Category: Poetry

Cavity

Andy1 Comment

I.

I’ll say that there are Men.
First.
Just that.
There are Men.

And that men are magnificent.

I’ll say that there are violent men.
Magnificent, violent men.
Violence is the golden blood.
And violence is the fetid brine
where it turns the earth to mud.

And I’ll say that the most violent thing is
Not the man
Not the knife
Not the heart
Not the guts
Not the blood or the brine.

That the most violent thing
is the violence it takes
to strip
to rend
to gnash
to gut
to burn
the man away.

II.

I’ll say that men are with women.
And these women are mothers.
And that mothers are magnificent.

And that if mama don’t get her way
she finds her way
any way.
Because she’s capable of the biggest things –
including violence.
Because that child won’t feed itself.
That fish won’t gut itself.
But mama’s violence doesn’t
crunch and zipper
down the fish’s scales.

Mama’s violence is an ancient intent –
A bloodless lunge that leaves no hole.

III

I’ll say that these women are with men
And these men are fathers
and that fathers are magnificent.

And if papa don’t get his way
he gives his way
any way.
That tree won’t chop itself.

But papa’s violence isn’t neat.
It leaves great gashes of sap
and of tarry black blood
and a hole so big
a child can crawl through it.

IV.

the built world screams at Papa
because his way is violent.

But papa with hard hands in the world he built
says nothing back.
He just shoulders the axe.
Because violence knows
and violence gives way
and violence rests.

And rest endures.

V.

And because endurance is violent
He is violent
to people who are his boys
so that they will not forget how when duty calls them.

And because violence endures
He endures
with people who are his girls
so that they will not forget how when duty calls them.

VI.

And he is with woman and she is with him
and they have ways that are found
and ways that are given
and ways that are taken.
All ways endure.

VII.

The most violent thing
is the fish
because the fish will gut the man
if he feels embarrassed
for the fish when he
looks at its guts.

The fish with its rent heart
will not understand this.
The fish with its rent heart
and piles of cold spilled guts
will wonder what’s wrong with him.

The fish will ask:

Have you never eaten?
Has your mother never told you
about all of the pain?
All of the violence it took
to be eaten alive by you?
At least you have the heart to kill me first.

VIII.

And I’ll say that men
have spoken to the fish
about the fish’s guts.

And I’ll say that men
have spoken to the tree
about the tree’s bones.

And I’ll say that men
have spoken to the earth
about the earth’s blood.

And I’ll say that men
have sung to the child
about the child’s supper.

And the fish and the tree and the earth
have answered the men.

the fish has offered its guts.
the tree has offered its bones.
the earth has offered its blood.

the child –
the child eats

IX.

And the little boys drag
– with their bleeding hands
and hard fathers – the heavy axe.

And the little girls pack
– with their tender hands
and hard mothers – the crimson gauze.

the men give thanks
the women water the stone.

Because endurance cradles
violence at its breast
and woos it to its rest.

Mock Bottom

Andy2 Comments

What does the floor look like
I wonder
In a place called Rock Bottom?

Does it shine like it shone
in the barracks from the hypnotic drone
of a heavy steel machine and
one or two sleepy soldiers
who cannot but buff and wax
until their standing orders have
a suitable place for standing on?

Does it shine like it shines
at these meetings where the dank black
brew drips and cakes in brown outlines
on a floor whose sheen lacks sharpness
the way it never would if they
hired an old soldier to do the floors
here in the basement of
St. Catherine’s at night?

Is it just an unclever joke?

A place they’ve named Rock Bottom
comically
because there isn’t
a rock to break your teeth on
within an empty bottle’s throw
of anywhere you might be laying?

Is it a floor as flat and fleet and forever
as the dull map of regret
charted in the lineless low-relief
of a place with no noteworthy terrain?
A map of an inch of desert
scaled out in such vast despondence
that the little key in the corner reads
(if you can see it)
1 grain = your whole wasted life.

Or are there really rocks
in the rubble down there – jagged
but germane to the rank poetics
from a beggar’s caustic maw.

Are there really rocks down there
where they tell me time and again
over and over
that I’m in The Right Place?

I remember some rocks, sure.
But I don’t remember a bottom.

I don’t know anyone
who remembers seeing anywhere
beneath the garbage
and the softening teeth
and the shameful things done
for a bottle of any-damn-thing,
seeing anywhere beneath that rancid humiliation
anything that looked like a bottom.

I’m no expert but I think that
my Right Place –
if I have such a thing –
has much better lighting.

And this dead-humming coffee
that I swear would come
crawling up my arm
if I dangled a curious finger in there
wouldn’t make it through the door –
much less onto the floor –
of anyplace that I would call

for me

right.

Dark Halo

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People like to say that you can conquer your fears, if you can just manage to face them. I disagree. The more you face your fear, the more you details you collect about what there is to be afraid of. The more certain you become. I had thirty chances – thirty-five, I always forget about jump school – to get over my fear of heights. All I got over was my interest in jumping out of airplanes. I’d do it again if I had to. If I had to.

The trained eye watches that video and sees a few fellas who are going to have a hell of a time getting their affairs in order before the ground comes up to meet them.

There’s no point in trying to avoid the ground, it’s everywhere. Still, your brain tells your body to find a way around it. Your brain screams at you to not let that meeting happen. You are told to look for the treetops and estimate your distance to the ground, but it can’t rightly be done. Like a drunk, you have no idea, really, when you’re going to hit bottom. Hopping off a chair or a platform 5 or 6 feet off the ground gives you the impression that you understand your position relative to it, but it’s not really true. It’s really just something you don’t care about, because you know you’re safe. You aren’t falling long enough to care about how fast it’s happening. From under a parachute, the closer you get to the ground the more you realize that you have no idea – no way of knowing – just how fast you are falling. They tell you it’s twenty-eight feet per second, and that’s a neat thing to say, but screaming it at the ground, in the dark, isn’t going to make things any easier. Besides, you’re only supposed to make noise out there if you are hurt.

You’ve been stuffed in this tiny airplane for the last hour, like tobacco in a cigarette, sweating. Sixty pounds on your lap, forty on your back. Your legs are woven into the legs of the man across from you, because the bird just wasn’t built for this. When it shakes, the dust of all the world’s time zones fall from the exposed wires and tubes. It has about two decades worth of flight hours, and has been doing this since Vietnam. The skin’s so thin that you think you can see right through it, all the way to home and your mom and that day when you thought you needed this, somehow. Even if she didn’t love you then, she loves you in this memory, because this memory wants you to go back. The old plane creaks and settles when it’s sitting still, and then it really lurches and lifts you into the sky.

The noise. Jesus, the noise. A little red light and the commands you echo not because you can hear the jumpmaster shout them, but because you know where and when they belong, even if you haven’t figured that out for yourself yet. Even if figuring out where and when you belong is really why you’re here. The noise, the light, the commands. And the games. You deflect and you distract. Your mind is screaming at you to not do this. To stop. You convince yourself for a moment that you are tough. Then your mind does it again: Stop. You convince yourself for a moment that you are crazy. Then your mind does it again: Stop. You convince yourself that you are screwed. This time your mind doesn’t rebuke.

The light goes from red to green, and finally your instincts are jolted by all your years and you know what to do when lights turn green. Your mind tries one more time: STOP.

There’s a dozen ways to screw this up, and your only comfort comes from knowing that almost none of them will kill you. That’s left to God, so you’d better hope He was there for pre-jump. It’s so dark and loud and your feet are shuffling and really you’re just doing what the other people are doing and all you know for sure is that if you buck this trend you will ruin the night for everyone behind you.

Then it’s silent but for the numbers in your head. Counting because they told you it was important, that if you made it to five there was something going wrong and you had better pull that reserve. But you’re not really doing the counting. They’re just shapes in your mind, a slide show with your eyelids stapled open. Just terror and symbols occupying the same ether, no causality. Somehow you always knew that if you made it to five you would probably make it all the way to nine or eleven or however many it would take before nothing else will take.

Somewhere in there came the yank. When the straps pull tight it is the only burning in the groin you will ever love. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Counting – six, seven…you can stop that now. The chute is open, the night is dead. You might or might not hear the quad props of a fifty year-old airplane trailing off somewhere. Maybe the moon is out and the varied terrain below you is somewhat visible. Varied. It’s mostly flat, and it’s all hard as trigonometry. Maybe the moon is gone and everything is black, except that matronly silk vestment above you, which is the darkest green Creation has ever seen. A perfect circle cut into the nothing overhead. You have a dark halo.

But twenty-eight feet per second isn’t interested in what’s above you.

It’s Friday!

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It’s Friday! It’s Friday!
The school children shout.
It’s Friday! It’s Friday!
But they won’t let us out!

They dash us through spelling
and draw up the art.
Then they stir up the science
(our least favorite part).

The next problem is math
(which they don’t even know),
before digging up history,
and – what? We can go?

Shrinking

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Like the house you grew up in
and the tree that you climbed.
Like the hill that you’d sled down
and the fossils you’d find.

Like the tadpoles you hunted
Like the snakes that you caught
Like the gun that your friend had
Like the birds that you shot

Like the calls from your parents
in the forts that you built.
Like the food you devoured
in the silence you killed.

Like the fists of your brother
Like the hands of your mom
Like the silence from father
Like he knew all along.

Like the speed of your heart
from your crush on that girl.
Like the dreams in your head
from the size of the world

Like the eyes of the teachers
Like the chalk on the board
Like the bell ending recess
Like the run left unscored

Like the patience of mother
let you know you were wrong.
Like the fear of your father
let you know you belonged.

Like the length of the days.
Like the depth of the night.
Like the hope and the dread.
Like the end was in sight.

Like the way looking back
is like slow-going blind.
Like the way it’s all shrinking
from the falling behind.

Bone Oil

Andy3 Comments

Lotsa gold left in the land,
Lotsa blue left in the sky.
My face within your tender hands.
Your fingers and my eyes.

Song as soft as baby feet.
The white-faced dog is home.
Oil rises from the street
The color of our bones.

Lotsa green left in the trees,
Lotsa glitter in the stream.
Trace the place behind your knees
Taste your shoulder’s cream.

Song as soft as baby feet.
The white-faced dog is home.
Oil rises from the street
The color’s in our bones.

Lotsa green beneath the snow
Lotsa blue behind the cloud.
My face within your tender hands
For as long as we’re allowed.

Who Gets the Sun

Andy4 Comments

I smoked cigarettes on the roof every morning
and stared across the China sea.
I had to turn far
so the thin hungry monsters of The North
would not haunt even the corner of my eye.

When I was bold and looked right at it
(the only way to kill a nightmare)
it didn’t look like hell from where I sat.
Open nature and scattered homes
where they say nobody actually lived.
Hell wouldn’t be scary if nobody lived there –
even with the Devil in charge.

Sometimes a flight of fighters
would rage in mathematical rigor
quitting the coast and holding
close to the lolling swells.
And I knew that if I looked at the news
I would see that someone had cast an unannounced missile –
ballistic bait –
fishing across the imaginary line
that nobody bothered to paint on the waves.

I could sit up there and remember
whole lives ago, when I watched the sun
rise and burn the snow and stone up high
and join the fire of the Autumn
leaves on the Rocky Mountains.
I would know without knowing
and say without saying
that this thing that is going to burn me, too
is the Colorado sun.

But I wasn’t so sure
when I smoked on the roof
and watched the light skip from
isle to isle
stone to stone
whose sun this was.

Would a Korean sun speak enough Chinese
to ask the purple water of the Yellow sea
for permission to press ahead?
Would a Chinese sun speak enough Korean
to tell the North why it might not
shine so bright beyond the torpid Han?

When I watched the sun and the sea
and saw how careful they both tried to be
I remembered Colorado
and I knew without knowing
and said without saying
that this is not the sun of the love songs and the poems.

This is not the same sun
that sets on lovers half a world apart.
This is not the same sun
that shines on bodies under battlements
without a stone to say.

If this same sun rose over screaming leaves
in the Autumn of the hard West
it would not know what to do.

With no languid tides
no rice paddies in rectangular certainty
no black river keeping the beasts at bay
it might lose its way.

Your Papa’s Schmaltz

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My Papa’s Waltz

by

Theodore Roethke

A Sober and Graceless Dramatic Interpretation by Andy Havens

Hell’s Kitchen, New York. The tiny kitchen you expect in the tiny apartment you never stop seeing in movies. A tiny table is clean and tight against the tiny wall. Two burner stove, a few open shelves stacked with dishes and pans, and a sink squarely balanced on its pipes. Enter Papa, well past supper time, dirty from work. Mother sits at the table, expectant and displeased.

 PAPA: Any whiskey in the house, m’darlin?

MOTHER: (Talking in the direction of the clock) I don’t guess you need any, the way you smell already. And listen to ya talkin!

PAPA: You know I can’t help but me and the boys stop in for a turn or two at the Old Russet after a Friday shift. It’s a long week in the shop, and Mickey lost three fingers in the die cutter today. And hey, it ain’t even yet eleven o’clock!

MOTHER: Three more fingers?

PAPA: Am I speakin’ Gaelic? Three fingers, sure as I’m standin here.

MOTHER: Poor Mickey musta been born with near two dozen, by my count. And yer barely standin’ there at all, anyway. Lean up against somethin’ already.

Enter the son, eight years old and yawning in his pajamas.

 PAPA: I’ll lean up against my boy!

SON: Hi, Papa!

PAPA: Sorry if I woke you up! Lemme just wolllltz ya back to bed! Mother, sing us a tune!

Mother most decidedly does not sing them a tune.

 PAPA: Well, then turn up that Lefty Frizzell!

MAMA: We don’t have a radio.

PAPA: We don’t need one! (Singing) “My daaaaad was a poor, hard-workin’ Saginaw fishermannnn…”

 Papa takes the boy by his hand and begins a clumsy dance around the tiny kitchen. The boy wraps his remaining three limbs around papa and hangs on like a cowboy. He might be smiling.

 PAPA: We’ll start with a box-step!

MOTHER: A what now?!

This first move sends a cast iron skillet from a shelf to the linoleum floor, and rattles a couple of tin mugs. There’s a glassy jangling of milk bottles inside the refrigerator. A large cat skulks dejectedly out to the fire escape.

 MOTHER: See now? You’ve even chased off Ulysses!

 PAPA: I’m sure he’ll just go up and get some fish guts from Joyce. Now, boy, like I taught you, the telemark!

MOTHER: (Rising a little, shouting and incredulous) THE TELE-WHO?! Where did you learn to-

PAPA: No time for talkin m’darlin, we’re coming to a tricky sp-

Papa slips a bit on the polished floor. The son makes a brief exclamation and rubs his ear, as it was scraped by Papa’s belt buckle. A neighbor pounds on his ceiling from below. Mother’s portrait of Kathleen Lynn goes a little crooked on its nail.

 PAPA: Sorry, son! We’re all jammed up here widdout any room. Can’t be helped! Now remember the next move, boy. It’s called the wing! Let’s dance you back to bed on a “wing” and a prayer! Hang on to something!

Mother is rooted to the spot.

 The son grabs two tiny fistfuls of Papa’s dirty cotton shirt and holds on for the scant six feet of movement from the kitchen to the one small bedroom they all share. Papa tucks him in.

 SON: Nice moves tonight, papa. You really like to dance.

PAPA: I have to dance, bud. We all have to. I only really like to dance when I do it here. Sweet dreams, now.

The bedroom light turns off. From the kitchen comes the sound of a burner igniting on the stove and a cast iron pan sliding from the shelf. A glassy jangling of milk bottles in the refrigerator. A large cat struts self-assuredly in from the fire escape.

Amotivational Wish

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Not a typo. I wrote amotivational on purpose. That’s how this works.

College. Where I find unique challenges every day. I was able to say the same for the Army, but in the Army, motivation was either easy to come by, or all-too-readily available from any number of willing… mentors. In any case, you were simply going to do whatever was to do, and that was that. Rather parental, when parenting works.

In college, motivation can be more elusive. You are truly on your own here, and if the material presented does nothing to move you intellectually or emotionally, it can be hell to get started on a project. I suspect this is why so many students just do what they’re told and buy whatever narrative is sent their way. It eases the difficulty. There’s no real way, from the impotence of the student’s disposition, to ensure that the wheels get greased. So the student’s best bet is to become a wheel and catch as catch can whatever lube is dripped her way.  To wit: an hour in a literature class is plenty of time to know exactly what the professor professes in public and private, and there’s a real narcotic allure to the idea of getting ideologically on board. Your assignments will conform to your conformity, and the sad coitus between two beings of diminished creative ambition will spurt along at a potentially Dean’s-list-level of coursework.

I see it, as best I can, from a distance. I call myself a writer with some confidence now, having produced some papers for school that I am perfectly proud of, as well as having one poem published and another take honors in a competition. I am a writer. There is power there, that I don’t think my fellow majors understand. I can sit in these classes, listen to these teachers, read the little post-modern litanies of a liberal arts education, take in the constantly present sense that “seriously, just do it like us, it’ll be so much easier for both of us” – and still write what I want. All it takes is evidence, and if you read regularly, you become so stocked with the stuff that you could be the 163rd CSI incarnation. I could read a piece of feminist literature and write a 5-page paper that never mentions feminism. And as long as I find the evidence for my points in the paper itself, I am in the clear. That’s the real power of liberal arts, as it is supposed to be understood. The power of being a writer with a little actual resistance in her. The power of turning post-modernism against itself and recognizing how easy it is to be right, within the framework of today’s vacated artistry and dissipated standards.

One of the first things anyone should be able to recognize from inside of the vapid collegiate gestalt is that the last thing anyone should be giving it is what it asks for. Maybe I am uniquely capable of seeing this because I am a parent: I know that you can’t raise a damn thing – child or idea or machine – by giving it what it wants. You have to give it what it needs. The university doesn’t need feminist papers or anti-feminist papers. It wants them both, though, because in either case the student is still just a wheel, safely hubbed onto the framework. What the university does need is true papers, real papers that are disinterested in social propulsion or the narrowing effects of thought-building. The university does not need to be saved by noble conservative infiltrators and their stout anti-political messaging. That’s more of the same, anyway, and absurd. It needs, like a protest needs a mute button, apolitical messaging. It needs, in short, to be made to forget about itself for a while. Again, exactly the same way that a parent knows that a child in a tantrum is best served by a distraction. The university is child to the student, and the student needs to start distracting its disobedient charge from its own illogic. You don’t do that by shouting “NO!” or by presenting oppositional logic. That just keeps the focus on the locus. Distract, distract, distract. You do it with ice cream and tickle bugs, wisdom and wit. You make it get up off the ground by showing it the sky.

But as nice as all that is to wail about for a minute, it’s only a small part of motivation. For instance, I am about to read “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” It’s a challenge that I am simply not sure that I am the master of. It’s ok, though, because again, there is a distance I can keep. A professionalism, and an artistry, even. Sometimes all it takes is is to talk to myself for a moment, and pencil up a poem to buoy me through the surf:

Every Wish has a Rider“Your wish has been granted”
said the Genie to the girl at the protest march.
She rose,
stiffened,
held her sign erect and raised
a single finger for the patriarchy
(forgetting her father)
in permanent letters
on the tip of a
long wooden shaft.
She heard herself say
“Thank you, sir.”