THE PERSONAL VIEWPOINT IN POETRY:

Transcending the Particular to Touch the Universal

David Rutiezer

Critical Paper and Program BibliographySubmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in

Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2012

1

Preface

This paper is a generalized discussion about particular poems. The poems, along withtheir sources, are included in the order in which they are discussed in the Appendix at theend of the paper.

2

The Personal Viewpoint in Poetry: Transcending the Particularto Touch the Universal

A woman in a workshop I once took had brought a poem she’d written about a

circle dance at a lesbian gathering. The experience had obviously been one full of love,

celebration, joy, and gratitude. But when she spoke of the dance itself, she said something

like: “Legs, hips, breasts move in unison . . .” By speaking in more general terms, the

woman gave what should have been an intimate moment a strangely disembodied feeling,

distancing both herself and us from the material. She shied away from her poem’s very

moment of power.

How often have I heard at writing critiques: You don’t understand this poem

because you’re a man, or You’ve never had cancer, or You didn’t grow up Catholic? One

time a woman whose poem line, “Banished from the mainstream,” I and others criticized

for being too vague lashed out: Well, maybe you’d understand if you’d been

marginalized. Eventually the workshop leader backed me up, but, please: gay, Jewish, a

very ADHD child—which of these is mainstream to you? It is so tiresome when people

can’t see past their own experiences.

So how can poems reach past the specifics that divide us and take the reader to a

deeper understanding of the human experience? What are some ways poets use to push

their personal poems past particulars towards their emotional truths and allow the

emotion to percolate through the material? What is universal in the specific, anyway?

How is it that we can relate to the emotion of writing that describes a life experience

different from our own? And why is it that poems often attain their greatest power and

resonance when they’re most specific, and lose that power when they try to generalize?

3

A couple of points of clarification: first, this is not meant to be a comprehensive

or exhaustive compilation of all the amazing poems in the world that are written from the

personal narrative point of view, nor even a collection of the best. I have chosen some

poems I’ve remembered even after many years, others from my own personal collection

of poetry books, and still other poems I’ve come across only recently, all of which I think

exemplify different ways poems can convey universal emotions. Second, I don’t

necessarily think a poem has to be about universal emotions in order to be a good poem.

Some poems are concerned primarily with language, or with ideas, not with feelings or

experiences, and I believe there’s a place for the many kinds of poems that have been

written. But universal emotion in poems is what I’m concerned with here, because poetry

as a universal method of communication, as a universal language of the human

experience, is an aspect of poetry I’m particularly passionate about.

Yusef Komunyakaa, “A Break from the Bush”

When I first read this poem, what stayed with me was the ending’s poignancy.

Komunyakaa juxtaposes the laughter of a young man playing a ball game with what will

happen three days after. In war, death is happening all around, but no one can predict

when or to whom. The poem underscores the vulnerability and fragility of life during war

in a way that readers who’ve never fought a war can relate to—the ferocity, urgency,

intensity of their playing. Is it any accident the most joyous music in the world comes

from those cultures that have experienced great suffering? Komunyakaa sets the

immediate scene and then alludes to the gunfire miles away, showing the reader that the

specter of death is never far removed. Then, of course, we have the irony of burying

4

oneself in sand and playing dead, as a soldier surrounded by the portent of death. It’s no

coincidence that he puts impending death with description of young man’s laughter in not

only the same sentence, but the same breath.

Yusef Komunyakaa, “Thanks”

Here the same poet uses a different method, always returning to thanks, which

when repeated here becomes almost a mantra, a prayer. If you’d never read other poems

by this poet alluding to the war in Vietnam, you’d still know where you are within the

first four lines. In the line that begins “Some voice . . . ,“ he tells us he relinquishes credit

for his survival. I love the way Komunyakaa enfolds the memory of the woman, exactly

the way thoughts and memories distract us, only in this case the irony is that instead of

being an inconvenience, the distraction may have saved his life. “Deadly game for blind

gods,” is, for me, the least effective part of the poem—too vague, distant, and abstract,

trying to encompass too much, not to mention the iteration of “blind” as synonymous

with ineffective, incompetent, and recalcitrant, an inappropriate and able-ist analogy at

best. The end almost evokes a guardian angel scenario.

Most people can relate to at one time feeling watched over and protected—Why

did I survive when someone else died? Why did this happen to that person, instead of to

me?—and also to seeing a person alive and vibrant and then suddenly losing that person,

or remembering a dead person’s vibrancy when he or she was still alive. These poems

reach in these ways beyond the narrower topic of war and combat to resonate with

anyone who knows death and loss and sheer arbitrary luck—that is, to all of us. Like all

the poems I’ve chosen, they work best when specific with details, without trying to

5

summarize or speak generally. These poems reach past their containments of time and

place, to speak about grief and gratitude.

Maxine Scates, “Her Voice”

In this poem Scates starts with the olfactory sense, the scent of blossoming trees

bringing her and her reader into the poem’s stream of consciousness. It’s easy for many

of us to forget smell when we write, to rely solely on the more obvious senses of sight

and sound—but I wonder, what would a deaf person, a blind person, write about? Which

sense would prevail? Like the branches of the trees she describes, Scates interweaves

time, back and forth, from the present to the past and back again. I relate to the line in

which she describes Ohio in winter as “a bleakness / the West does not understand” as a

native Chicagoan who remembers the winters there. Yet, by contrasting this with the

previous image of flowers, she beckons in those who have not experienced Midwest

winters, by implying those winters as the opposite of blooming, something many

Northwesterners can relate to. Then, suddenly it seems, Scates has this: “I came here to

talk about work / and poetry though it was my mother who labored / as I have not.” She’s

saying she feels like a charlatan; she’s talking about the difference between generations

and their ideas of work. She’s still interweaving past with present, just as so often in

life—some days more than others, it seems—memories weave their way into our present

realities.

Lola Haskins, my first-year mentor, once told me that things in poems that seem

unrelated can be emotionally related. In a list poem told from personal narrative point-of-

6

view, each item, if you will, gains layers of meaning when measured against what comes

before and after it on the list.

By the end, Scates has built a pedestal and established within this succession of

memories a dynamic of looking up to her mother as she self-deprecates. The

implications: fear someone will find out I’m a fake, feeling that my mother should be on

this stage instead of me, fear of not matching up or not living up to someone else’s

expectations, always comparing oneself to others. By ending with the image of her

mother’s hands, Scates implies so much: that the mother herself is stronger, more

capable, more resilient, with perhaps even a feeling that she’s let her mother down.

Though the poem’s trajectory of juxtaposed scenes may at first seem disjointed, when

looked at in layers, whole volumes of meaning emerge. For instance, starting at line 10,

the description of the mother “figuring, I know now, a way out” leading immediately to

the narrator’s own wandering down a chilly street seeking warmth in a cup of soup may

at first seem an abrupt and incongruous transition, until one realizes that both people

were seeking solace, and both on their own. In order to provide context, one can’t be

taken without the other; they must be read back-to-back. Ironically here, the only

“comfort” comes from the coldest, most mechanical allusion in the poem, the whistle of

the train, perhaps comforting because it’s so ubiquitous and familiar. Scates compares

herself to her mother through this entire poem, even when relating seemingly superfluous

incidents. For instance, what does this description of her walks in the woods with an old

dog have to do with anything? Again, when looking at things in terms of what Scates has

already set up in the poem, this dynamic with the mother, and keeping in mind Lola

Haskins’s idea of emotional relation, Scates’s meaning becomes clear: her memory,

7

presumably of childhood, in which she’s proud to lift stones from a wheelbarrow, seems

pitiful and embarrassing now, compared with all her mother carried, and not only

physically. Everything in Scates’s poem benefits from being read in the context of the

complicated relationship the poem always points toward. That’s how the universal

themes in the poem emerge: the specific details tell a story of loss, of lack of confidence,

of feeling one can never measure up.

When revising a list poem of your own, you can use the same strategy. How does

any item change by being compared or contrasted with what comes before or after it?

And, how does changing the order affect the emotional impact? Try this exercise I

learned from poet Henry Hughes. Read a rough draft of your poem, starting from the end.

Philip Levine, “Library Days”

This is a really good poem, I think, but one of the reasons I chose it is because I,

too, used to work in a library, and like Levine, it was not a great experience for me. But

beyond that, I’d like to look at ways this poem might resonate with someone who’s never

worked in, or even spent much time in, a library.

First, I love how Levine starts this poem as though he’s already been telling the

story, and we’ve been set down suddenly right in the middle of it. I also love how the

librarian is “assembling a frown”—I can see one grouchy librarian in particular from my

library days. And there’s something peculiarly perfect about the smell of used tea bags.

With “In late August / of 1951” Levine sneaks in a bit of exposition, and a bit later, he

uses an interesting and effective telescoping effect. By telling us, “Other men, my former

schoolmates, were off / on a distant continent in full retreat,” he implies the Korean War

8

without ever specifying, then pulls the focus in to his garden. This makes the outside

world seem even more distant, and how ironic to use “retreat” to refer to the soldiers in

Korea, rather than himself. Levine is establishing his own mindset of immunity. He

seems to build the poem towards an inevitable ending that at first seems calloused but

could also be read as an escape into intellectual stimulation in a world with lack of it, or

as an antidote to the feeling of helplessness. And this is how larger topics come into this

poem, ones many people can relate to. This is how it becomes about something much

more than working in a library. Where is the line between self-preservation and denial?

Between literature as escape, and literature as planting the seeds of change? The library

itself, in this poem, appears not as a shelter, or a haven, but seems as dysfunctional as the

world outside, as it seemed when I worked there. The irony is, he’s not working—there

are no “deliveries” ever, are there? Or did I miss something? And the biggest irony is that

he criticizes the coldness of others even as he worries about being as aloof as they are

from the world’s woes and pains. What is the role of good writing—whatever the form or

genre—if not to remind us of our roles as human beings, and what of those times when

people read great literature about the generosity and resilience of the human spirit, only

to return to their myopic ways?

George Venn, “Forgive Us . . . ”

It’s interesting and powerful how Venn opens with an addressing voice. It’s also

ironic that the butchering is used to illustrate the grandfather’s humaneness. My

immigrant Jewish grandmother kept kosher, and of course, in that tradition, too, animals

when butchered are never supposed to suffer. So, there is some universality in that

9

concern, as well as in cruelty. The line “. . . I know / now the need for meat” is weighty,

yet I’d almost argue for its exclusion here: the theme or moral here, after all, is not

hunger, nourishment, nutrition, or want, nor the learning of it, and it seems to pull the

poem a bit away from its true emotional core—the concern about the condition and well-

being of the grandfather. I love this list he starts with “Nothing should suffer,” of all the

things Grandfather could never harm.

The poem’s title, as Venn explained to me in an email, comes from the Lord’s

Prayer: “While the irony and source of the title have not been noted by reviewers, I

intended it to suggest the poet's persona in the text as protesting the "trespasses" of God

(the conventional religious sense) in prolonging the suffering of my grandfather—a

powerful, sincere, and devout man—from Parkinson’s Disease.” Venn’s grandfather

never let anything suffer and never took God’s name in vain, yet God let him suffer.

Therefore, God could learn a thing or two from the grandfather. The anger Venn feels at

God for “letting” this happen to his loved one is palpable—and anyone who’s lost

someone to illness, injury, war, genocide, homicide, or natural disaster could relate to that

anger.

I remember reading this poem years ago in an anthology, and though I hadn’t read

it again until now, I never forgot it, or its emotional impact on me. I remember reading

the part about the grandfather’s bed of manure, and weeping, reminded of my own

grandfather, of the loss of dignity and quality of life at the end of his. These common

sorrows cut across the differences—it no longer mattered that my grandfather wasn’t a

butcher, or was Jewish.

10

With “And now this God, Grandfather,” Venn really begins to talk of loss of faith,

of questioning God, and there’s an implication of irony that the author’s faith is not as

strong as the grandfather’s, that the questions he has for God about his grandfather’s fate

are questions the grandfather himself never asked, or even thought to ask. Venn’s poem

brings up many questions about religion and faith, in direct relation to pain and death:

What is “dignified”? When we talk about courage, especially in the face of death, what

do we mean? Is it really more courageous to suffer than to die quickly? And, if we choose

to believe in God, how do we reconcile that belief with the suffering in the world?

Venn touches upon universal issues in this poem: measuring up to previous

generations; questioning our faith and our fate; aging, independence, death and autonomy

in relation to faith; the nature of courage; how much suffering is acceptable; and growing

up to question the beliefs of our predecessors.

Cortney Davis, “The Smoke We Make Pictures Of”

Davis read her poems years ago when she came to Portland. I was lucky enough

to take a workshop from her, and I still remember how powerful this poem was. It’s

ironic how the wrapping of presents—what should be a happy occasion—instead triggers

this meditation on loss, on gifts, on what has been given to us, and what taken away. The

title refers both to the future’s nebulousness, and to the cigarette smoking of her

parents–and its consequences. Davis takes a deceptively simple premise—watching a

clock tick in a mirror and thinking about time reversing itself—and seems to just take off

running. Yet, in almost-detached observation, she tells us so much—of the illnesses that

took her parents, and of the failures of marriages. Without anything implicit, there’s more

11

than a suggestion of sexual violation in the scene with the father. But the poem’s end, and

I’d argue, its real resonance, is a rumination on life’s arbitrariness. What if my parents

had never met? What are the chances of any of us being here at all? And who among us

has never wondered? Davis’s poem seems perfect in its reach—it wouldn’t have been

nearly as provocative had she ended with a sweet childhood memory; she had to go back

further, past both happy and sad events, to really access the full power of the poem—the

universal question of our very existence.

How interesting that Davis’s poem’s emotionally climactic moment occurs at the

poem’s very end, before she was born. What can we do to access that emotionally

universal human moment when we write poetry? One suggestion came from Henry

Hughes in a workshop I took at Fishtrap in the summer of 2011. His exercise consisted of

simply reading our poem drafts aloud—but in reverse order, starting with the last lines

we wrote, and working our way back, finishing where we began writing. The reason for

this? Hughes said we often write toward our emotional truths, so reading backward, you

start with what you were working towards all along and read toward the expositions we

often start with, some of which we may be able to discard or work into our poems in

other ways. Hughes suggested we try this with our own poems, to see where they feel

most potent, and where they might be trimmed.

Fleda Brown, “I Return to Fayetteville after Twenty Years”

Brown’s title does more than many of these poems’ titles to set up perspective,

and with the part “I’ve grown so tall . . . ,” things really get interesting in terms of the

disconnect we often experience with memory, almost as though we have two distinct

12

identities, then and now. Have you ever felt as though you’re watching yourself in a

movie? Brown’s poem invites us to join her on this kind of journey, one in which one

observes oneself in a detached way, in which one looks at choices, forks in our roads of

life, as if each choice we didn’t make, each person we never met, is a path we opted out

of, one that led to someone we would have been. Her way of talking about the neighbors

is so effective, consigned to these anonymous lives in interchangeable houses with weird

yet oddly similar problems.

With “inside the house are the original / houses of my mother, my father,” Brown

sets up a dollhouse or Through the Looking Glass dynamic, in which one is peering into a

replica of one’s own life. One of the poem’s most provocative portions begins, “From up

here, / I lean down as if my life were a lesson / I have to teach.” Do we tell our own

stories at least partly so that others won’t repeat our mistakes? So they’ll learn from us

what’s really important? So our blunders and pain won’t have been in vain? Is that how

we achieve immortality?

But then, what an interesting turn this poem takes with Brown’s description of the

mother. I love this visual of the mother’s arm: “so alive / the hairs on her arm glisten.”

It’s so intimate, bringing us so close to her, and then: “Listen, does she / say anything to

live by?” When I read that line, I think of all the times people say things that are not

useful or helpful, things that are routine, ordinary, stupid, or just ignorant, all the human

moments when our shortcomings are most apparent.

And then, Brown at the very end throws the poem open: “No, it’s always / the

chimes, and the space between / where everything else gets in.” To my thinking, this is

the grand everything else of learning by osmosis, by living and observing the living of

13

others, by trial and error, by passing time, and all of these ideas and theories are resonant

and relevant to me as a reader and transcend boundaries of time, space and generations,

overcoming the fact that I have never been to Brown’s Arkansas, nor am I Methodist.

Christopher Howell, “Something Borrowed”

The title refers to the well-known nursery rhyme thought to originally come from

old England, a list of things a bride should wear to her wedding. Howell ends the poem’s

first stanza with what most readers, unfamiliar with the subject matter, would find humor

in—a father-in-law’s minor irritation at the smiling bridegroom. But the crux is revealed

only in the second stanza, and in the last four lines, at that. Howell’s daughter, Emma,

died at age 20, and someone who knows or has met Howell, or knows anything about

him, would have known that. Clearly, this is a poem occasioned by Emma’s death. In

fact, I remember Howell years ago pausing at a reading to tell us he couldn’t yet read his

next poem, and then moving on to other poems—perhaps the poem he wasn’t

emotionally able to read yet was this one, or an earlier draft of it? In any case, for most

readers unfamiliar with Howell, this poem’s conclusion will come as a shock.

Of course, there is a great sense of loss in the poem, in this case the death of a

young person, out-of-sequence, too soon (as the title of one of Oregon poet Penelope

Scambly Schott’s collections puts it, May the Generations Die in the Right Order), and

the witnessing and struggle by parents and family to somehow pick up the pieces and go

on living. But there’s more going on here. The poem explores not only loss itself but our

ways of coping with it. Like Fleda Brown’s poem, there’s this idea with the dreams of

alternate futures, the dream’s preferable one elaborated on in the first stanza, only to be

14

slammed against the actual reality of a life without that person in the second. This really

accentuates the sense of the hole that’s created in the lives of those left to continue on.

With the sparrow, there’s almost a sense of trapped spirit, of energy, or of potential

looking for and not knowing where to go without this person. Howell’s ending is a bit up

in the air, as well—with this oblique last line “as this dream begins again,” is he

suggesting that it is the alternate dream, the one with Emma, that begins again, a

perseverating of a fantasy of what might have been? Or is it a reference to having to start

over, without her? Either way, the ending feels surprising, as if it opens the poem even

more, in unexpected ways.

Now, imagine using Henry Hughes’s exercise here, on this poem, starting with

the ending. What if Howell had started with something like: “She died eight years ago,

leaving us all / in the suddenly empty church . . .” and then had gone on to elaborate on

the dream of her living. It wouldn’t work. It would deflate the poem’s power, which lies

in conveying the human condition of being unprepared for the death of a young person.

The poem is perfectly ordered. It’s not about our sadness at Howell’s loss, nor even really

about the loss itself, but about our human defenses, our coping mechanisms, the ways we

deal with such devastating loss by painting ourselves out of our own realities, to the point

of constructing imaginary ones. In such circumstances of great sadness, haven’t we all

wished, or asked ourselves, “What if?”

Lois Baker, “Elegy for a Stepmother”

In so few words, Baker describes a complicated, distant, tension-filled

relationship between narrator and stepmother, using compact, disjointed lines and

15

enjambments, unusual among the poems in her book. The description of cold is so

visceral that the stepmother seems to imbue everything she touches, even the stairwell,

with iciness. The depiction of the other patients so accurately depicts the typical state of

mind of many who are ill, desperate to keep things light, to talk and to think about

anything besides their own condition. It’s interesting to contrast their approach with the

stepmother’s.

But the second stanza takes us in another direction altogether, evoking sympathy

for the stepmother by bringing us readers, with the image of the stepmother’s stained

nightgown, through her loss of bodily function. Baker ends by describing the balcony’s

emptiness and watching freeway traffic endlessly moving in opposite directions. Despite

the stepmother’s unpleasant qualities, there’s a feeling of alienation and loneliness, as

there often is when someone dies or falls ill, no matter our personal feelings about that

person. In this way, Baker’s poem points us past particulars—the stepmother, calling

AAA—in the direction of broader observations about the clinical feel of many hospitals

and end-of-life environments; the dynamics of estrangement; the tensions between an ill

person and a caretaker; the loss of control an ill person experiences; and the sense of loss

the surviving person may feel, no matter the nature of the relationship.

Dorianne Laux, “Bakersfield, 1969”

Despite the poem’s ostensibly casual beginning, or how it might appear at first

glance, it’s not really about the boy, or even about how the narrator and the boy met. But

Laux reveals the crux when the time is right. There’s a great description of how this boy

played guitar, “picked at it, like a scab,” implying many possibilities, or combinations

16

thereof: that the boy persevered in his guitar playing rather than creating something

inspired; that he was doing something because it was there, or because he was bored, or it

bothered him to do nothing; that he had a nervous tic; that he knew he’d never match up

to the aforementioned Taj Mahal. Then Laux isolates the description of another incident,

perhaps because it colors everything that came after; of course, this is the encounter with

the boy’s mother. She really sets up the tension with this description: “I . . . set the last

dish / carefully in the rack.” She lets the description replicate for us readers how on edge

we feel after someone mistreats us, is unkind, attacks us out of the blue. She doesn’t

return to this exchange until later, as we, too, often don’t really process difficult

experiences until much later, sometimes years. The photograph is also another window

into the poem’s core, the memory of the affair, I’ll call it, with this boy. It’s interesting

how Laux constructs time in this poem, not in a linear fashion, but in windows, and how

the incident with the mother is one portal, and the photo another. With the photo, Laux

adds ever more layers of meaning in the details—with merely the visual description of

this photo, the glittery hope of the narrator’s own youth, the description of the heat that

seemed as intimate a lover as any person, and equally capable of brutality. Finally, she

ends with what the poem is really about: what prompted their visits in the first place –the

feeling that someone’s not acting, but being real with you. The core of the poem, what

people will relate to across boundaries of different human experiences, is the power of

loving—or at least liking—someone, of caring about someone, and what that love or

caring makes us do.

17

Crystal Williams, “The Embrace”

This poem, while on the surface being also a poem about the poet’s mother, is a

very different creation from Scates’s poem, addressing different emotions and

consequences, and reaching other conclusions. Relatively soon in the poem, Williams

relates the judgments people make about other people without knowing the whole

story—in this case, judging her for not going to her mother’s grave. And then, there are

these wonderful leaps, from the grass at the gravesite to the girl in the shop, pirouetting,

to a memory of the mother taking great joy from something so seemingly simple as being

clean, something able-bodied people take for granted all the time (I know I do) that

becomes special in times of infirmity and physical limitation. This provides a key to

Williams’s poem: her memory of her mother’s joy is the essence of her mother to her.

That’s how this poem becomes both a questioning and a reclamation. Who is in charge of

our own memories? And who has the right to tell us how we should grieve? Of course, no

one, but the fact that these kinds of pressures, from other people and from larger society,

exist, and that we all must live within a world with these pressures every day, and the

problem of what to do about it, coexists in Williams’s poem side-by-side with her

championing of her mother’s joyfulness, her tribute to her mother’s fearlessness about

showing her joy, and her fervent reclaiming of the ideals of glee and bliss that, to her,

embodied the spirit of her mother, and perhaps one of the most important and lasting

lessons Williams learned from her.

18

Natasha Trethewey, “White Lies”

So far, I’ve been talking about universal themes in poetry of the personal

experience—that is to say, poems that draw upon emotions, ideas, problems and ideals

that many people around the world, regardless of the differences that often divide us,

could relate to or understand, whether intellectually, emotionally, or in other ways. So,

what about a poem like this? Can someone who has not had the experience of being black

in the United States of America relate to this poem? And if so, in what ways?

First of all, the title points to the irony of that commonly used expression,

especially in relation to race relations and oppression in this country, though the

expression appears to have no known connection to race or racial references. Even

though Trethewey’s self-description in the poem’s first stanza is certainly not how I—or

many others—could accurately describe our own physical appearances, in the second

stanza she begins to reach past personal descriptions to begin describing

circumstances—living in poverty, daydreaming of the better life that the pretty dresses

represent—that people who’ve lived in poverty, grew up poor, or ever worried about

having enough money could understand, anywhere in the world, African-American or

not.

Then, Trethewey relates a poignant moment when another girl mistakes her for

white. What are the implications here? To find out even more about the dynamics of race

in this country, particularly involving someone whose skin happens to be light enough for

the person to “pass” as white, I read, years ago, poet Toi Derricotte’s compelling memoir,

The Black Notebooks. Ask me, as a gay man, how it feels when someone says I shouldn’t

mention gayness, that it doesn’t matter anymore, when I’ve only mentioned it in the

19

context of a discussion, in order to make a certain point. Trethewey’s poem talks about

the price of having to keep a secret, the pressure to pretend to be something you’re not or

to hide your true self. The price is shame, serious problems with self-esteem and self-

worth, and guilt.

What might have happened had Trethewey told the white girl Trethewey was

really black? What would the consequences, the ramifications, have been? And, what

does her poem’s ending say about that price? The relationship that suffered

most—besides her relationship with herself—was, eventually, her relationship with her

mother. Believing, it seems, that she deserved the punishment her mother exacted, she

imagines herself–what? Becoming white, like the suds? Purified? What is the price, even,

of our language,? Of the idea of heaven as a white light, or angels with white wings? Of

the phrase “it was a dark time in my life”? What unstated ideas does it reinforce about the

value of color? And, beyond that, the last two lines pull the poem completely open. What

is the solution for shame? How does one recover from feelings of guilt for having lied?

Or begin to understand the ways one has survived, within the context of a larger, societal

reality that required lying, hiding, dishonesty, discretion, in order merely to survive?

Trethewey’s “lesson” applies to us all, black or not, and she shows us how it applies, not

only by inviting us to imagine the choices we might have, or not have, in her shoes, but

by having us fill in the poem with parallels from our own lives—being excluded or

targeted for whatever reason, being judged, being made the keeper of secrets, and the

burdens we bear by internalizing those messages to mean that we are somehow bad

people, to our marrow. We’re left with an indelible sense of shame, sorrow, and

20

loneliness, able to confide in others, perhaps, hopefully, in adulthood, and realize the

irony that many of our defense mechanisms kept us alive.

Bruce Weigl, “In the House of Immigrants”

How ironic that Weigl starts with this indelible visual of cats that’s really about

mothering, and ends with the words of the immigrant mother. He peppers the first stanza

with references—Mozart, the games of ball, the chicken dish the mother’s cooking—that

show the stitching of many immigrant lives, the varied cultural references that make up

modern American experiences. The poem here seems concerned primarily with the

goings-on of everyday life and the obligations of motherhood: the energy they expend,

the sacrifices they make, the levels of exhaustion they must experience. Yet, Weigl’s

sudden stanza break implies a split, a point beyond which there’s no turning back.

There’s a moment in social situations, when one’s behaved a certain way, or spoken in a

certain way, after which there’s only damage control; arguments can escalate so quickly

before you even have time to realize you’re in one. This break implies the rupture, the

ragged gap between before and after.

This poem reminds me of the Bulgarians, Macedonians, and other eastern

Europeans I’ve met here in Portland. They have a very different view of this country, one

that’s flavored, of course, by the hardships they endured before coming here. And it’s

easy to forget all that, as non-immigrants who’ve only known life here. Weigl’s second

stanza addresses this disconnect, when people argue under the assumption they’re coming

from the same experience. Also, when the father speaks, it’s in disjointed, broken-off

streams of words, inviting us as readers to imagine ourselves the immigrants, in a new

21

country where we have to learn and communicate in a new language. The author and the

father are not on an equal playing field, because English is the native tongue of only one

of them; the father must resort to putting his thoughts and feelings into this new language

as best he can, without, apparently, much empathy for his struggle from the author. We

get so caught up in our own feelings, in arguments, that we can easily forget things like

language barriers and vastly different reference points and life experiences, but in this

case, the mother takes care of that. I love the declarative, end-stopped lines the mother

has. They are so powerful that you feel the energy deflated from their argument, the

approach of awkward silence. What more could either man say?

By ending with the mother’s words, this sudden statement that makes everyone

stop, reexamine everything, Weigl brings up so many universal issues about human

communication and connection. Who has control over our own life experiences, feelings,

memories? What happens when people’s experiences are politicized, or made into

slogans and soundbites? How does one—or can, or should one—separate art from the

deeds of the maker of the art? What are the long-term effects of war and genocide? What

is the price of the expectation not to talk about memories of genocide? How does this

expectation manifest itself? And, how can people argue constructively, without denying

anyone dignity?

Terrance Hayes, “At Pegasus”

This poem, which begins Hayes’s 1999 collection, Muscular Music (it’s even in

its own section), was a shock when I first read it. Now, years later, I still feel my

amazement just reading it, for its unabashed embracing of human sexuality in all its

22

complexity. I found it even more surprising coming from an ostensibly straight, black

American male poet. At the time, I was aware not only of how few black gay men I knew

here in Portland, Oregon, but how rampant homophobia has historically been in many

black churches. I still see more Asian gay men, who usually, though not always, come

from Buddhist upbringings, whose teachings are often more sympathetic.

I love how Hayes positions the poem’s lines as staggered tercets, giving the

visual appearance on the page the poem etches in its bi-windowed, past-and-present

approach. And, how many times have I seen this guy in gay male environments: I’m just

here for the music. This memory of Curtis, how even the tadpoles are “slippery as

sperm,“ and the slapping of skin, really blurs the lines between sexuality and sensuality

and shows how arbitrary that line can be. Again, later, the references to this ambiguity

continue: “bodies blurred sexless / by the music’s spinning light” and, perhaps even more

provocative: “A young man slips his thumb / into the mouth of an old one / and I am not

that far away.” Does Hayes partly mean, perhaps, that he’s not that far from being these

people himself, unashamed of having a sexuality, whatever that might be? I love, too,

how seamlessly Hayes goes back and forth between the moment with Curtis and the

present scene in the disco—the lines, “The whole scene raw and delicate / as Curtis’s foot

gashed/ on a sunken bottle shard. / They press hip to hip, / each breathless as a boy /

carrying a friend on his back,” evoking both past and present, coexistent in each sentence.

Especially intriguing and almost wistful is the passage “But I remember his weight /

better than I remember / my first kiss.” Really? He remembers it better? What an amazing

and powerful statement, not only about memory, but the very nature of sexuality.

23

Hayes really took a chance with this, a brave, daring, surprising poem the likes of

which I’ve not seen before or since. By using specifics to bring out his own human

vulnerability in this poem, Hayes speaks about the ambiguity of sexual desires. All

humans are mammals, with innately sexual natures, and sexuality is part of our human

experience. Here, Hayes feels perhaps a bit envious of this group of people’s ability to

allow that sexuality to consume them for a while, to let it be a part of them, to be at peace

with it. Instead of being horrified, or focusing on sexual compulsions or obsessions or

addictions, instead of distancing himself from the activity around him, Hayes becomes in

his quiet way a part of their celebration. How interesting and telling that his last

description of the group uses holy, not a word you’d expect to hear when someone’s

describing people dancing at a gay disco. Hayes has created a poem that speaks to and

celebrates the sexual aspect of us all.

William Stafford, “Serving with Gideon”

I first became aware of Stafford’s extensive work years ago through volunteer

work for Friends of William Stafford, and I have reacquainted myself with this poem as a

featured reader at two of the commemorative readings this year to honor what would

have been his 98th birthday.

The refrain I remember is a great writing prompt, but here Stafford uses it perhaps

to imply suppressed memory that’s come up again and is difficult to look at: “Now I

remember.” 'The way he sets up the inequity is so visual, so palpable, that we can see the

difference between the glass and the cup. Even the line break “so he could/ drink it

elsewhere because he was black,” creates the aural sense of dismissal, despising, derision.

24

Also, in stanza 2, he uses a line break to offer a point of clarification, an exception to the

rules, by showing with that pause who was included in the in-group, who reaped the

benefits, and who did not: “. . . they were generous/ to their sons or the sons of friends.”

Then, in stanza 3, the closing fist evokes tension and violence in a description of

the winter light, of all things. And, the allusion to war, enveloping a room from a radio, at

once present and far away, overpowered by the illusion of grandness the radio promoted.

Themes of privilege really come out in the last stanza, this touching, heartbreaking

admission to the stars. I guess some religious people might look at this as a confession of

sin. But either way, any religious context aside, the reality has sunk in: he could have

become like the “boys.” I had every opportunity, unlike the black elevator man, towards

whom his allegiance and empathy seem to be leaning at the last line. Or, one could see it

as a choosing: I choose the side of the elevator man, by drinking out of a cup, too. I also

love the electricity in the air at Stafford’s description of the library—that it “seethed and

sparked,” that reading can be dangerous, can upset the status quo.

The whole poem is a touching, tension-filled portrait of a young man’s first

encounter with power, his own privilege in a racist society, and coming into himself amid

difficult situations with no guidebook to help him.

We know poetry can touch a place of shared humanity, of common

understandings and shared experiences, across barriers of race, religion, gender,

orientation, culture, geography, physical appearance and ability, age, life experiences,

family dynamics and upbringing, and all the other particulars that so often divide us. I’ve

only given examples of fifteen such poems that do just that. We also know everyone has

25

a story. And, with our current rate of human overpopulation of this planet, there are ever

more everyones out there, not part of the machinery of power and privilege, with stories

yet to be heard. So, at the same time that poetry—and, indeed, education itself, economic

stability, and access to other basic human needs—is falling farther and farther out of

reach for so many of the world’s people, the need for poetry, as a voice for those who’ve

been denied it, may never have been stronger. With all the poetry books out there that are

never read, that sit dusty on shelves, looked at as antiquated and irrelevant, it might seem

sometimes that humankind has “poemed” ourselves out. But what if poetry has really

only scratched the surface of the human experience? So this is not a conclusion at all, but

a moving point somewhere along the human journey of poetry into our own human souls.

26

Appendix

27

A Break from the Bush

The South China Seadrives in another herd.The volleyball’s a punching bag:Clem’s already lost a tooth& Johnny’s left eye is swollen shut.Frozen airlifted steaks burnon a wire grill, & miles awaymachine guns can be heard.Pretending we’re somewhere else,we play harder.Lee Otis, the point man,high on Buddha grass.buries himself up to his neckin sand. “Can you see me now?In this spot they gonna builda Hilton. Invest in Paradise.Bang, bozos! You’re dead.”Frenchie’s cassette playerunravels Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”.Snake, 17, from Daytona,sits at the water’s edge,the ash on his cigarettepointing to the groundlike a crooked finger. CJ,who in three days will tripa fragmentation mine,runs after the ballinto the whitecaps,laughing.

Yusef Komunyakaafrom Neon Vernacular

28

Thanks

Thanks for the treebetween me & a sniper’s bullet.I don’t know what made the grasssway seconds before the Viet Congraised his soundless rifle.Some voice always followed,telling me which footto put down first.Thanks for deflecting the ricochetagainst that anarchy of dusk.I was back in San Franciscowrapped up in a woman’s wild colors,causing some dark bird’s love callto be shattered by daylightwhen my hands reached up& pulled a branch awayfrom my face. Thanksfor the vague white flowerthat pointed to the gleaming metalreflecting how it is to be brokenlike mist over the grass,as we played some deadlygame for blind gods.What made me spot the monarchwrithing on a single threadtied to a farmer’s gate,holding the day togetherlike an unfingered guitar string,is beyond me. Maybe the hillsgrew weary & leaned a little in the heat.Again, thanks for the dudhand grenade tossed at my feetoutside Chu Lai. I’m stillfalling through its silence.I don’t know why the intrepidsun touched the bayonet,but I know that somethingstood among those lost trees& moved only when I moved.

Yusef Komunyakaafrom Neon Vernacular

29

Her Voice

Early yesterday morning on my wayto catch a plane the wild cherry blossomedand the yellow gorse and when I spokeI heard my mother’s voice on another morningfifty years ago when she roused me before lightand wrapped me in a blanket to makethe journey downtown with my fatherwhere he’d drop us at my grandparents’on his way to work. In that house of dustand silence she whispered with her sisterfiguring, I know now, a way out. This morningI walked down Main to Water Street in Kent,Ohio, where spring has not arrived, saltunderfoot because it’s snowing, a bleaknessthe West does not understand, stoppedat a drug store and bought a Times, then founda deli and a cup of soup. In the motel parkinglot the jackhammer is rattling, the garbage truckscame at three a.m. to empty the dumpster so I knowthey won’t be back, blocks away the trainwhistle calls every two hours, a comfortas it is at home. I came here to talk about workand poetry though it was my mother who laboredas I have not. Today my friend will show meher house—it’s yellow, her dog is black, bearishwith winter, and the tree outside her window,she tells me, will cast its amber light in autumn.The birds are singing a little now. I used to gointo the woods with my old dog. She’d carryher ball; I’d push the wheelbarrow and whileshe rooted in the stream I’d lift large stones,proud that I could heft them. My mother’s voiceon that morning, its timbre of resolve, is a small tearthrough which she’s slipped in time. She’s eighty-six,still lives alone and will not cross a picket line—she used to say she could do the work a man could do,her hands are large, still stronger than mine.

Maxine Scatesfrom Undone

30

Library Days

I would sit for hours with the sunlightstreaming in the high windows and knowthe delivery van was safe, locked in the yardwith the brewery trucks, and my job secure.I chose first a virgin copy of The Idiotby Dostoyevsky, every page of which confirmedlife was irrational. The librarian, a womangone gray though young, sat by the phonethat never rang, assembling a frownreserved exclusively for me when I enteredat 10 A.M. to stay until the light dwindledinto afternoon. No doubt her job was to guardthese treasures, for Melville was here, Balzac,Walt Whitman, my old here, in multiple copieseach with the aura of used tea bags. In late Augustof 1951 a suited gentleman reader creakedacross the polished oaken floor to requestthe newest copy of Jane’s Fighting Shipsonly to be told, “This, sir, is literature!”in a voice of pure malice. I looked upfrom the text swimming before me in hopesof exchanging a first smile; she’d gone backto her patient vigil over the dead black phone.Outside I could almost hear the world, trucksmaneuvering the loading docks or cloggingthe avenues and grassy boulevards of Detroit.Other men, my former schoolmates, were offon a distant continent in full retreat, their commandsand groans barely a whisper across the vastnessof an ocean and mountain range. In the gardenI’d planted years before behind the old house

31

I’d long ago deserted, the long winter was over;the roses exploded into smog, the African vinestolen from the zoo strangled the tiny violetsI’d nursed each spring, the mock orange snoweddown and bore nothing, its heavy odor sham.“Not for heaven or earth would I trade my soul,rather would I lie down to sleep among the dead,”Prince Myshkin mumbled on page 437.a pure broth of madness, perhaps my part,the sole oracular part in the final actof the worst play ever written. I knew thenthat soon I would rise up and leave the bookto go back to the great black van waitingpatiently for its load of beer kegs, sea trunksand leather suitcases bound for the voyagesI’d never take, but first there was War and Peace,there were Cossacks riding their poniestoward a horizon of pure blood, there was Anna,her loves and her deaths, there was Turgenevwith his impossible, histrionic squabbles,Chekhov coughing into his final tales. The trunks–with their childish stickers—could wait, the beercould sit for ages in the boiling van slowlymorphing into shampoo. In the offices and shops,out on the streets, men and women could cursethe vicious air, they could buy and selleach other, they could beg for a cup of soup,a sandwich and tea, some few could face lifewith or without beer, they could embrace or die,it mattered not at all to me, I had work to do.

Philip Levinefrom News of the World

32

Forgive Us . . .

Fifty years of your butchering artare here, Grandfather. I hear the crashof your falling ax into alder, the whiskof your keen knife on the blue steelwhile lambs and wethers bleat in the barn.

They know your one quick stroke acrosstheir throats would make their endsthe best you could create. I still don’tlike the blood, Grandfather, but I knownow the need for meat.

“Nothing should suffer,” you said,and sought out old dying queens in hivesand pinched their heads. Mensik’s calf—you told us not to watch; bad dreamswould come, you said, so we walked out

and watched you anyway through a crackin the wall—one deadly swing, no more—from the spiking maul buckled the calfinstantly to its knees on the hay.We knew your power then, and ran away.

And now this God, Grandfather, this Godwhose songs you sang, whose churchyour worship built, whose book you read,whose name you never said in vain—He’s got you here in his shepherd's barn.

Oh, he’s a shoddy butcher, Grandfather.He’s making you suffer his rusty dulldeathknife for years, crippling your legs,then cutting off your speech to tremble,then tying you up in a manured bed.

He won’t bring you down with any graceor skill or swift humane strike of steel.Day after day, you sit in His hallwayin your wheelchair and nurses walk bylike angels and shout half your name.

Ah, this God of yours, Grandfather, thisGod has not learned even the most simple

33

lesson from the country of your hands.You should have taught him how to honeHis knife, that the slaughtering of ramsis the work of those brave enough to lovea fast deft end.

George Venn

From Off The Main Road. Appeared in Poetry Northwest, Volume 19, Issue 2, 1978;Pushcart Prize IV: Best of the Small Presses, Pushcart Press, 1979; Rain In the Forest,Light In the Trees: Contemporary Poetry From the Northwest, Owl Creek Press, 1983;Marking the Magic Circle, Oregon State University Press, 1987; and From Here WeSpeak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry, Oregon State University Press, 1993.

34

The Smoke We Make Pictures of

Wrapping presents, I look upand see the clock in the mirror,how it seems to tick backwards.

In the living room, gifts unwrap,ribbons recoil on their spools;my life peels like a time-lapse flower.

I haven’t yet met you.My first marriage falls apart,my children’s legs telescope into their bodies

and they scamper away, curllike the ends of unused ribbon.I feel them drawn into me; my water,

splashed at the doctor’s shoes, gathersand the sack seals. For a momentI think we could start again,

but the hands click back,the cells of my tiny children shrinkinto droplets. Sperm swim, frantic,

and disappear into my husband.I am free. My hair grows long,I’m in college throwing water balloons–

they explode, spray risesand settles like sequins.Now I’m in my yard in Pittsburgh,

the sprinkler waves a shimmering barrier,my bare feet paint the grass.Father, just balding, still drinking,

laughs and lights a cigarette.Mother, tall and pretty in her housedress,her dark glasses black as night,

comes out with Zipper. He wags his tailand smacks his jaws at the mist falling.I’m so happy I want to stop the hands,

35

but they inch back and I’m three, sittingby the mantle, father snapping a Kodakas I frown up, waiting for Santa.

I don’t know that mother’s just homefrom the doctor, her lung cradlingits dark spot, returned from the jar

where it will rest thirty years later.Father’s breath is tinged with Four Roses,his arms with their spotty freckles

rewind the film, undoing the knot of cancerdrifting in his colon, scattering the pagesof the novel he knows he can write,

but never will. Then I spiral into myself,we all disappear into mother’s angular hips.Her uterus bulges under the hot fuchsia skirt

my father loved. It’s the weekend he was homeon leave. As they lie pressed together,he takes back that part of me he will love most:

the way I draw horses with manes flying uplike blackbirds, frightened, rising in unison.The way I let him stroke my long fingers

late at night, while mother waits upstairs.With the final gasp of their union,I am gone.

Father reaches for a match.They talk about how I’ll be theirs someday,and they watch the clock on the bureau

tick, each of them exhaling smoke into air,clouds they make pictures of. A houseat Christmas. A dog. A little girl.

Cortney Davisfrom Details of Flesh

36

I Return to Fayetteville after Twenty Years

The Methodist church still chimes its electrichymns. I’m still in junior high study hall,desk bolted to the floor. I’ve grown so tall,though, that I hover over myself, whereI’m scratching a crude house on the desktopwith a straightened paper clip. It’s a long waydown to the house, the one on Whitham Street,with the creek and the crazy ironing ladyand the field and the chloroformed kittensand the crying. Or the one on Maxwell Drivewith the crawl space and the mother catand the gun and the other crying,and the impatient sex wicking itself intothe sheets. Inside the house are the originalhouses of my mother, my father. They fitthe space exactly, wall against wall, alltheir plots and expositions, their little worldscarved out of materials at hand. How sweetlythe gouges improve on the desktop’svarnish! How fiercely the pencil lead drivesa darkness in, for remembrance. From up here,I lean down as if my life were a lessonI have to teach. Look, I say to myself, that’syou in the house, crumbling shredded wheatinto the bowl. There’s you mother, so alivethe hairs on her arm glisten. Listen, does shesay anything to live by? No, it’s alwaysthe chimes, and the space betweenwhere everything else gets in.

Fleda Brownfrom Reunion

37

Something Borrowed

Again I allow myself to see her,twenty-eight now, maybegetting married, clinging happily to meas we walk toward the minister or rabbior whateverand the smiling bridegroomwhom I hateonly a little and whom I anyway imagine has no senseat all of what he's in for. Sunlight is bolting down through the highwindows. Up among the roof beamsa trapped sparrow flutters and singsas I hand her over, vowing silently never to tellthat she died eight years ago, leaving us allin the suddenly empty church, the birdlike something flown out of us and circlingas this dream begins again.

Christopher Howellfrom the website Oregon Poetic Voices

38

Elegy for a Stepmother

Go, you say, just go and I carry thecold that since

yesterday has creptfrom your hands to

elbows downthe ice-blue

stairwellto Parking. Keys locked in the car. Iwait outside for AAA where seersucker pajama’dambulatory patients tell jokes under a dirty citymoon. How many Poles (the one with an oxygentank) do you need to make an eclipse?

Tomorrow I will launder the stainednightgown you hid from nurses. Restoreyour apartment walls to their original blonde. Set out twochairs, at the distance we kept between us, ona starless little balcony. Watch freeway trafficpulsing north and south.

Lois Bakerfrom Man Covered with Bees

39

Bakersfield, 1969

I used to visit a boy in Bakersfield, hitchhiketo the San Diego terminal and ride the bus for hoursthrough the sun-blasted San Fernando Valleyjust to sit on his fold-down bed in a trailerparked in the side yard of his parents’ house,drinking Southern Comfort from a plastic cup.His brother was a sessions man for Taj Mahal,and he played guitar, too, picked at it like a scab.Once his mother knocked on the tin doorto ask us in for dinner. She watched mefrom the sides of her eyes while I ate,When I offered to wash the dishes she told meshe wouldn’t stand her son being takenadvantage of. I said I had no intentionof taking anything and set the last dishcarefully in the rack. He was a bit slow,like he’d been hit hard on the back of the head,but nothing dramatic. We didn’t talk much anyway,just drank and smoked and fucked and sleptthrough the ferocious heat. I found a photographhe took of my getting back on the bus or maybestepping off into his arms. I’m wearing jeanswith studs punched into the cuffs.a T-shirt with stars on the sleeves, a pairof stolen bowling shoes and a purse I madewhile I was in the loony bin, wobbly X’sembroidered on burlap with gaudy orange yarn.I don’t remember how we met. When I lookat this picture I think I might not evenremember this boy if he hadn’t taken itand given it to me, written his name under mineon the back. I stopped seeing himafter that thing with his mother. I didn’t knowI didn’t know anything yet. I liked him.That’s what I remember. That,and the I-don’t-know-what degree heatthat rubbed up against the trailer’s metal sides,steamed in through the cracks between the doorand porthole windows, pressed down on usfrom the ceiling and seeped through the floor,crushing us into the damp sheets. How we endured it,sweat streaming down our naked bodies, the airsucked from our lungs as we slept. Taj Mahal saysIf you ain’t scared, you ain’t right. Back then

40

I was scared most of the time. But I actedtough, like I knew every street.What I liked about him was that he wasn’t acting.Even his sweat tasted sweet.

Dorianne Lauxfrom The Book of Men

41

The Embrace

I have never been& likely will never go to the spot on the earthwhere my mother’s ashes are buried.People do not understand.Their eyes harden.But I take comfort in the facts:the grass there lengthens,rusted leaves fall & rot,industry’s soldiersmarch across the letters of her name,& today, when the small girl in the book shopin her white toile princess dress twirls & twirls,her throat warbling with glee,jumps into the laughing eyes of her mother,their arms & bodies clasped,their heat radiant & necessaryas if they had never been torn apart,my mother’s papery armis again entwined with mineas we plod from the hospital ward’s shower stalldown a dim hall, thin cotton gowntight across her behind, when she,in one of her last miracles—as if a lithe Fred Astaire& against all evidence—kicks both feet in the air heel-to-heel& squeals, “I am clean! I am clean!Oooooh-weeeee! I am clean!”Thus her eyes & bliss. Thus her arms& bliss. There she is. My mother.In that embrace. There.

Crystal Williamsfrom the website Oregon Poetic Voices

42

White Lies

The lies I could tell,when I was growing uplight-bright, near-white,high-yellow, red-bonedin a black place,were just white lies.

I could easily tell the white folksthat we lived uptown,not in that pink and greenshanty-fied shotgun sectionalong the tracks. I could actlike my homemade dressescame straight out the windowof Maison Blanche. I could evenkeep quiet, quiet as kept,like the time a white girl said(squeezing my hand), Nowwe have three of us in this class.

But I paid for it every timeMama found out.She laid her hands on me,then washed out my mouthwith Ivory soap. Thisis to purify, she said,and cleanse your lying tongue.Believing her, I swallowed sudsthinking they’d workfrom the inside out.

Natasha Tretheweyfrom Domestic Work

43

In the House of Immigrants

After milk, the kittens spill out of their box,weary mother cat snapping at them,too young for so many babies. In the bedroomthe boy bows his cello painfullydown the hall, Mozart. He loves his practicemore than ball with the boys who call himthrough the summer’s open window. The grandfathersmokes, reads his Hungarian newspapermoving his lips. The mother cookssome nice chicken with garlic, some boiledpotatoes, and our children run in and outof the house as if there were not enough timeto live because there isn’t, the solstice sunalready gone below the oaks looming over us,and I argue with the father.

He loves our countryno matter what, he says. There mustbe sacrifices, our voices beginning to riseabove the cello, above the children,above the kitchen noise until everyone freezes,stares at us fearfully and with disappointment.We’ve come too far to stop. I’m notinterested in details he says, onlythe principle is important, his hands shakingbetween us and a wronged light cast downon his face until his mother stepsfrom the kitchen and tells us with her eyes to stop.She shakes her finger at her husband and sayshis name, stressing the syllables the way a mothercalls her child home across the darkneighborhood and then she turns to me.I was only a child she saysThey lined you up without a wordand shot you like a dog.I won’t listen to Russian music.I don’t care if you say it is beautiful.I won’t read Russian books.I don’t care what you say.They buried people in the school yard where I played.

Bruce Weiglfrom Archaeology of the Circle; What Saves Us

44

At Pegasus

They are like those crazy women who tore Orpheus when he refused to sing,

these men grinding in the strobe & black lights of Pegasus. All shadow & sound.

“I’m just here for the music,” I tell the man who asks me to the floor. But I have held

a boy on my back before. Curtis & I used to leap barefoot into the creek; dance

among maggots & piss, beer bottles & tadpoles slippery as sperm;

we used to pull off our shirts & slap music into our skin. He wouldn’t know me now

at the edge of these lovers’ gyre, glitter & steam, fire, bodies blurred sexless

by the music’s spinning light. A young man slips his thumb into the mouth of an old one,

& I am not that far away. The whole scene raw & delicate as Curtis’s foot gashed

on a sunken bottle shard. They press hip to hip, each breathless as a boy

carrying a friend on his back. The foot swelling green as the sewage in that creek.

45

We never went back. But I remember his weight better than I remember

my first kiss. These men know something I used to know.

How could I not find them beautiful, the way they dive & spill into each other,

the way the dance floor takes them, wet & holy in its mouth.

Terrance Hayesfrom Muscular Music

46

Serving with Gideon

Now I remember: in our town the druggistprescribed Coca-Cola mostly, in taperedglasses to us, and to the elevatorman in a paper cup, so he coulddrink it elsewhere because he was black.

And now I remember The Legion—gamblingin the back room, and no women but girls, old boyswho ran the town. They were generous,to their sons or the sons of friends.And of course I was almost one.

I remember winter light closingits great blue fist slowly eastwardalong the street, and the dark then, deepas war, arched over a radio showcalled the thirties in the great old U.S.A.

Look down, stars—I was almostone of the boys. My mother was foldingher handkerchief; the library seethed and sparked;right and wrong arced; and carefullyI walked with my cup toward the elevator man.

William Staffordfrom An Oregon Message

47

Bibliography

Baker, Lois. “Elegy for a Stepmother.”

Man Covered with Bees. Howlett, 2001. Print.

Brown, Fleda. “I Return to Fayetteville after Twenty Years.”

Reunion. U of Wisconsin P, 2007. Print.

Davis, Cortney. “The Smoke We Make Pictures Of.”

Details of Flesh. Calyx, 1997. Print.

Hayes, Terrance. “At Pegasus.”

Muscular Music. Tia Chucha, 1999. Print.

Howell, Christopher. “Something Borrowed.”

Oregon Poetic Voices. Web.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. “A Break from the Bush.”

Neon Vernacular. Wesleyan Poetry Series, 1993. Print.

---. “Thanks.”

Neon Vernacular. Wesleyan Poetry Series, 1993. Print.

Laux, Dorianne. “Bakersfield, 1969.”

The Book of Men. New York: Norton, 2011. Print.

Levine, Philip. “Library Days.”

News of the World. Borzoi, 2009. Print.

48

Mueller, Lisel. “When I am Asked.”

Waving from Shore., Louisiana State U P, 1989. Print.

---. “Curriculum Vitae.”

Alive Together: New & Selected Poems. Louisiana State U P, 1996. Print.

Scates, Maxine. “Her Voice.”

Undone. New Issues Series. Western Michigan U, 2011. Print.

Stafford, William. “Serving with Gideon.”

An Oregon Message. 1987. Print.

Trethewey, Natasha. “White Lies.”

Domestic Work. Graywolf, 1999. Print.

Venn, George. “Forgive Us . . .”

Off The Main Road. Prescott St., 1978. Print.

Weigl, Bruce. “In the House of Immigrants.”

Archaeology of the Circle. Grove, 1999. Print.

Williams, Crystal. “The Embrace.”

Oregon Poetic Voices. Web.