

Paperback
-
SHIP THIS ITEMIn stock. Ships in 6-10 days.PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781899179992 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Wings Press |
Publication date: | 01/01/2006 |
Pages: | 40 |
Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Lost and Certain of It
By Bryce Milligan
Wings Press
Copyright © 2006 Bryce MilliganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-899179-99-2
CHAPTER 1
Lost and certain of it
Lost and certain of it, the woods crowd in
allowing only glimpses of the track
that was so clear and broad and well traveled
only moments back where the sun fell bright
between the leaves to dapple the mast, but
lost and certain of it, the woods crowd in
spinning the senses like leaves in a wind
risen from the past to obscure the path
that was so clear and broad and well traveled.
A broad green stream appears for a moment
strewn with rippled light and autumn's soft flames.
Lost and certain of it, the woods crowd in
and the stream slips away into the deeper shade,
taking with it the desire for the path
that was so clear and broad and well traveled,
taking with it the memory of the last
dregs of love and I am glad that I am
lost and certain of it.
Let the woods crowd out
all that is clear and broad and well traveled.
Summers in the Country
for Tino Villanueva
Summers in the country, I was the city boy
up from Dallas to visit the farm, up to visit
up to explore up to no good up to corrupt (those
old ladies said behind their curtains) those
country girls those twelve-year-old cowgirls
who snuck beers behind the rodeo stands and
those boys who talked about which cows were
best who wondered what the hell I found so
interesting about the damn grave yard and
why did I always have a damn book with me
and was I writing down notes to give their
damn mothers or what.
Summers in the country
I was Huckleberry looking for Jim and a river
I was Woody looking for a song and glory I was
Meg trying to tesser and Davy trying to trap
the perfect coon for the perfect hat and trying
to get it all down on a backpocket steno pad
taking shorthand on life and getting curiouser
and curiouser about how my parents survived
this damn town at all.
Summers in the country
I drove grandpa's air conditioned tractor
while field hands bent double down the long rows
sometimes singing chopping cotton always sweating
everyone of them a philosopher of labor
a poet of the machete an Odysseus
making his way back home every one of them
knowing more about the land than I ever would
in a lifetime of summers in the country.
Wild mustard
for Mance
Sudden sunlight steams the wild mustard,
heavy headed with the vanishing mist,
and for miles the scent makes the sodden heat
worth enduring: windows down, elbow slung
against the warm damp wind.
All along this southern highway clouds
rise out of the ground to surround treetop
islands, each mysterious just so long
as it takes the gray incensed fog to fade
into the yellow light.
One hot May morning thirty years gone
I walked these Navasota bottomlands
with old man Lipscomb: "I's up way early
for a bluesman," and he laughed at the sun. We stood in that rich light
until Mama's sausage and biscuits
drew us inside to a day of stories
and guitar licks I would never get right –
not even understand until I smelled
wild mustard in your hair.
The silence inside the city
I wait for sleep
like some late bus
with the A/C
vents screwed tight
and the windows
opened wide to the night
to the blatant moon
filled like an autumn pie
with memories –
when the jazz begins
to cut through the traffic,
floating out from
the neon-drenched cafes
and acid-thin guitar licks
sizzle down from some radio
and some woman's talking
too loud to God
while a dumpster lid
screeches open
and shut
open and
shut
and all I can hear
is me thinking
of you
Where were you
Where were you when
the pecans fell and
I crawled all afternoon
alone among the mast
to gather this late harvest
together with the old tomcat
who lay sunning himselfmissing your rare touch
I wanted you when
the shattered shells were
scattered across the news-
papers on our oldest table
Where were you when
the fall winds rattled
sash on sill and whistled
shrill as the memories
that rise with the
autumn aroma
of these southern pies
Trying not to fall
for Joy Harjo
There is a woman with a saxophone
blowing the blues out of time
raising tones like thunderheads
and tones like lightning,
tones like the gray mist
rising on an Oklahoma river.
There is a woman with a saxophone,
golden horn handed down
one prophet to another
one shaman to the next
beginning as a scrannel flute
golden reed from the Chattahoochee
drawn at dawn and cured inside
a medicine bundle somewhere
in America, somewhere
in time
flint carved its first song,
the song of awakening
after long sleep, after death.
There is a woman with a saxophone
breathing in the same air
drawn through the sacred stem
when no white hand had laid claim
or shed blood anywhere
in America.
There is a woman with a saxophone,
woman of wind and water
blowing the blues out of time
woman with hair like the raven
that hangs in the sky calling the future
as he sees it, hair blue
blue as blackbird wings in sunshine
with eyes like black holes
in time, ends and beginnings
quick as grace notes.
There is a woman with a saxophone
on the banks of the Muscogee
rising into the cloud of her music
rising like sacred smoke
rising like stomp dance bonfire flames
rising like warriors bound
for the long paths of the milky way.
There is a woman with a saxophone
trying
not to fall.
Five Years Gone
for Jane Kenyon
Behind the house, Jane's garden is overgrown;
between there and Eagle Pond only ghosts:
trains that run silent over the grade's gray stones
littered with rusted steel spikes, heavy bolts.
Beside the lake, a favored spot, good for sun,
good for water, only slightly wilder than
Jane's garden where her spring ministrations
kept the volunteer maples down, so eager
to see the seasons in and out, in and out.
Down the road a mile there is a stone where
anonymous hands swap scraps of poetry
and sea shells for pine cones, single ear rings
or other scraps of poetry, some of it
Jane's, mostly not, some taking, some giving.
Just over the fence, a small apple tree drops
the sweetest fruit I have ever tasted.
His last pocketknife
Granddaddy honed his pocketknives
until their blades were slivered winter moons,
black-backed silver crescents, razors but
useless in the end, too fragile to carve.
Old ones were retired to a cigar box
beside his bed where they lay with his pipes,
the blackened briars that killed him.
He clutched a new knife with dead
pallid fingers when we found him,
chair rocked to the wall, his hourglass
whetstone shattered on the porch,
the black shards so thin
they resembled the tea leaves in a bone
china cup. All my life since I have honed
his last pocketknife against too-soft stones.
Visiting the Painter Lady:
Canyon, Texas, 1917
Once a week for six weeks, while farmboys died in France
Pauline visited Georgia – packed up her precious paints,
her half-finished flower scenes, cranked up the Model T
and rattled down the rutted wagon track that led
away west to the newly grated gravel road,
gearing down and down toward the top of the one long hill,
pausing there to catch a breath of wind and pretend
for a moment that the scent of scrub cedar was sweet pine,
then sailing the other side in neutral, fast enough to skim
the sometime-quicksand crust of the Canadian River ford.
Pauline spent an hour with the painter lady at the College,
two neat brick buildings overlooking Palo Duro Canyon,
that sudden red rift across tawny plains so stark
as to inspire imagination in a fence post, just to fill in
the colossal emptiness. Pauline painted scenes
of mountain meadows she had never seen, portraits
of unborn daughters in starched pinafores,
a woman in a grass skirt with a ukulele. Georgia
shaped colors: rich red rifts across tawny dreams
beneath looming orchid skies.
Reading Victoria's Secrets
I. 1991
I'll never know what Victoria wears
beneath these vintage dresses,
granny calicos hugging slim hips
no granny ever had, with
lacy necklines that dip too deep
into my too macho imagination.
Into this high school classroom
she strolls hipper than I
recall any hippies of twenty
years back, her black eyes
determined to tap
her own rhythms
though she fears they
may be echoes only.
Here they come, I think,
the poems of young ennui
of love and suffering
and sure enough
I have Victoria's secrets
open before me, laid out
like polished river stones
each with a history.
My desk strewn with desires
and questions and power,
I carefully select the blue pencil.
II. 1993
Into my college comp class she strolls
with a sheaf of poems beneath
her arm like an immigrant
with her papers, proof of the right
to be where no one should question
her right to be.
Cat like,
ready to pounce or run
weep or scream,
equally confused and confusing.
She has put her power somewhere
she cannot reach. It is growing
and cannot be edited.
She will
marry the bastard and vanish,
leaving unfinished papers
and poems smoldering
like coals in my hands.
III. 1995
He beat her. The bastard
raised his fist and hammered
his frustrations home at home,
claimed that he was the poet,
not she.
Then Victoria took this secret
and wrung poetry from it like
strong women have always wrung
sex out of linens
beside thousands of streams
for thousands of years
in the sight of the whole village.
Victoria stood up in her black and silver,
took to the microphone
and dripped that man out of her soul
one word at a time, out of her body
until all the machismo infection
was drained away.
I know what Victoria is like
beneath those vintage dresses:
maid and maker,
granite block and steel chisel,
muse and mother,
seething with
secrets within
secrets within
secrets.
Instructions for the funeral
Find the right hill
the highest, rockiest
in this too flat land,
that one north of town
with no roads, no paths
but water tracks
Do your best to avoid
the law; follow only
the oldest conventions;
especially avoid
any professionals
in the business of death
Cut no living wood
but seek out the scrub
cedar brush blown down
and weave a lattice couch,
cover it with the old
four-stripe Hudson Bay
Lay me out in the morning
in my oldest jeans
and the red Guatemalan shirt
with buffalo nickel buttons
to provide the crows
with whatnots
Monuments:
the things that remain
to remind us of what we were
before we were without that
which prompts us to remember,
but here the monument is a thing
of air, a column like Jehovah
in the Sinai, first flame then nothing
but smoke, dust and smoke.
The monument
in the mind is an emptiness
in the air where once
was flesh and blood,
concrete and steel,
but only the emptiness
in the mind remains.
The children gathered
in this classroom have built
the only monument that will remain,
burnt it into their futures
to keep as we have always kept
the deaths of kings and presidents,
astronauts and princesses,
and old men making salt
by the sea:
"Where were you when ...?"
"What were you wearing ...?"
Steel is always simply steel,
subject to the slow fires of rust,
but this monument of smoke
remains, terrible
as Jehovah in the desert.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lost and Certain of It by Bryce Milligan. Copyright © 2006 Bryce Milligan. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Foreword, by Sudeep Sen,
Author's Note,
Lost and Certain of It,
Lost and certain of it,
Summers in the country,
Wild mustard,
The silence inside the city,
Where were you,
Trying not to fall,
Five years gone,
His last pocketknife,
Visiting the painter lady,
Reading Victoria's secrets,
Instructions for the funeral,
Monuments,
Water's rising,
Revising a story among wolves,
Between one crack and another,
Lightning,
Metaphor,
Stone conundrums,
She sets the pace,
Songs,
Lady Rides the Rails,
Black hair,
My Lady of the Woods,
Look Who's Coming Now,
All My Texas Rivers,
Dark Freight,