Said Not Said: Poems - Softcover

Marchant, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555977731 ISBN 13: 9781555977733

Verlag: GRAY WOLF PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

“Fred Marchant teaches and awakens the soul.” —Maxine Hong Kingston

someone in Benghazi with a hose in one hand
uses his free one to wipe down the corpse
water flows over the body and down
a tilted steel tray toward the drain

what washes off washes off

—“Below the Fold”

In this important and formally inventive new poetry collection, Fred Marchant brings us into realms of the intractable and the unacceptable, those places where words seem to fail us and yet are all we have. In the process he affirms lyric poetry’s central role in the contemporary moral imagination. As the National Book Award winner David Ferry writes, “The poems in this beautiful new book by Fred Marchant are autobiographical, but, as is always the case with his poems, autobiographical of how he has witnessed, with faithfully exact and pitying observation, the sufferings in the lives of other people, for example the heartbreaking series of poems about the fatal mental suffering of his sister, and the poems about other peoples, in Vietnam, in the Middle East, written about with the noble generosity of feeling that has always characterized his work, here more impressively even than before.”

Said Not Said is a poet’s taking stock of conscience, his country’s and his own, and of poetry’s capacity to speak to what matters most.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Fred Marchant is the author of four previous poetry collections, including The Looking House and Full Moon Boat, and he recently edited Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford. He lives in the Boston area.

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Said Not Said

Poems

By Fred Marchant

GRAYWOLF PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Fred Marchant
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55597-773-3

Contents

ONE, 
Psalm, 
The Unacceptable, 
How?, 
Forty Years, 
Me, 
Her, 
In the As If, 
Intake Retake, 
Cement Mixer, 
twin tulips, 
The Name of the Painting, 
TWO, 
A Bone in the Throat, 
Here is what the mind does, 
From The Sender, 
Marwan, 
Below the Fold, 
E pluribus animus, 
King Chestnut, 
Quitter's Rose, 
Quang Tri Elegy, 
The Peach (Võ Quê), 
Crossing Nguyen Du Street, 
Trip Wire Dream, 
Checkpoint, 
Passage Tomb, 
Ghost Ranch, 
THREE, 
Two Minutes, 
Wod-or, 
pollution, 
well well, 
gulf, 
oil, 
spill, 
drill, 
More or Less, 
Delasanta, 
Said Not Said, 
The Teacher, 
Chalk, 
In the Rapids, 
Wet Gravel, 
Pear Tree in Flower, 
FOUR, 
The Left Hand, 
Body Body, 
Meltemi, 
The Migrants, 
Glad Day, 
O Be, 
Call to Prayer, 
Ecce, 
Fennel, 
Olive Harvest, 
Fresh Ink, 
Sixteen, 
The Day Later, 
shade laurel, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Psalm


So why bother with it, let it go,
  this business of deciding if,
or how long, a string of words
  should take to stretch across
a page, or float, as if weightless,
  or reach down like a priest
who after listening to your list
  says you are forgiven. This is
not something for a grown-up
  to worry about, nor is it for
anyone who votes, or is listed
  demurely as head of household.
Nor is it your question for today,
  not after you have, in traffic,
followed a purple flag to
  a grave where, inches down
in East Providence, R.I.
  a yellow backhoe has revealed
a layer of vivid red clay.
  The workmen who loop the straps
under the coffin are whispering,
  wondering if the seal remains true.
In this question they are like
  the priest who, upon finishing
his Prayer for the Dead, offers
  remarks on the poet by which
he means the psalmist, that singer
  who, though he knows better,
insists: when I call, answer me, God.


The Unacceptable

How?

How do you write about a cough?

How to hint at the sound of it?

A cough that was odd, not from a cold, or something else you catch.

I think now it was the sound of what was eating away my sister's mind.

I first heard it at our grandfather's funeral Mass.

I was seven and thought she should just quit it, stop bothering me, and
everyone.


Forty Years

Howard, her life spent on William A. Howard's farm, Howard the short
form for what was originally the Asylum for the Incurable Insane.

How the gentle Pawtuxet stream flowed past, and how I composed a song
she could sing under her blanket:

O bless this sweet layer of wool, bless my warm halo of heat.

How the illness clutched her by the neck, tossed her up and let her go,
and in the second before she landed, how she thought she might escape,
could drift away like smoke from a long drag on her cork-tipped Kool.

How the sound of the rust-bucket trawler named Memory followed her
wherever she went, its iron nets dragged across the floor of her being, the
silt clouds and debris fields, a stern winch sounding a lot like pain.

How she ached to have them examine what they pulled up there, some of it
thrown back, some saved in the ice-hold: a few scaled creatures to be studied
in the labs, their weird antediluvian appendages, their would-be limbs.

How rage at times so transformed her face I was sure she and Nero had
gone fishing in the lake of darkness, and me, I had become the sane but
cleverly gibbering Edgar hiding in the hollow of a tree.

Howard, a downbeat, and off beat, a first note in the music we heard when
the kitchen knife found its home in her hand as she reached in the drawer.

How the legal involuntary moved in and imposed itself because the great
orange snowplows out on the mid-winter highway were trying to run her
down.


Me

To her I was airy sunlit ice, a comet tail, in an elliptical once-in-a-while
orbit, a vague portent, a streaky omen, with nothing much to say anymore,
just the rest of my self-comforting ditty.

Bless the blanket over her head and under her feet.
Bless the hands that weave the thread.
Bless the sheep they sheared it from.

Our father, meaning to protect me, said it would be good for me to visit
and see this, so I'd know, so I would know know know how not to end
up here or there or wherever Howard actually was or would in my life
someday be.

too wanted to give that place and her a world of berth, the Xmas visits
all I ever had to do really, just get a box with stick-on ribbon, some CVS
shampoo, wrap it in paper printed with holly, candles, Victorian joy.

An hour in the Howard parking lot, my father and I signing her out to the
backseat where she opened what we brought her, a chocolate interlude,
an engine idling, the heat on.

Our spot outside her own red brick How and her wherefore Ward, decked
out year after year in the tinsel and the garlands of disordered thought.

Howard, our one and only name for the world headquarters, the genuine
article, real deal skit-so-free-nee-ya, its live-in campus to the left of the cornfields,
just off Rte. 2, heading south from Providence.


Her

Her last day on the planet she thrashed and spit while the nurses tied her
wrists to the bedrail with strips of cloth that only worsened what was
happening.

Her face was radiant, her whole being flush from the long struggle with
those she knew she should never have trusted.

They tried to keep track of her vitals, charted her erratic heart, peered
into her cranium with a flashlight through the eyes.

She said they had taped a death-line to the port in her arm.

They said she should believe in the plastic tube at her nose, that it would
fill her lungs with good clean air.

She shook her head as hard as she could, got her whole body to say nope,
thou shalt not, no way, nothing doing, thou shalt not touch me.

Not with the elbow-bendable straw adjusted to the lips, not with the
insidious needle pointed upward and dribbling over.

And absolutely not with that wheezing apparatus of the unacceptable the
big attendant in his scrubs was wheeling in.


In the As If

we plan to stuff steel wool down the doctor's throat get lighter fluid

  ronson

squirt it in his ears and up his hairy nose ignite that fucker inside out

  my-my-myelin

while an infinitely dull month passes between first pills and the pucker

  tardive

and lip-smack on the day after the tomorrow when your head starts to

  trigger

nod like a horse trained...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: GRAY WOLF PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1555977731
• ISBN 13: 9781555977733
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 96
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar