Poetry |

“Trophy,” “Pond,” “Oh” & “Fare Thee Well”

Trophy

 

 

I believed a secret

keyhole might be found

in each & every city

 

And somewhere

were the keys to the city —

kept in a cluttered kitchen drawer,

not quite forgotten

but somehow gone missing

 

Many times now

I’ve seen myself the way

my mother saw me

 

“No disguises

in dreams,” that’s what she

would say

 

I sit at my desk

and complicate all

that has happened since

my mother looked

at my face & told me

that one day I’d be glad

I’d inherited her skin —

until, after a while,

something out there

or something here

inside me says, no,

you should write —

and that’s

what I do

 

What a thought — it

sounds almost childish, so

simple, as if the sun

had given itself

a trophy when a blue jay

flew from a tree,

and the bird

was the trophy itself

 

Without disguise

the stag appeared

one evening, as if

it had earned the right

only because of how cold & green

the ocean is as it flows

through the late summer meadow

a moment or at most two

for the grasses parted

by a North Atlantic wind

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Pond

 

 

You aren’t the first to feel these things —

or are you? would you like to have been?

you whose loneliness became you

if you thought yourself the first

would it change you? (I bet that

you would like to be changed) humbled

by being chosen reborn

would you even know you’d been

reborn (I think you would) after all

you’d woken helmetless last night

again & again before the sun returned

the sun as usual bristling a little then

don’t deny the gift of happiness don’t

think it’s meaningless even if it fades

it would still take a paintbrush made

entirely of the thickest of eyelashes

to get it on canvas that face of yours

as it emerged a minute ago warming up

without warning near the end of June

a kind of 19th century face

with high Gallic cheekbones & watchful eyes

under a straw hat wide-brimmed

its tan crown banded by black ribbon

your eyes shaded by the brim

you studied the effects then of the drink

taken in long sips from that hip flask

a tree carries as it walks through winter & spring

early spring slow sips imperceptible

wild traceries of green at the tips of

poplars & willows their elixirs

turn the water to fluorescent algae

near the shore now that the thousands of

polliwogs & minnows feed on it too

the lip of the pond overfull

after last night’s torrent someone’s cheap

wristwatch left on a canvas lawn chair

in a netted cup-holder the sweat-dark

strap evidence of the body missing

from this scene but loved for its pulse

the watch still ticking after all that

lightning rain & thunder so many hours

have to pass for all the faces it takes

so long to see hooded within a face

loneliness is such a dark cloak

it doesn’t reveal itself so easily

it wavers there below you

on the sandy bottom as you float

under rushing clouds almost

dead center of the pond your shadow

a cloak dark & cold as your shame

warm & dark as your freedom.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Oh

 

How long? How long

will it be that I

get to feel this, this golden orb

pinging in my heart?

— a sleepless 3 a.m.

as right & wrong as air

now that the bug-spray mingles there

with Bach. So much

vibrato in the viola now

that the overwhelmed note

has to hide in my head,

bumping lightly

against some thoughts, nudging

one: you know

how I’d like to lick the spot

on your neck where you so often

rub that scent I love? —

well, maybe you don’t —

but if I were dying

yours would be the last face

I would want at the end

to see. The archer

elegant & serene in posture & stretch pants

who brings gifts both

kind & painful when she reminds you

you have a heart.

In the dark

I had been trying for a while to get at it,

what it meant

when you wrote. Maybe

I could be the hero of the story

however it went. I am not

the hero of the story. I’m only a man who

a year ago woke from a dream

and heard a voice, a voice asking

the one thing he needed to be asked:

“what makes you think you

can’t be touched in your life?”

I don’t mean to say

that I think it was your voice

I heard, only it is

so much like the things you do say

that I want to believe

it must have been you.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Fare Thee Well

 

 

Moss the carpet

underfoot makes a quiet shrine

beneath the birches & pines,

 

spectral trees, shadowy

as a biotech with no need

for venture cash —

 

the day demands an adolescent earth

to climb down to

on a ladder of blue spruce branches,

 

a high school landscape: woken on a chartered

bus in backwoods Vermont

coming home from a ski trip to Quebec,

 

I heard the young Jesuit

chaperones playing ‘Age of Aquarius’

over the PA —

 

the sitar sound of a wild river

more beneficial at other moments

of my education.

 

What I wanted from women back then

wasn’t always fucking exactly

but some belonging made of looks —

 

everything gets reified

by memories reshaped with the body

in mind,

 

an old shirt you could make paper from.

Her chin dimple quivering

when she adjusted a bra strap,

 

the lanky, pick-up game

precision of her walking over frozen slush

in knee-high boots. I feel kind of

 

Tecumseh Valley myself,

like Townes Van Zandt as a note

that reads ‘fare thee well’

 

in a dead working girl’s hand.

Everything, each incident, turns into a life,

whether wished for or not —

 

eight sugars in her prized cup of coffee —

remember our happiness? so simple?

sundered by a pint bottle of rye —

 

“Take your girlfriend

to get help,” the priest said. “Me,” she said,

“I’m just waiting for you

 

to check-out.” Get with the work

a goat’s heart knows best

in order to escape the bardo —

 

that’s what someone else

would counsel later, neither enemy

nor ally.

Contributor
David Rivard

David Rivard‘s seventh book of poetry, Some of You Will Know, will appear in October from Arrowsmith. His work has won the PEN/New England Prize in poetry, the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and he has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Among his other honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.  He lives on the coast of Maine.

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