22 July 2013

Dorianne Laux [poems out Loud]

from Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men:

Mine Own Phil Levine

                after W. S. Merwin

What he told me, I will tell you

There was a war on

It seemed we had lived through

Too many to name, to number

There was no arrogance about him

No vanity, only the strong backs

Of his words pressed against

The tonnage of a page

His suggestion to me was that hard work

Was the order of each day

When I asked again, he said it again,

pointing it out twice

His Muse, if he had one, was a window

Filled with a brick wall, the left-hand corner

Of his mind, a hand lined with grease

And sweat: literal things

Before I knew him, I was unknown

I drank deeply from his knowledge

A cup he gave me again and again

Filled with water, clear river water

He was never old, and never grew older

Though the days passed and the poems

Marched forth and they were his words

Only, no others were needed

He advised me to wait, to hold true

To my vision, to speak in my own voice

To say the thing straight out

There was the whole day about him

The greatest thing, he said, was presence

To be yourself in your own time, to stand up

That poetry was precision, raw precision

Truth and compassion: genius

I had hardly begun. I asked, How did you begin

He said, I began in a tree, in Lucerne

In a machine shop, in an open field

Start anywhere

He said If you don’t write, it won’t

Get written. No tricks. No magic

About it. He gave me his gold pen

He said What’s mine is yours.

Fog

The first of us must have looked up at the night agog,

so many stars, so much light falling down, the bugs

back then big as fists, so many rivers and ponds clogged

with fish we skewered them on sticks, made a fire, bred dogs

from wolves to keep us warm, safe, pines wrapped in fog

or morning mist, the sheep braying beside us, groggy,

their bellies filled with wet grass, the feral pigs become hogs

in a pen, cloven hooves slathered in mud. We built jagged

fences to keep what we didn't want out, what we did, logs

were dragged through a field by horses, a house rose, mugs

placed on a shelf, a table set with plates. Then the nagging

began: Who left the feedbag in the rain? Who forgot to plug

the hole with a rag? The children grew, little quagmires

we sank into. We fed them, scrubbed them, raised them, rang

a bell for supper, school, for the one who died, the soggy

earth taking her back, the others running unaware, tagging

each other in the dusk, calling out numbers. But still the vague

unrest in the dark looking up at the moon, the old dog wagging

his tick-laden tail, barking for no reason they could tell, zagging

off like an uncle, drunk on busthead whiskey, back into the trees.