DETOUR AHEAD

                      for Evie Shockley

 

One week alone on campus

spoiled us to everything real in the world

but a heightened camaraderie

quick to reach fever pitch: writers

at conference. We stopped only to eat

(on scheduled beat) and to sleep,

restless skiffs in the boathouse of dreams.

Huddling in clusters, we chatted

into the night about everything

process. (How could so much fun

be so exhausting?) I’ve left it now,

thank god: a few hours out of Raleigh,

mind unspooling the truth-serum

pontification a workshop tends to extract

from its leader. About to fall asleep

inside this numb corridor of I-95—

what the hell—I turn down

the potholed off-ramp

into the trough of Philadelphia.

Just my luck: the Phillies are at home

and I’m stalled, dead center,

inside this stadium parking crush,

bumping forward inch by maddening inch.

The radio announces that if they lose,

the Phils will have accrued 10,000 losses,

some fan’s punched gut of a stat.

I don’t care, wanting only the traffic

to open up—which, when Broad parts

its tributary mouth to kiss the wooden teeth

of this old city, it eventually does.

I’ve got Evans’ Explorations on the deck,

LaFaro’s groove pulse carrying me

through the afternoon: murals and store-

fronts and center-lane parked cars; one

homeless soul pushing the world’s shopping cart

brimming with crushed cans. Two blocks

and I’m in the land of Starbucks and sky-

scrapers. Men in suits, women in pairs

walking fast. There’s enough coffee

in my system to stun-gun an elephant.

There’s a square, a wrong turn and, for a few

lost minutes, one-way streets send me

around in circles. The route looked straight

enough on the map, a simple drive up

into pastoral green; I was hoping

Highway 611 would escort me

up its urban spine into the river-lined,

wheaty heart of rural America.

Rolling down my window to ask

an elderly couple, Am I still on Broad?

Will it take me out of the city?

the man throws me a look that says,

You know where you’re headed, white boy?

Then he nods: Just keep going straight.

I want to tell him that the same year

LaFaro recorded “Detour Ahead,”

with Evans and Motian on drums,

possibly the most synchronized trio ever,

he also played on Ornette’s Free Jazz,

that ultimate firework of an album,

before wrapping his young man’s Firebird

around a tree six months later

on New York State Route 20 outside Geneva,

which is like orchestrating

a game-ending double play

then preparing the five-star meal

that night at some hot new bistro,

sauce pans exploding into mini bonfires

of applause, then, tented by a box

of cardboard, marinated in piss and dirt,

sleeping on a grate passersby agree

to overlook. A friend’s first night in Philly,

he’s driving down Broad in a rental truck,

worried by the conspicuous absence of street-

lights, rundown buildings leaning in

like field oaks, when he comes upon a car

on fire. No one around, no police.

Windows rolled down, he takes in

the burning rubber, the crackling heat

off the pyre. Me, I’m the only white face

in a square mile, a white boy bubbled

by cool jazz, wide awake now, thank you,

absorbing as much as I can, open

to the heat, the city’s talk squabbling

with the music. Then, when the road bends,

I’m in the suburbs, just like that: the long

snake of sprawl, pod mall after pod mall.

First one township then another. Up

in the country now, a green chant

of trees, river dancing in and out of sight,

small bridges popping brief drum solos

under my tires. Pretty soon I’m in

the long, cool embrace of the Delaware Gap,

breeze washing my face, heading

northeast to 84, Evans’ “My Foolish Heart”

subsumed in light: rush of wind; tires whirring

inside a brushed snare; the day suddenly mine,

body resurrected inside moments

framed by the windshield, catching them like fish

in its porous net.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem I HAVE A THEORY ABOUT REFLECTION

I cannot put my mother in the freezer and neither can I store her

in the attic nor in the bank box nor in the canister of sugar In

fact she is calling me now she is ringing in my kitchen in both

bedrooms in the upstairs office I am wearing her like a too-big

coat The coat is made of wire I shoo her away I flap my hands:

go away go away I am a match and every time we speak—and

sometimes when we do not—she strikes me Even in the bend of a

spoon I can see her reaching

The Courtney Holley Literary Award FATHER AS DISTANT BOAT

Far across the lake, on the other shore, the family

takes off their hats, loosens their neckties, unbraids

their hair. There is a man and woman,

a girl and small dog with floppy ears. They board you

through the mist and stink of weeds. You pitch wildly.

 

Not until the shore’s too far gone will they realize

the wood underfoot is rotten soft. Delicately,

like a slowly flooding room, it will dawn

on them: no one ever survives you. At sunset

they’ll leap from your edges like flames.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award EXHALE

I watched the sky and waited. The storm

will come as it comes. Trees in the wind threw

their branches at the evening. Despite the lack

of human voices, or perhaps because of it,

I catalogued noises—

crickets, wind, traffic, drops of water hitting a sink,

hum of appliances, click of the well pump.

 

Air inside the house stilled during the storm,

though wind continued to strike the hillside

and rain washed down the side of the house.

When the full force of the storm finally hit,

and lights flickered once, then died, the stillness

of the house sounded like the rest

between heartbeats, the sudden quiet

when the morning alarm is shut off pre-dawn.

The house still creaked.

It seemed the logs would tear themselves apart.

 

After the storm, I waded through the heavy wet grass

to the center of the field. There wasn’t a rainbow,

though far-spaced raindrops sliced through sunshine.

The field’s middle depression was filled with water,

thick in mud and heat. Mosquitoes will be born there,

will nest in the deep puddles and swarm up in summer air.

The house settled at night, air expanding and contracting,

plaster pulling between logs with each breath.

All night, small noises—just the house, the weather, I thought.

 

In the morning I find the trophy my cat left—

a small creature—a mouse or mole

almost neatly dissected on the rug in front of the cast-iron stove:

body, then head, then organs clustered like whitewashed pebbles.

NOTHING ABOUT YOUR LIFE

Let’s say you’re visiting an old friend at a beach.

It’s October, and excluding the standard update,

 

your friend knows nothing about your life

(this is your vacation). Let’s say beachcombers,

 

wearing light jackets and shorts, are watching you:

wading at first, you let the cold

 

water splash, holding your skirt

higher. At the next wave, you duck under.

 

Visible now: the bra beneath your shirt.

You are the picture of willingness to brave

 

change, the temperature that shocks. Another wave

hits. You are inside, where drowning is possible,

 

the gray sea crashing around you,

fish you can’t see brushing your legs

 

(nobody’s the wiser). From the shore,

you hear your friend’s daughters

 

shouting your name like the name of a new crush.

Everybody likes the person who just heads in.

 

Let’s say they’re cheering as you exit the surf

still too far away for them to see

 

you shivering in the wind-chilled weight of your clothes.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem THE WHALE

There is still a spotlight aimed at a paper moon.

There is still a young woman reading the classics

out loud in a downtown park—

 

though the park lights are out

and the whale is pulled through the streets in the evening

by ten groaning oxen.  We are all being swallowed.

 

Night by night, the avenues empty,

the whale hollows, its gut expands.

But it is warm in here.  There’s plenty to eat.

 

We’re burning the blubber for light

by which to sew tents.  In the tail,

someone is stirring a soup, someone is baking bread.

AMBROSIA

milky blue June and endless afternoons

the worst thing getting smaller every day

               you return in different forms      

immortal        sometimes a bluebird

on a white gutter or the smell of honeysuckle

or gardenia          the contrail over the house

like a seam in the sky

no one asks questions anymore

or mentions the thing that is you

and how it is you vanished           for example

today’s survival depends on the room

where you would have lived

the green paint cracking is a vein in the wall

            like that you are back again

Star Gazer at 102,800 Feet

Before I walked-off the highest step in this world,

I stood inside the gondola of a hot-air balloon,

held space and tasted nebula like pomegranate seeds.

Star-clusters raced away, melting like snow

on blacktop. The taste on my lips was a galaxy’s

that no man had been to before. I wore

a suit pressurized with pure oxygen to

keep me guarded from frostbite, high-winds,

what little I knew of heartbreak in Outerspace.

I couldn’t tell I’d been falling faster than my voice:

in love with my susceptibility to the ground,

in love with the yielding of my wrists to your grip.

Sling them over my head, I said, like a parachute.

I’ll float the rest of the descent back to Earth.

BRIDGE

Let us go out and stand for a while

in the deserted, back-country church

of an old iron bridge—plate, beam

and rusty rivet—a place of light

with lofty rafters framing heaven,

with enormous triangular windows

depicting the world in October,

with brown and yellow willow leaves

drifting onto a trickle of creek

meandering toward us on one side

and slipping away on the other—

lesson, sermon, collection and hymn—

a place through which so many lives

have passed and so many prayers

and hopes have been carried away

that now it rings with silence.

Leaves are falling. Take my hand.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem WARD WORKS HARD TO KEEP YOU HIDDEN

In the mangroves

                of Ward’s memory

you’ve become a little fish—orange

                and flapping your tail fin

as you used to—swaggering down

                Marlboro street, dogwood

fireworks above—back

                before I watched you

slip away for deeper waters. Yes,

                Ward dreams of you always

in these incantations,

                these silly songs: once,

you were a groundhog—brown

                little log rolling

across the lawn; once, your form

                took flight as a moth—

green and shining; you flashed

                like a thrown card

through the forest.

                You’re rarely you

but when you are you are

                the you of years ago,

the you of your million voices,

                always leaving, always

through Ward’s front door:

                a black umbrella blooming

before you and into the rain.

                And it’s here that you became

an absence preceding Ward;

                it’s forever at the spot

of your last leaving where he feels

                he must step through you.

But he can’t. Every day he tries.

                He walks from his house,

and your absence, like a bank

                of cold air, floats

before him. Through it, he appears

                smaller than he is, diminished.

He hopes you never notice.