Editor's Note: David first appeared in Verse-Virtual in March of 2015, with a fabulous poem “Elegy for Roger Case” which was originally published in The Cortland Review (TCR). In one of life’s inexplicable coincidences, three years after his poem was published there, I joined the editorial team at TCR, where I stayed for several years. Fast forward to 2015, his poem was reprinted in Verse-Virtual, just a few months before I joined the community. I can’t think of a nicer poet to follow around. David and I selected five of his poems that have appeared in this journal, including my personal favorite “Self-Portrait as Lucky Man.” It is the essence of his personality. With permission from David and his wife, Lee, I share here some tough news. In August of this year, David suffered a stroke, with several attendant challenges that he is working through. Both speech and writing are affected, so his bio note is compiled from information published in his many appearances in this journal. He is home, recovering and doing rehab therapies. David, we are holding you in the light. Bio Note: I was a teacher of writing and literature at several schools for thirty-seven years, thirty of them at Ripon College in Wisconsin. Add to that my years as a student, and to my surprise my six years of retirement mark the longest time I’ve spent outside a classroom since I was five years old. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels and differences between creating and teaching poetry. Teachers often say that there’s no better way to learn something than to teach it. Since retiring from the classroom in 2016, I suppose that writing the “Poetic License” columns for Verse-Virtual has been my way to keep learning about this art that I haven’t retired from. Martin Luther famously remarked that if it were the last day of the world, he would still want to plant a tree. I'm pretty sure I would want to write a poem. But as for a subject, it could be anything, from the horrors of aerial bombardment to the mysteries of artistic vocation. Or maybe just the strangeness of looking at my own baby photos. As this pandemic grinds on into its third year, one way I’ve occupied my increased time at home is by revising older unfinished drafts that I find in my journal. Since I have been following a daily writing regimen for many years, I have thousands of these. Often I don’t remember writing them, and most are indeed forgettable. Two of the poems below are from two years ago. I thought them to be worth sharing, once I tidied them up a bit. More of my work is online here: |
My Fashion Sense
I don’t clean up particularly well. In
a three-piece suit I look less like some
Gilded Age card shark and more like Elmer
Fudd. I was Relaxed Fit before it was invented.
Same haircut I had as when I was twelve. Green
and blue—what other colors do you need? OK,
maybe dark gray or navy for funerals. I like
a ball cap with brim out front where it belongs—
blocking the sun’s glare, sure, but mainly to keep
my subtle inner beauty from bleaching away.
As for shirts and pants, nothing you’d notice,
except maybe the size. Ditto the shoes. You won’t
remember mine and I sure won’t notice yours,
much less have an opinion about them. My pockets
still bulge as when I was a boy, yet no longer
with marbles or baseball cards. These days
it’s treats and poop bags for the dog, plus my pills,
of course, and pen and pencil even though I
no longer carry a pocket notebook. My notes may
be virtual, but my ring-tone’s pure 1959,
a rotary-dial blare that makes me miss TV
dinners and black-and-white movies. And
did you know there are a billion Stop signs
in the U.S.A.? I believe I’ve come to a full stop,
then looked both ways, at all of them.
The Comet and the Moving Van
It’s easy to forget the sky here. Once in a while,
glimpsed between the neighbors’ garage
and that big old maple, a slice of sunset
more vivid than gumballs. We go to
the window and point, say how spectacular
it must look over Lake George, where we
are not. And that comet everyone’s talking
about? Well, missed it entirely. But I’ve seen
comets before, and frankly they’re nothing
much. Even in photos this new one seems
smudged, a bright piece of heavenly lint.
Now I’ll have to wait six thousand years
for a chance to catch it again. Not that
it’s vanished. For thousands, maybe
millions of years it’s been circling the sun
that birthed it and which still gives it the only
light it has, a jagged rock careening through
the teeming reaches of the solar system.
Sometimes, driving home at night along
a stretch of interstate without gas stations
or malls, I see the heavens truly for a minute.
Like a song I had forgotten from boyhood
it makes me momentarily glad and sad
in equal measure. Then a long-haul truck
from Ohio blinds me with its high beams,
and the stars blink out again. My exit rises
from the darkness ahead, truck rumbling
past in the opposite lane. I see it is a moving van.
Someone’s whole household rushing into
the future. That family trusting it will see all
its mattresses, books, and mirrors again. So much
can happen on the road between one life and
another. So many exits are the wrong ones,
though they all look alike, with arrows pointing
in both directions at the bottom of the ramp.
Snow Is General
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.
—James Joyce, "The Dead"
I don't need a newspaper or web-page radar map
to know what lifting my shade can tell me
this muffled morning, the streets erased overnight,
with phone poles and Stop signs rising from
the general blur like fence posts in a flood,
and it is a flood, this roil of cloudy expanse
that has closed middle schools, shut down interstates,
and already spread across the map in my mind,
every rest stop, back yard and bean field from here
to Albany, New York, falling on Pizza Huts
in Cleveland, wiping out the parking lot
of a hospital in Erie, covering ice shanties
on Lake Onondaga, drifting doors shut
in a trailer park near Binghamton where
my old friend Juan lives, rising bleary-eyed
from frantic dreams and one too many bourbons
last night to peek out the little porthole-sized window
and watch snow still falling, falling across
triumph and loss equally, falling without fuss
as it did thirty-five years ago high
above the river in New Hampshire, where
we stole dinner trays from the dining hall
and headed out to the golf course at midnight
in the swirl and gust of it, the same storm
truly, as falls down the years now, burying
all the hard words, all the frigid miles
that separated us for good half a lifetime ago,
Juan and I, who once every winter at least
will still go careening wildly down
the long sloping fairway of the fourth hole,
shouting shit to the sky and to each other,
both of us well out of control and spinning
deliriously as the flakes spin and descend
out of the darkness, healing every pothole,
every divot and boot print that defaces
the clean lawn down which we plunge,
with no other thought but the glad tug
of gravity, and no other sound but
our sheer, impossible laughter.
Self-Portrait as Lucky Man
Because I pay my bills on time and often smile when signing checks my credit limit’s been raised again. I’m looking better and better these days in the bathroom mirrors of interstate highway rest stops -- my pallor and road-dazzled eyes lend me the cool intelligence of actors in foreign movies where no one completes a sentence. And though I cannot find a job I’m the kind of man you would think should have no trouble. Yesterday my car stalled at a traffic light in time to avoid being hit by an escaping felon’s truck. Even when I lower my eyes in pain or shyness I’m sure to glimpse five-dollar bills in the gutter. My wife is so kind I do not deserve her, though she swears I do.
Gerard ter Borch (1617 - 1681) "Lady at her Toilette"
(Click image to enlarge)
How shall I not adore them, snoozing right through the Annunciation? They inhabit the outskirts of every importance, sprawl dead center in each oblivious household. They're digging at fleas or snapping at scraps, dozing with noble abandon while a boy bells their tails. Often they present their rumps in the foreground of some martyrdom. What Christ could lean so unconcernedly against a table leg, the feast above continuing? Could the Virgin in her joy match this grace as a hound sagely ponders an upturned turtle? No scholar at his huge book will capture my eye so well as the skinny haunches, the frazzled tails and serene optimism of the least of these mutts, curled in the corners of the world's dazzlement.