions in the coming years,
if there were any.
And every day
the radio sizzled warnings
that a shoddy, homemade shelter
would get you broiled “to a crisp”
or squeezed “like grapefruit,”
as in American neighborhoods
people built “wine cellars,”
or else the contractors worked
under cover of night.

I cried into our couch
for 14 days straight in 1962,

and I didn’t even really know why
beyond the fact that all the adults
seemed quiet and scared,
and I understood the word annihilation,
and saw, over and over again,
the documentary where the house
gets blown away sideways
by a speeding cloud of nuclear winter.

But the bomb never fell,
even though everyone,
including me,
kept fear in their hearts,
and spent years
practicing for the end,

3.

and it’s the same now.

When the kids returned to school
later that morning,
we tried to resume a
typical Halloween
in a typical American high school,
the kids dressed to kill,
the sugar-high higher
because they were back on familiar ground.
But the party didn’t last long.

Soon a voice filled with urgency
squawked over the perpetual loudspeaker
that we needed to immediately
go into the “S-plan.”

Ignore all fire alarms and bells.

Students in the hallway
should run to the nearest classroom.

Teachers lock your classroom door.
Do not let ANYONE in.

If students ask to be let in,
do not let them in.
Direct them to the office.
Do not let them in.

Cover the windows
with the black paper
that you’ve put aside
for this occasion.

Huddle all your students
into the corner,
away from the windows and doors.

Do not use the school phone
or your cell phone.

Stay there until you receive instructions.

And we did. For two hours,
me and the bum,
the Ninja Turtle,
the Queen of Hearts,
fear in the eyes behind the masks,
fear in the tears of the ballerina.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

Read by Author

folding tables and threatened
species like lopsided turtles and misused
harness bulls. I wasn’t as speedy as I claimed to be
or as galled by those without

a purpose in life. I sold three-day
vacations to resorts that existed
only in your mind. I liked to watch the breeze
take leafy boughs in hand.

The limits to man’s ability
to reach the stars were no problem for me.
I sank my nose in foreign papers
looking for tiny lots I might build

my dream house on. I said I owned
hotels and racks for smoking arctic char.
I claimed to notice something burning
in the kitchen. A leaf seemed at times to urge

a change in plans. Probably the winds
were coming from the east. I gave away
my watch and told the time by the degradation
of building materials. I spelled the stuporized.

The sun, an old friend, eased
onto the brickyard wall. I sensed an era
drawing to a close. Something told me,
so I said, to gather up my things. Smoothed-

over ideas, frets, a capacity for change
unremarked on by others, a boarding house
menu I used for a text, my bindle, palpebral musings,
a burial suit of lights

and a jar of brandied apricots—all these
I said I’d send a van back for and never did.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

AND THE WEST WAS NOT SO FAR AWAY
by Brad McDuffie

Des Hymnagistes Press
P.O. Box 41271
Lafayette, LA 70504
ISBN 978-0-9822693-2-9
2009, 64 pp., $12.00
http://deshymnagistes.blogspot.com

Maybe it’s a truism but it’s not untrue: American poetry has never been much known for its poetic “movements,” or for what the French call “schools” of poets as though they were talking about schools of fish. I think Borges once elaborated on this, and he decided that he envied us.

On the one hand, this freedom might indeed feel liberating. After all, “movements” are often paradoxically stagnant. On the other hand, it means a reader never knows what a new poet is going to do with the language. Picking up a first book of poems—especially, perhaps, a first book of poems from a small press—is a shot in the dark, and sometimes real violence seems to be done. In this case, however, the surprise is a pleasant one.

Brad McDuffie is an unusually American poet and his first book, And the West Was Not So Far Away, speaks with the inflections of Robert Lowell and Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey and (perhaps, most of all) the Methodist Hymnal. But these poems don’t simply borrow voices; they blend them into something new. McDuffie’s voice is truly contemporary, but its high lyrical, high lonesome style is not a style we’ve come to expect.

So I could easily make a long list of the tired “poetical” subjects that these poems wonderfully do not engage. I could point out, for instance, that McDuffie does not use the word “revenant,” nor does he write poems about Sigmund Freud or overuse Latin words derived from botany, nor does he have many poems that take place in bed. But it’s probably better to offer some positive form of praise.

Better to say, maybe, that McDuffie’s lyricism drives this book into open country—into places that I haven’t heard from in a long time. He isn’t afraid of the American language or its deeply personal music, its weird mixture of the popular, the vulgar, and the allusively abstruse. The opening lines of “Cross-Examination” sound like an old song coming on the car radio late at night:

When it comes to sadness, darling, plead
no contest, I know God’s jealous heart by heart.
I memorize the starless nights like scripture
reciting their blank

verses to other lovers in visions…

While the poem “Gethsemane,” with its wonderful opening landscape colored by memory and desire, give a touch of Dylan Thomas to a Hudson River scene:

The lights on the suspension of the mid-Hudson
Bridge mottle like candles on the black waters
Below.

Throughout, And the West Was Not So Far Away is tapped into the spirit of place, ranging from the Hudson Valley to the French Mediterranean. Many of the poems take place as a starting point for metaphysical meditation, and leave the reader somewhere new and strange at poem’s end. Even the book’s cover (among other pleasures, the West is attractively designed) makes a collage of a Mediterranean Village and what looks to be a New England beach.

It won’t surprise anyone that “the West” is a major motif of the book. Though McDuffie’s “West” appears in unlikely places—as much in the sound of Emmylou Harris’s voice as in a certain slant of light as in “the lunar plains of Nevada.” In

“A Meditation on My First Tour de France,” we find the West very much abroad:

In Saintes-Maries we carry you into the sea
and you dive deep beneath the Old Church
keeping watch on the horizon,
the gold waters shimmering in the West,
the relic of the setting…

McDuffie’s finest poems move like this. We seem to be watching the daily world with a calm eye when suddenly a metaphysical trap is sprung. First the ordinary:

Driving in grey silence down Hudson, we fol-
low you on through to Sundown, rivers attend-
ing our way up Rt. 28A.

And then a sudden lyrical blast:

               My lost
mariner of time needles over the neck
of the West in every direction, cracked
like crystal over

the mainspring.

This is “On Through to Sundown” (one of the book’s finest poems), but such flashes of recondite lyric brilliance are everywhere, as in an image of “Sir Walter Raleigh weighing smoke on scales” or, in a poem for Ansel Adams, a mountain slope shadowed “like a woman before she’s known.”

The West is filled with such daily intimacies. Many poems feature the names of friends and family members, idiosyncratic people and places. Usually, I would find this irritating, but somehow it works wonders for McDuffie. “Visiting Coney Island,” for example, ends with a moving picture of the poet’s children (and a subtle self-portrait):

On the edges the serpentine Cyclone haunts
The silent frame, paused as before the dead
Fall of the coaster clacking down the tracks
And the screams of delight cast over the sands

Where Anna and Jonah make small pillars
And I chase the screaming gulls.

With eyes to the sea one might imagine
                                                         things never change

As the book progresses (assuming you read it in some vaguely linear order), the reader gets to know these names, gets to know the poet’s corner of the world, and the poet’s idea of the West.

Yet even if McDuffie seems to favor flights into high Romanticism—into the overtly well-wrought metaphysical turn of phrase—the poems that I have so far found myself rereading and retaining are the simplest ones. Particularly, “Staining the Adirondack Chairs in Late July,” a great mid-summer Hudson Valley poem. To quote in full:

My children are spondees
running through the fresh cuts
of our front lawn. As July sets
with the sun, I am on one knee
staining the Adirondack chairs
under the oak tree, just off Phillies Bridge.
The days are endless with summer,
but thunder clouds line up beyond Shawangunk,
a horizon of shadows beyond the Catskills.
Switching knees, I stain all visible
angles. Glossing a stranger’s initials
knifed into the wood, their voices call
as those in day-dreams, bewaring the distant rumbles.
Rain and fumes mince black clouds with westwinds.

Certain passages in “Grace Rituals,” too, about the death of a friend’s father, are gripping in their exact simplicity:

In his notebook your father
marked the weekly catch
with a hand steadied in resistance:

A simple “—” for nothing,
and an even simpler notation
of size and weight

for the days on which a trout would rise.

Or, in another passage of ordinary exactness, a passage in a poem called “Fidelity”:

At dawn we watched the blue jays at the feeder
making clothesline dives from the Holt’s white crape-myrtle
tree, winged ribbons

they hide in the silver stars of the live oak.

In such sketches of small things, I find McDuffie is at his best. They’re the sort of poems that bring us back to the world without being merely humdrum records of the poet’s everyday life.

Rather, with Warren and Lowell and James Dickey as models, McDuffie seems to see poetry as a way of engaging in language with what it is to be alive—a sentiment I don’t think the poet would shy away from. I might say: It’s all so intimate, but without the slither of intimacy. Or I might quote the poet Donald Junkins, who writes of him, “Brad McDuffie has the knack of getting real emotion into his poems because he is willing to be intimate, and his words come out of the intimacy which is beyond emotion…it is a huge and life-sustaining thing.”

____________

Alex Andriesse is a translator and a poet. He currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

06.25.00 – PHISH – ALLTEL PAVILION, NC

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

BERLIOZ

Now let us praise Hector Berlioz
who found himself one night composing
a symphony as he slept who woke
lucid remembering the entire
first movement in A minor he could
have sat down at his desk and begun
transcribing as during the first hours
after a great destruction we see
in detail each small thing that was lost
as after my house went up in flames
carrying with them all of my poems
I sat on a mattress on a cold
floor and began to reconstruct them
found I could remember all of them
if only the night were long enough
but Berlioz willed himself not to
pick up his pen his wife was ill if
he wrote the first notes he knew himself
too well for months nothing would exist
except poured silver he would not write
the articles that sustained them how
would he pay for her medicine how
would he buy food he willed himself not
to pick up the pen yet the next night
the symphony visited him once
more it called him to service it called
him to adoration it took all
his strength to lie back down until he
finally fell asleep and the spurned
muse left him just as I fell asleep
laying my head on my journal and
the poems I had not transcribed left me
with only my child and my mate and
the spring where I knelt and chopped through ice
to draw the blessing of water let
us praise Berlioz for his unsung
symphony of medicine and bread

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

One day the iceman came no more.
Neither did the coalman with his telescopic chute.
Nor the junkman with his horse and cart,
his dust and sweat-streaked face.
Not even the milkman’s xylophone
of bottles could be heard jangling
through the magenta streets of dawn.

That day the wide-eyed band of women
in calico aprons, pockets bulging with
clothespins, were swept away to a buzzing
world where everything came with its own
complication of cord. But these women of faith
knew what to do. They dove in and took refuge
in Houdini’s secret, hiding a small brass key
in their mouths.

And they did what they’d always done,
took everyone in—the plug-in refrigerator
and washing machine, a menagerie of electric
can openers, ice-crushers, and coffee mills.
And the Edsel of home appliances:
the sit-down steam press that could snatch
a shirt from your hands, send it back
an origami waffle with melted buttons.

It was Fat Tuesday in the history of man’s
imagination, a festival of dazzling inventions,
each one out-doing the next. The bobby pin
bowed to the Spoolie, the Spoolie
to the electric roller. The wood-sided
station wagon sidled up, wired
with a radio and its very own garage.

And the suburbs—that great yawn of grass
with its pastel stutter of houses, all
stocked with friendly products: Hamburger
Helper, Aunt Jemima, a detergent
called Cheer, a dish soap named Joy.
Turquoise linoleum nests, feathered
with vim and verve where they delivered
us, girls who grew into flowers, ceding

ourselves to the wind. They watched
in dismay as we pulled up those tender
roots and headed out for the likes of India
or Back to the Land. They couldn’t understand
why we left our humming dowries behind—
plug-in frying pans, carving knives, and brooms.

But on our way out they drew near,
as mothers do, and slipped us the keys—
the small brass keys they’d kept all the while
in their mouths, but never used.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

Read by Tim