Craig van Rooyen

January 6, 2017

“Meeting the Buddha” by Craig van RooyenPosted by

Craig van Rooyen

MEETING THE BUDDHA

A man hikes a mountain road with his daughter.
She is two and rides his back. Prayer flags make
river stones of their ears. But the poem does not start here.

At some unmarked bend in the sky, the girl
drops a stuffed animal. Nor is this the beginning.
Only family can fathom the scale of this loss.

Others who measure suffering in epidemics and
battlefield casualties understandably take no notice.
Yet for two years the girl has never entered sleep

without the presence of the cotton rabbit.
Mornings, her parents must speak to the stuffed
piece of cloth before they are allowed to address

their daughter. When the girl prays, she mouths
the rabbit’s secret totem name in gratitude.
Needless to say, the man spends all afternoon

tracing and retracing his ascent. And since,
in the local dialect, he does not know the words
for “have you perhaps seen a furry pink bunny?”

he suffers in silence and returns home, hands empty
as last spring’s birds’ nests. Still, the poem has not
started. That night, the girl sleeps for the first time

with the Buddha. (Surely even he secretly believed
some attachments worth the suffering?) And when
she wakens, clutching at the emptiness beside her,

when she rubs a phantom ear between
her thumb and finger, when she cannot find the words
for the nothing in her center, then and only then,

the poem finally starts—the beginning of some
essential song she will spend her life trying
to turn to praise. Think of the echoing sea in

lightning whelk shells; the rattle of a summer gourd
in winter. Not to mention the tiny flutes
made from the hollow bones of songbirds.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016

[download audio]

__________

Craig van Rooyen: “The fact is, we lose stuff all the time. If you’re lucky, it’s just your wallet. Tomorrow it could be your dog. At some point, it will be your mother. One of the jobs of a poet is to make music out of loss. That last sentence sounds pretty and is kind of philosophical, which is why it would never work in a poem. It’s also probably offensive to someone who has just experienced a big loss. A good poem, on the other hand, makes a sound that readers recognize as their own. I write to come closer to making that sound.”

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August 2, 2016

“Ode to a Nightingale in a Payload” by Craig van RooyenPosted by

Craig van Rooyen

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE IN A PAYLOAD

There are nights when the ringing
in my ears swells like a power planer
chewing through a piece of hard ash,
gnashing it to wood chips. These regrets.
These sins. On those nights
I beg the moon to share its silence, beg
for the chance to cover my mind’s ears
with its glowing quiet. Now, I hear
Google’s launched a rover called
MoonArk that will broadcast
a three-minute-and-twenty-second loop
of nightingale song as the rover rolls endlessly
across the surface of the moon.
Such extravagance. It makes me want
to love all men in lab coats everywhere.
My neighbor Luke started hearing voices
at 25. When he’s off his meds, the mini receiver
in his tooth lets him talk to Leon Panetta.
They had to remove him from a train, once,
because he pulled a knife.
His parents took him to the hospital.
The hardest part, he told me later,
was knowing he belonged there.
Some nights, when Luke can’t stop shooting
ground squirrels with his father’s .22,
his mom comes out on the porch and
takes away the gun and reads to him
from the Encyclopedia Britannica about the moon—
how it’s really just a rock, a piece of earth
that escaped into the silence of space—
how it has no atmosphere, no voice.
And sometimes I’ll sit with him
when the moon is full and neither of us can sleep.
He likes to imagine a place utterly without sound.
“Not even God’s voice. Not even that.”
So I don’t tell him about MoonArk
and the nightingale up there. But I think
it might help. Longing for silence is a hard way
to be in the world. They say a song
never dies completely.
It just gets more and more faint
as the sound waves flatten out and separate
across the black sea of endlessness.
I imagine birdsong reaching us from the moon,
our inner ears not delicate enough to hear it—
that still small voice, one note
every hour or so—the lilting, tenuous melody
as MoonArk crunches on
through the light-absorbing dust
at the bottom of the Ocean of Storms.

—Poets Respond
August 2, 2016

[download audio]

__________

Craig van Rooyen: “I was fascinated to read in an article by Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker this week, that a privately-funded group with seed-money from Google will launch a moon rover named ‘MoonArk’ later this year. One of the cultural relics included on the MoonArk is a song: a three-minute-and-twenty-second recording of a nightingale, made in Bremen, Germany, in 1913, by Karl Reich. Engineers describe the MoonArk and its 6-ounce payload as ‘a deep human gift and gesture for the Moon.’ Sometimes human beings can still surprise and move me with their extravagance.”

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April 16, 2015

“Waiting in Vain” by Craig van RooyenPosted by

Craig van Rooyen

WAITING IN VAIN

When my daughter asked if it was God
on my T-shirt, I lied and said yes,
though it was really Bob Marley. So what?
He could pass. The natty halo. The prophetic eyes.
The righteous look of someone who might be
crucified or go into exile at any time.
And who can blame her for wanting
a picture of God? We all crave one.
Just a snapshot to keep in the wallet
next to the kids: Yep, this is my Big Guy.
See his burning bush of dreads,
the smoldering spliff between his fingers?
He’s quite a footballer, but his biggest talent
is saving the world. Instead, all we get
are glimpses. Like that night in the VW
with Marley in the cassette deck and Mimi
in my lap, wiggling to the walking bass;
double skank guitar stroking up the goosebump
back-beat, open hi-hat off-beat underneath
the choppy organ shuffle, call and response,
call and response, the lub dub one-drop
liturgy, riddim, riddim, all about
da pulsing riddim pushin’ in on quarter
note four four like that, like that, baby
like that. Moonlight pouring
through the open window and the smell
of milkweed on her breath. Now that
was a look across the river Jordan,
as the prophets would say.
I could tell my daughter that was the night
she got her start. Then I’d have to tell her
the minor chord stuff—the weeping and
the wailing stuff. How we didn’t want
her. How we stayed awake plotting
her demise. How we sat in a clinic waiting
room hiding our young faces in old magazines,
the purgatory of Fox News on the overhead TV.
How we couldn’t get our feet to move
when the nurse called Mimi’s name.
How Mantovani’s Orchestra mutilated
“Let It Be” as the elevator descended
like the angel Gabriel, moving us
from one life to another while we looked
away from each other’s eyes.
I’d have to tell her about the time spent
walking circles in the desert, trying to build
an altar at every godforsaken turn in the marriage,
looking for a sign from God in every date night
fortune cookie. How we waited in line
at the liquor store for cigarettes and lotto tickets;
waited in line at church for a cracker on the tongue;
waited in line at the movies to find a story
in the dark. But then I’d get to the part about her.
How she arrived like a familiar four on the floor
bass line—a remembered backbeat in our chests.
The same cross stick snare. The dominant chord
in minor form. How her hunger and wailing
woke us up. How our hunger and wailing
led us back. How the same voice keeps calling
from the wilderness, calling, Idowanna, idowanna
idowanna, idowanna, idowanna wait in vain.

—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner

__________

Craig van Rooyen: “I write poetry for the same reason a frog croaks—I want to be a rock star, but I can’t sing. It’s an uncomfortable situation. ‘Waiting in Vain’ is about redemption. It wasn’t until I fully committed to Marley as Word-become-flesh that the sound of the poem began to emerge. That’s when the speaker finds his voice and tries to follow it to the meaning beneath the music. Religious people may find this blasphemous, but for a frog or a poet the process feels very sacred. In fact, it feels downright redemptive.”

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