Do I have anything new or useful to say about writing (and reading) poems these days? I don’t know about useful, but new, yes. I used to try to write poems that moved rather quickly and sideways, hoping to surprise, to take off guard, myself included. Lately that sort of poem has come to strike me as a bit vacant, given what the world keeps tossing up all on its own, before imagination even begins. And I find myself increasingly put off by the rage for clever non sequitur, witty and evasive, what Tony Hoagland has recently described as the “skittery” poem.

So I’m taking the chance these days of writing more narrative poems, less metaphorical, with actual subjects that sometimes even require research! What they lose in speed I figure they maybe gain back in range and purpose. At least that’s what I tell myself now at age sixty-five.

The ten new poems represented here are part of a new collection titled Running into War, a group of eight short stories by Lynne Hanley and twenty-four poems of my own, the result of a conversation we didn’t even know we were having as writers until there it was, right in front of us.





CEMETERY HILL


First you need the dog
Hauling you forward the leash stretched taut
Nose thrust deep in every scent he crosses

And some irritable neighbor’s complaint
To wind up in the bone yard on a regular basis
Where you’ll have to look the other way

When he squats beside the rug of a soon-to-be funeral
Or tripods against a shrub and hits the headstone instead
Because the dog is your permission he is your key

That lets you enter the gate with no higher motive
Than to walk the lively dog
And take in all that’s happened since

Last evening when the whitewashed Celtic cross
Still wore the red bandanna neck-high
Replaced this morning by a blue

With a lolling yellow rose in a tube
And a paper napkin tucked behind
Doug See U on the other side Love Danny

Such a lot of living going on among the stones
Pansies then marigolds then potted chrysanthemums
Easter eggs on strings pinwheels clam shells

Above Larry Recore a lovely glass moose
As the dog heads over the next rise
To the old part where history spools backward and downhill

Here lies Thomas Cole d 1870
22 Yrs a Slave 58 Yrs Free
With a veteran’s flag-standard planted in the moss

Do the math then imagine what set him free
And farther downhill yet
As the border collie looks back to see what’s keeping us

The granite slab above Freedom L
37 Yrs 4 Mos 1 Day
Back when you counted your good luck to the very last minute

If good is the right word
Because lately we’ve considered how best to end it
OK we’re just trying to get used to the thought

And that’s why you need the dog





THE UNSUSPECTING SPARROW

Crisscrossing Ohio we were bound to hit Akron
So why not you said take in Kent State as well

Where four plaques marking the spot each one fell
Lay beneath cars in the newly paved parking lot

When we asked the first two people we saw
Whether anyone had erected an actual memorial

The first shrugged and said she didn’t know
But the second pointed to a hedge and said I think over there

Where we discovered four slabs of blank pink granite
Surrounded by 58,175 daffodils for the dead in Vietnam

Meaning one for each US soldier
No wonder the brochure is such a murky affair

Available in a box with a clear plastic lid
Composed in 1999 twenty-nine years later

Just imagine the pressure its several authors felt
From the governor for instance from the National Guard

On Friday evening warm weather and drinking
And indignation over the bombing of Cambodia

Resulted in a crowd
Tear gas was traded for rocks and epithets

And no one gave the order to fire it claimed
Although 64 shots in 13 seconds

Rang out on tape they thought their lives threatened
You were reading to me later in the car

Scowling and fuming when a sparrow beside the road
Flustered up from the shoulder’s dust and gravel

Struck the right front bumper flopped around a little
In the rear-view mirror then came to rest

Like a puff pastry in the opposite lane
With an eighteen-wheeler bearing down on it

And you turned in your seat and murmured very softly
Oh children you’re just a shot away

WAKING IN HAVANA 2000


Where blue is so blue it puts even Hockney to shame
Where green is six layers deep the last five peeling
Where warships landed hungrily in waves
So much for being island

Where the very day we arrive the posters go up
Devuelvan Elian gripping a chain-link fence
The coverage that evening repeating five times
The same footage to make the demonstration seem endless

Where I wake up pinch me then wake up for real
Because Carmen says don’t be a tourist go way in
Doorways fully eighteen feet tall
Every bar with its bandaged hero of the revolution

Where cigarettes for $1.50 cost $2.40 later the same day
Where Plaza Vieja once an auction-ring for slaves
Sports a museum of modern art at its northeast corner
Bold words on burlap beneath flying cranes

And where the cemetery called Colon wakes me up for good
City of avenues mansions obelisks names
Cut in brass plaques distinguishing pro from anti
In that edgy embrace death favors here

Ever since the generation of Jose Marti
Whose charming birthplace sits three blocks away
From the bar Two Brothers where judging by the walls
Hemingway loved to pose for gravid portraits

Toasting himself glass aloft
Until even he wasn’t welcome to stay
Just two years left to go but that’s another story
While Carmen of an age all promise lies ahead

Could have packed a suitcase at any later date
The boats still leaving the sea sky-blue
But chose to remain ironic to the end
Persuaded everyone deserves better in this life amen


- for Carmen Gonzalez Diaz de Villegas (1941-2002)





LIBERIAN WOMEN’S ARTILLERY BRIGADE


By all accounts fearsome
If captured you have the choice
Of facing their tribunal
Or mucking their horses

Lynne murmuring in her sleep Just treat me like a horse
When I ask in the morning what it meant
She frowns for a moment then smiles Just try it
If men had to handle

Horses you’d have
Different hands

SORTER OF SPOILS


It was easier if you avoided their faces
Concentrating on what they held in their hands
Monday it was jewelry Tuesday bound books
Wednesday silverware and so on down
To musical instruments and Persian carpets
In return for which I stamped a form
Slid it across the counter and put whatever in its bin

What did they imagine would happen next
I preferred myself not to think beyond the boxes
Overcoats blankets pillows pillowcases
Lace curtains here lace tablecloths there
Fumigated dry-cleaned mended folded
Onto shelves that nearly reached the ceiling
All the worldly goods they had amassed

Which brought the officers’ wives by to look
And choose so you had to sort things neatly
Not just fur coats but mink beaver leopard
Raccoon muskrat fox weasel
My fingers grown so deft
They could separate four grades of silk
Egyptian from common cotton

Until I was summoned to the inner room
To explain why the degree of elaboration
Was constantly increasing could it be
My aim was subversion slow the process to a halt
Undermine the entire Third Reich
While all I’d done was follow orders to the letter
And discover I had a certain knack

SHE COULD HAVE DANCED ALL NIGHT


Last night I saw my love in a canoe
She doesn’t like my using her name
With Julio Antonio Mella I knew
By the red tip of his Havana and the bullet hole through his head

They were circling Back Lake the moon racing dark clouds
As music drifted from the brand-new ballroom
Out over the water that Saturday evening
Late July or August ‘41

When she was two years short of born and he twelve dead
Buried without the lovely brown fedora
Which she later saw in Cuba behind glass
With the corresponding hole above the brim

But back to Back Lake where you’d never know war
Is just around the corner this steamy summer night
In 1941 with the swamp all drained
Trees felled and milled the tall timbers hoisted

By three Hawes brothers all of them draft-age
On top of ooze no one had ever owned
With their father and grandfather who dreamed
A line of log cabins and a red pine ballroom

“Resourceful” as people used to put it
On a lake as far north in New Hampshire as it gets
Where time itself is a kind of dream
Floating nearly outside time altogether

Which is why Back Lake is perfect for my view
Of the canoe and its occupants who just now
Are conversing rather more excitedly than ever
Conversing because she is never at a loss for words

And because anything more would risk my growing jealous
As I try to overhear what they’re talking about
Something about an apple followed by a very good question
Who would come here to dance and from how far

Followed by the biggest question of all
Why does revolutionary fervor skip a generation
To which he answers based on personal experience
Assassination works

Gunned down in Mexico City for fomenting revolt
In Cuba due again according to his math
Around 1960 which pleases her no end
To be able to confirm and report this one lasted

Yes that’s really the way they talk
They care that deeply about it and increasingly each other
The result of my giving her her heart’s desire
She can hardly look away his face so chiseled

And European she’s suddenly ashamed of herself
And listens sideways to a far-off song
As Julio Antonio falls silent as well
Skipping his last days in Mexico

Especially the part about Tina
Which she knows already and doesn’t mind
Gliding in a canoe with her revolutionary hero
On a night out of time on Back Lake with a moon

SAYS THE PENGUIN TO THE MOOSE


Let’s both open our mouths wide
As we can and see who is funnier
At the next table I open mine too
And all three of us start laughing

Let’s play dress-up and choose our own clothes
The moose returns in a white tux
With a pink hankie tucked in the breast pocket
Then the penguin arrives in a French musketeer’s

Cloak with high boots and a gleaming saber
Which he plunges suddenly into the moose’s heart
Who falls sideways out of his chair
Gurgling and choking

When I awoke the second of three dawns
Was peaching the horizon halfway up a tree trunk
And we were in 29 Palms once more
Stuck between Joshua Tree desert to the south

To the north the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center
Which weeks ago at home we heard on TV
Is where troops bound for Iraq train and leave
And return in a body bag or still standing tall

Outside the inn’s breakfast room loomed two giant SUVs
One from Idaho the other Discover Virginia
Six Guardsmen in fatigues seated at two tables
Eating muffins in silence before heading toward the gate

Behind which they were about to disappear
(No Civilians Beyond This Point said the sign when we drove out)
Six boys the oldest barely a legal drinker
Two black two brown two pathetic with pimples

Good luck to you said a housekeeper on her way out the door
Not here yet not here but just over there
Beyond the dry bare ridge on the desert floor
A life-size Iraqi village tank-tracks choppers

Where they practice every form of live fire
Our arsenal has to offer as well as door to door
Don’t ask me how I know you don’t know any more
These days who is listening

Until we’re prepared to do there what we’ve learned to do here
The two of us turning turning back turning toward
Joshua Tree National Park instead
Where rainfall last fall has turned late spring

Into hiking trails flanked by inconceivable flowers
Scarlet saucers yellow purses sky-blue stars orange thorns
Such splendor in starkness I wince at my knack
For forgetting what lies just over there

CLIMBING MOUNT ORIENT


You had on those shapeless knee-length shorts
And striped socks halfway up to here
Crossing Amethyst Brook named by Emily the famous

When out of the trailhead steps Virginia Woolf
Whom you recognize by the long linen skirt
(Lately my eyes have been playing tricks on me)

And chiseled beak and wide straw hat
Who when you ask replies in exasperation
She had thought to get seriously lost in thought

For tonight’s lecture at that all-male college
When out from behind two tall oaks
Jump teenagers in camo complete with rifles

Firing paintballs at each other pretending death
Which frightened and angered her although guns themselves
Had just been in her mind on Emily’s account

My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun –-
In corners – especially the corners part
Woolf’s first best lesson in staying on-scene

And she would tell her so if only they crossed paths
So when Dickinson emerges from a stand of hemlock
In that famous white dress her mouth still puckered

Cradling a basket lined with blue cloth
Without missing a beat Woolf tells her so
And asks politely about the basket

To which Dickinson instantly replies
Gathering Indian pipe that likes the floor under hemlock
Ground to a powder it jostles my Visions

And you see I’m not the Queen Recluse at all
As that brutal man calls me behind my back
I just prefer my own to the company of others

To which Woolf responds thank you very much
Now I know tonight what the college boys will hear
In corners – corners – and hiding behind trees





MEMORIALIZE THIS


We couldn’t reach Georgetown itself
By subway anyway
Because Georgetown had said no
To a Metro stop DC had offered
Because guess why how to put it you know
As soon as you’re there the chichi shops
The crusty hotels and the range of faces
All the way from pink to grey
Retired Jesuits in golf carts plying the sidewalks

But we weren’t there yet thus didn’t know
Because before walking the straight-line route
Along P Street right to my daughter’s dorm room
From a not-cheap B&B on Dupont Circle
We had turned instead toward the street named U
Where the map said some memorial stood
(Or lay or sat or sprawled or rose)
To the African American Civil War dead
And we wanted to see it

Cross T toward U and suddenly it dawns
What the answer to the question you don’t yet know
Is as if someone had taken a very keen knife
And divided dark from light heavy time from easy
Give the ghetto back its pride the Committee for Public Art
Undoubtedly uttered in some back room
And there on the corner of 10th and U
Yes standing also kneeling in rows
The names of 209,000 plus Union dead

All black except for their commanding (dead) officers
While rising nearly ten feet tall
Before an even higher curved bronze shell
Three soldiers bursting forward out
Toward the action sunlight flickering on their foreheads
You can feel the sculptor’s fingers on their skulls
Pressing them into life African-American himself
As huddled around back in the shell’s curled palm
Stand the soon-to-be widow and two expectant children

Dedicated reads the plaque in 1999
Years after the stone Vietnam wall
Despite 209 to 57 thousand lost
(Always ours never theirs) if you follow the branching thought
Once I wrote poems said to be “Marked
By a wild inventiveness and a weird heightened hope”
Now I’ve lost it
Let’s take in the unblossoming Mall instead
And the dead presidents and the wall if we can find it

Don’t worry Georgetown won’t vanish
The perimeter of “safety” widening ever out
Barricades now a good half mile from the White House
Side streets bristling with rottweilers and machine guns
Circling helicopters whap-whapping overhead
And for some time we didn’t see
Sinking slowly at our feet into the ground
The memorial designed by a Chinese-American
Woman to boot (oh the patriotic gore that followed)

So unimposing we weren’t sure
What it meant to be saying
Until we inched down the crowded ramp
To its eventual bottom
And the names which had begun one name at a time
At ground level then kept on building (or falling)
Formed columns twelve feet above our heads
Until our eyes could no more take them in
Than bear their weight black granite for bones

After which it was time to complete the loop
To Georgetown on foot to meet my daughter
Who explained her new boyfriend was away
Or she would otherwise introduce us
Just two months shy of twenty-seven
When his Guard contract would have expired
Redeployed (deep obscenity of language)
To guess where
Where safety is beyond my sorry imagination


(first draft completed Memorial Day 2007)





THE WAR OF 1812 (Sackets Harbor)


When the quarterly I worked for for free
For twenty-odd years for a lifetime subscription
Arrived this morning and its cover read
The Messy Self A Special Issue

With an epigraph from Nietzsche inside
“One must still have chaos in oneself
To be able to give birth
To a dancing star”

My heart sank into my shoes
(Which beats by an inch a star that dances
In regard to unhinged language)
Today’s paper lying on the kitchen table

A photo of patrons at an outdoor café
(The reporter lists proscuitto green grapes chevre)
In the jet-set’s necklace-by-the-sea
Looking resolutely unaffected

While two miles south sleek missiles go bang
A mangled bridge a headless t-shirt and jeans
Whistling me back to the brew pub last week
Overlooking the St Lawrence River on tap

War of 1812 Amber on coasters that claim
History Never Tasted So Good
Just a block from the battleground-turned-park
Complete with self-guiding tour no thank you

On the deck still with our sweating pints
Watching a baby gull’s webbed feet beneath the waves
Maneuver like nothing not even our canoe
Messy selves what explains the current attraction

When the world itself no you describe it your way
Unless by messy they mean that row of clowns
Back on their barstools in upper Wisconsin
At 9 Mile Tavern and Canoe Rentals

Where one guy turned to another and smirked
Hey Billy how about that babe in Oshkosh you like
Was down to Oshkosh myself the other night
Woke up to something pressing against my back

Looked over my shoulder her teeth beside the lamp
A glass eye rolling in circles in the ashtray
And when I glanced in the mirror on my way to pee
I was wearing her wig

As though the messy self were a giddy joke
Which it is and the use of imagination
Too if its outcome is a star that dances
As opposed to imagining the unimaginable

Which gets more unimaginable every time I try
Like the posh yachts slipping in and out of the bay
When a freighter suddenly noses into the frame
Shrinking the rest to toys in a bathtub

(Gone the radiant non-sequiturs the peek-a-boo the charm)
Or like the young filmmaker in a Beirut window
“There was the sea and the sky
Then a boat came into view

Then another and another”
In the long-distance of his lens
Forming all one exodus
Now that the unimaginable had arrived

While lounging in the landscape of 1812
The freighter having vanished the human scale restored
I drink to the one and only war
(Which eliminates Cuba Korea you name it

If the word invade still means anything at all)
In which we invaded and were invaded back
Fair is fair tit for tat
Back when war was the mess and up close