July 2017
Dick Allen
rallen285@earthlink.net
rallen285@earthlink.net
My two most recent books are Zen Master Poems (Wisdom / Simon & Schuster, 2016) and This Shadowy Place: Poems (St. Augustine’s Press, 2014). The latter received the New Criterion Poetry Award for books concentrating on traditional poetry forms. I was the Connecticut State Poet Laureate from 2010-2015. Now, my wife and I quietly write poetry by the shores of Thrushwood Lake, in Connecticut, and struggle daily to banish politics from our heads. Website and weekly blog: <http://zenpoemszenphotosdickallen.net>
Author’s Note: In my late 30s, I had what used to be called a “nervous breakdown,” featuring acute agoraphobia and clinical depression. Psychiatrists and psychologists helped me out of it—mainly a psychiatrist who diagnosed disinsulinemia along with stress. Thus, for the rest of my life, no more alcohol (I was drinking eight or more shots of Teacher’s scotch or Jack Daniel’s Black a night and kept going until the picture on the TV set turned double . . . yet I never had a hangover) and no more sucrose in all its variations. Slowly, almost naturally then, my “madness” went away.
The Day After June
I have been to Madness: it is a house
strongly built, not created.
It looks not at all like the House of Usher
and has been freshly painted.
All the others left when I came there,
drove away in carriages with high-rimmed wheels;
in my bedroom was a lopsized painting,
a pencil, a stone, a box of one-inch nails.
I sat down on the stairs and wrote
about the cobwebs flickered in the wind,
the dark replenishment of love,
the sun, the sun, the sun, the sun.
Nothing reached me there, not politics,
nor arms sawed off, not images
of women with soft dresses on, not friends
who knew the cure for curing agonies.
I had a television and I had my scotch,
two dreams—though one was deathly ill,
sufficient cigarettes, an essay book
including Faulkner saying mankind shall prevail.
In the kitchen, there was food enough,
the water faucets and the toilets worked,
a picture window stared into the sea--
Atlantic or Pacific—I don’t remember which.
I remember writing up a storm
and sailing into it, my arms outspread.
Thinking that “a gentleness survives,”
I’d let myself be used and broken wide.
So here I was, in Madness, in the calm
rooms with draperies and wicker chairs.
I saw the Future coming down
into a place without me, without doors.
How did I leave? I left. That’s simply all.
I left some zinnias in the upstairs vase,
did not shut the windows, set the phonograph
low volume and the tone control to bass.
I met the carriage coming though the trees,
the silent driver tipped his stovepipe hat.
The taste of poppy seeds was in my mouth;
the horses whinnied and the long whip cracked.
from Regions With No Proper Names (St. Martin’s Press)
The Day After June
I have been to Madness: it is a house
strongly built, not created.
It looks not at all like the House of Usher
and has been freshly painted.
All the others left when I came there,
drove away in carriages with high-rimmed wheels;
in my bedroom was a lopsized painting,
a pencil, a stone, a box of one-inch nails.
I sat down on the stairs and wrote
about the cobwebs flickered in the wind,
the dark replenishment of love,
the sun, the sun, the sun, the sun.
Nothing reached me there, not politics,
nor arms sawed off, not images
of women with soft dresses on, not friends
who knew the cure for curing agonies.
I had a television and I had my scotch,
two dreams—though one was deathly ill,
sufficient cigarettes, an essay book
including Faulkner saying mankind shall prevail.
In the kitchen, there was food enough,
the water faucets and the toilets worked,
a picture window stared into the sea--
Atlantic or Pacific—I don’t remember which.
I remember writing up a storm
and sailing into it, my arms outspread.
Thinking that “a gentleness survives,”
I’d let myself be used and broken wide.
So here I was, in Madness, in the calm
rooms with draperies and wicker chairs.
I saw the Future coming down
into a place without me, without doors.
How did I leave? I left. That’s simply all.
I left some zinnias in the upstairs vase,
did not shut the windows, set the phonograph
low volume and the tone control to bass.
I met the carriage coming though the trees,
the silent driver tipped his stovepipe hat.
The taste of poppy seeds was in my mouth;
the horses whinnied and the long whip cracked.
from Regions With No Proper Names (St. Martin’s Press)
©2017 Dick Allen
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF