September 2015
A native of Johnstown, NY, I've lived in Ripon, WI for the past 28 years, where I teach literature and writing at Ripon College. I've published six collections of poetry, including Stutter Monkand Second Wind; I also co-edited (with Kate Sontag) the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Confession. Essays, reviews, and individual poems have appeared widely, both in print and online. In recent years I've spent nearly as much time on photography as poetry. A gallery of my work is online here: http://instagram.com/doctorjazz
Meeting Tomas Tranströmer
A scruffy bunch of student poets crowds the kitchen
of the huge patron's huge house. Parquet floors
and lithographed walls: surely I am not
the only wise guy thinking, "you live well. The slum
must be inside you." Yet I cluster with the others
around the generous table with its burgundy jugs
and finger food, floating on our tippy raft
of words. I sidle carefully closer
to the skinny, sad-faced poet. Hard to say
what I even want on such occasions—the signature
on the flyleaf being nothing, dust unto dust—
unless it is, for one unwrapped moment,
to be seen by such eyes. Yes, hooting
at unfunny jokes and elbowing my way past
the turnstile of absurdity, still I know
any reprieve from darkness will be brief.
When I reach the great poet's side at last
I am drunk enough to risk a serious jest.
"These parties," I mutter, lifting my eyebrows
to the throng, "—after a while you must feel
as if you are standing inside one of
your own poems." I no longer know what,
if anything, I meant by that. The look he fastens
upon me is real, though, a leonine silence
and wary withholding that's all I could have asked for.
Fluent in English, perhaps he does not
speak Idiot very comfortably. He sails swiftly away
down the river of my admiration, this man
younger then than I am now, but before he does
I shove my precious copy of Windows & Stones
at him, translations I have underlined and followed
around the house like a puppy more midnights
than he could know or care. When I get home,
head throbbing with more than wine, I discover
he has scrawled, right below my ex libris, "But
the book was actually written by Tomas Tranströmer."
A scruffy bunch of student poets crowds the kitchen
of the huge patron's huge house. Parquet floors
and lithographed walls: surely I am not
the only wise guy thinking, "you live well. The slum
must be inside you." Yet I cluster with the others
around the generous table with its burgundy jugs
and finger food, floating on our tippy raft
of words. I sidle carefully closer
to the skinny, sad-faced poet. Hard to say
what I even want on such occasions—the signature
on the flyleaf being nothing, dust unto dust—
unless it is, for one unwrapped moment,
to be seen by such eyes. Yes, hooting
at unfunny jokes and elbowing my way past
the turnstile of absurdity, still I know
any reprieve from darkness will be brief.
When I reach the great poet's side at last
I am drunk enough to risk a serious jest.
"These parties," I mutter, lifting my eyebrows
to the throng, "—after a while you must feel
as if you are standing inside one of
your own poems." I no longer know what,
if anything, I meant by that. The look he fastens
upon me is real, though, a leonine silence
and wary withholding that's all I could have asked for.
Fluent in English, perhaps he does not
speak Idiot very comfortably. He sails swiftly away
down the river of my admiration, this man
younger then than I am now, but before he does
I shove my precious copy of Windows & Stones
at him, translations I have underlined and followed
around the house like a puppy more midnights
than he could know or care. When I get home,
head throbbing with more than wine, I discover
he has scrawled, right below my ex libris, "But
the book was actually written by Tomas Tranströmer."
©2015 David Graham