February 2018
David Graham
grahamd@ripon.edu
grahamd@ripon.edu
A native of Johnstown, NY, I retired in June 2016 after 29 years of teaching writing and literature at Ripon College in Wisconsin. I've published six collections of poetry, including Stutter Monk and 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
Author’s note: This rather old poem of mine has a bit of history. I originally wrote it as Lee and I headed toward our 20th wedding anniversary in 1995, thinking of a time before we were married. Both memory and poem often come to mind when we have a below-zero and snowy New Year’s Eve, as we surely did this year in the Adirondacks. So it’s an old poem reflecting on an even older memory, and referencing a truly ancient Tu Fu lyric. Last June Lee and I celebrated anniversary number 42.
New Year Love
Snow skurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.
--Tu Fu, trans. Kenneth Rexroth
Twenty years since I first read,
on a ten-below New Year's Eve,
the thousand year old complaint of Tu Fu:
I brood on the uselessness of letters.
The house crackled with abiding cold.
I lay in a borrowed bedroom, feeling
keenly the strangeness of its settlings.
Wind at the windows startled me
into hearing the skritch of my own pen.
It was a love poem I labored over,
long lost now, along with dozens more
melted like frost skimming the morning pane.
I put aside that stiff and useless lyric
and paged through Tu Fu until the flurries
in my head quieted to a solemn clarity.
Useless letters: I do not wish
to lecture that boy now, though if I could
I'd nudge him next door, to the bedroom
where his love lay sleeping, and still sleeps now,
two decades later, while snow teases the pane.
New Year Love
Snow skurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.
--Tu Fu, trans. Kenneth Rexroth
Twenty years since I first read,
on a ten-below New Year's Eve,
the thousand year old complaint of Tu Fu:
I brood on the uselessness of letters.
The house crackled with abiding cold.
I lay in a borrowed bedroom, feeling
keenly the strangeness of its settlings.
Wind at the windows startled me
into hearing the skritch of my own pen.
It was a love poem I labored over,
long lost now, along with dozens more
melted like frost skimming the morning pane.
I put aside that stiff and useless lyric
and paged through Tu Fu until the flurries
in my head quieted to a solemn clarity.
Useless letters: I do not wish
to lecture that boy now, though if I could
I'd nudge him next door, to the bedroom
where his love lay sleeping, and still sleeps now,
two decades later, while snow teases the pane.
MAN WITH PINKS -
Jan van Eyck (b.1395-1441)
Ode to the Faces in Renaissance Paintings
I do love the sneers, the dirty-nailed hands
clutching Bibles, five o'clock shadow
faithfully rendered. I believe in stringy hair
no cap can tame: all flesh is grass, etcetera.
And sumptuous gowns, architectural hats,
ermine and tooled leather—all that extravagance
in stark contrast to the skeleton lurking behind
the drapes, or a skull glowing on the table
next to a tipped-over globe. Even Adam
and Eve, stripped to their shame, look like
our next door neighbors as they hustle
away down the path toward our smelly world.
I love it that these folks lust and sweat
and squint in irritation, so unlike rococo saints
in the next gallery, those spirits purged
in advance of all fleshly delight
and earthly burden, their haloed skin
stretched and burnished by no light I've
ever seen. These lords and ladies jowly
and multi-chinned, wrinkled, hawk-nosed
and wary-eyed. As well they should be,
now five centuries and more since death,
stared at and judged and subjected
to monographs disputing even their names.
This man, a butcher from next door
to the painter's studio, sported a halo
and bogus scriptural identity by the time
the first paint dried. But X-ray analysis
was hardly needed to put the lie to such
nonsense: this lined face with its beard stubble
and warm-beer flush was never anything
but one of us, gassy and exasperated
as the long seconds of the pose ticked by.
I seek such faces in the crowds behind
each miracle or martyrdom, faces
from grocery store and bus stop, gawkers
at a house fire, fans in the bleachers, faces
I know and thus can believe, with their
shifty looks and well-lined brows
somehow undissolved by time, not a miracle
but close enough for this believer.
I do love the sneers, the dirty-nailed hands
clutching Bibles, five o'clock shadow
faithfully rendered. I believe in stringy hair
no cap can tame: all flesh is grass, etcetera.
And sumptuous gowns, architectural hats,
ermine and tooled leather—all that extravagance
in stark contrast to the skeleton lurking behind
the drapes, or a skull glowing on the table
next to a tipped-over globe. Even Adam
and Eve, stripped to their shame, look like
our next door neighbors as they hustle
away down the path toward our smelly world.
I love it that these folks lust and sweat
and squint in irritation, so unlike rococo saints
in the next gallery, those spirits purged
in advance of all fleshly delight
and earthly burden, their haloed skin
stretched and burnished by no light I've
ever seen. These lords and ladies jowly
and multi-chinned, wrinkled, hawk-nosed
and wary-eyed. As well they should be,
now five centuries and more since death,
stared at and judged and subjected
to monographs disputing even their names.
This man, a butcher from next door
to the painter's studio, sported a halo
and bogus scriptural identity by the time
the first paint dried. But X-ray analysis
was hardly needed to put the lie to such
nonsense: this lined face with its beard stubble
and warm-beer flush was never anything
but one of us, gassy and exasperated
as the long seconds of the pose ticked by.
I seek such faces in the crowds behind
each miracle or martyrdom, faces
from grocery store and bus stop, gawkers
at a house fire, fans in the bleachers, faces
I know and thus can believe, with their
shifty looks and well-lined brows
somehow undissolved by time, not a miracle
but close enough for this believer.
©2018 David Graham
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