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Overview
The poems in Devin Johnston's Traveler cross great distances, from the Red Hills of Kansas to the Rough Bounds of the Scottish Highlands, following weather patterns, bird migrations, and ocean voyages. Less literally, these poems move through translations and protean transformations. Their subjects are often next to nothing in several senses: cloud shadows racing across a valley before dusk, the predawn expectation of a child's birth, or the static-electric charge of clothing fabric. Throughout, Johnston offers vivid glimpses of the phenomenal world: "He describes objects with his hands and his eyes, noting texture, heft, and fit" (Boston Review). Equally, one finds a keen attention to sound in the patterning of subtle rhymes and rhythms, demonstrating "care and precision with line and pause" (Poetry).
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781466886667 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date: | 12/02/2014 |
Sold by: | Macmillan |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 80 |
File size: | 132 KB |
About the Author
Born in 1970, Devin Johnston was raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of three previous books of poetry; as well as two books of prose, including Creaturely and Other Essays, reflections on the natural world. He works as an editor for Flood Editions, a nonprofit publishing house, and teaches at Saint Louis University in Missouri.
Born in 1970, Devin Johnston spent his childhood in North Carolina. He is the author of six previous books of poetry and two books of prose, including Creaturely and Other Essays. He works for Flood Editions, an independent publishing house, and teaches at Saint Louis University, in Missouri, where he lives.
Read an Excerpt
Traveler
By Devin Johnston, First edition 2011
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2011 Devin JohnstonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8666-7
CHAPTER 1
FROM MEDICINE LODGE
From Medicine Lodge
to Coldwater, from Coldwater
to Protection and beyond,
this undulating line
intersects no industry
yet slows to Central,
resumes a bare number,
and finally frays
in shallow tracks
where Black Kettle
and Standing Feather
took their geologic time
and left no cairn.
Salt and gypsum collapsed
to form a basin
shadows race across,
their smooth momentum
broken only
by a spindly windmill
with its corrugated trough
or scratchy, windrattled
cottonwood, a graph
of fluctuating force,
anything upright
under revision.
A twist of hair
threads the ring
of a dried-up sink
as stackenclouds and fibrous
sonderclouds draw silver
from common sagebrush,
or waneclouds streak
the afternoon with grains
of polished wood—
only to kindle flame
as everything shuts down
but cloudworks, unfinished
parts of a world.
NOTHING SONG
after William IX, Duke of Aquitaine
I made this up from nothing.
It's not myself I sing,
or love, or anything
that has a source.
I dreamed these words while riding
on my horse.
I've neither youth nor age.
Ambitions out of range,
I feel no joy or rage
to see them go.
One midnight worked the change
that made me so.
I wonder, do I wake
from dreams, or dream I wake?
Beneath a sheet, I shake
and clutch my heart,
though part of me—aloof, opaque—
remains apart.
For such uncertainty
I've found no remedy
in psychotherapy
or sedatives.
I rummage through debris
where nothing lives.
A friend I've never met,
unknown to me as yet,
has kindled no regret
or happiness,
no tender sobriquet
to curse or bless.
As coldly radiant
as stars, and light-years distant,
this expectation can't
embrace a life,
but shines on, ignorant
of lust and strife.
My song of nothing done,
I ride from Avignon
and leave my words to one
who turns a key
to find the deadbolt drawn
and stable empty.
EXPECTING
what will she
now a she
trailing clouds
yet hearing our
muffled voices
all the while
from this dark
world and wide
what will she
mew or bray
as any envoy
might derive
an embryon
from animal
or amnion
from tender lamb
though tethered to
a human form
an embryon
in amnion
or bloom of jellies
at the whim
of storm and tide
the ocean's roar
above, around,
and then inside
AUBADE
A vacant hour
before the sun—
and with it a valve's
pneumatic hush,
the deep and nautical
clunk of wood,
chanson du ricochet
of rivet gun,
trowel tap,
and bolt drawn—
the moon sets
and water breaks.
Curled within
a warm pleroma,
playing for time,
you finally turn
and push your face
toward November's
glint of frost,
grains of salt,
weak clarities
of dawn.
CESAREAN
Graphing pain,
the toco monitor
scrolls a white
bounding line
on a blue field:
not heraldry but
a lightning flash
illuminates
the rugged range
of your estate,
from deep crevasse
to trackless slopes
of Traversette.
Dryly tapping,
a clerical ghost
prints a pan-
oramic strip.
In a sudden charge,
the air contracts
a vast expanse
(remote and thin)
to this bare room
where surgeons cut
a Gordian knot
and everyone
says wonderful
when they forget.
TRAVELER
From the foot of Cotopaxi
and across the Gulf
a Blackburnian warbler
follows a pulse,
follows Polaris
and the Pole's magnetic field
through travail
and travel's long ordeal,
until he drops
to a black walnut's
pinnate leaves
tossing like waves
in the North Sea
and glances toward
my lamplit, stationary world
of smooth planes:
against a cloud,
his throat's flame.
FOREIGN OBJECT
The hours spent on transpacific flights
pass like a sandstorm through the Mongol steppes,
lodging a single grain—an irritant
to memory—within the furrowed cortex.
Nacred by revolving doubt, it grows
a pearl as black as the ocean depths
and lustrous as the moon
through sublimated ice.
This pearl outlives its host—and can be bought
in Shanghai, from an unassuming shop
on the French Concession's western edge.
The jeweler plucks it from a velvet box
and cups the pearl like a Dramamine
in the hollow of her outstretched palm.
She stands like that, expectantly,
revolving shapes to come.
ROGET'S THESAURUS
At the first surge of psychotic trance,
to ward it off or ride it out,
Peter Roget took up a list:
breeds of dogs, human bones, anatomies
of cloud, or forms of transport.
It steadied his mind to study the spokes
of wheels glimpsed through vertical slats:
van, wagon, whisky, tumbrel, truck;
the blur of whips and hooves,
ornate signage stripped of syntax.
Now, among aseptic cells
of Bonne Terre, Roget's thesaurus
circulates more than Malcolm X.
One offender, stout as a mule,
circles the yard while leafing through
a dog-eared passage (cf. trough)
from hole to eye to aperture and on:
outlet, inlet, orifice, throat,
channel, chimney, pit, pore,
sieve, riddle, borer, screw,
bodkin, needle, warder, gouge.
As an officer calls for head count,
the morning sun reticulates
filigree of chain link
and a curl of concertina wire.
It glances off the hubcap
of a distant Cadillac
joining the flow of traffic.
NOWHERE
Sifu John has left the dojo
and struck out on his own.
No more shit from Master Jong,
no endless adjudications
of single whip, no banquets,
belts, dues, or membership.
His only student—big dude
with the tight, slick ponytail
of Steven Seagal—
got lit and locked
a bartender in tiger claw,
then spent a night in jail.
Clearly distinguish
empty from full,
the classics instruct.
Mornings, feeling thick, John
crosses off his mother's list
at Schnucks, returning home
with tourniquets of plastic bags.
Evenings, sifu and student
grasp the sparrow's tail
beside a picnic pavilion
perched above the park's basin,
its pooling shadows
emptied of pedestrians.
As snow begins to fall,
they return to fundamentals
of Peng, Lu, Ji, An ...
slow as three-toed sloths
under the orange glare
of sodium lights
with all else thrown in darkness.
Getting nowhere.
SET APART
Set apart
from the compound
friction of forest,
a rough-barked
bur oak,
mostly trunk,
outlives
its understory.
A sapling in 1700,
it rose like smoke
from leaf litter,
a totem for those
who told tales
vertically,
every episode
the offspring of earth and sky.
Carotenoids flare
through its vascular system
in slow time,
releasing aromas
of black tea
and tobacco.
Winter-hardened,
the oak endures,
a column supporting
nothing but its own
fixed extension.
The fine point
of a feeding warbler—
a drifting spark
or cursor—
ghosts its crown.
COLD-BLOODED
Beyond a ring
of mercury light
nothing conspicuous
could survive
the coming night.
The rippling hunch
of a barred owl
propounds as yet
no prey, no rattle
in late September's
coil of fern.
A cold breath
of Brush Creek
gently rocks
joe-pye weed,
but skin still
radiates heat
from the setting sun.
Fever kindles
a turbulent flow
continuous with sleep,
shape-shifting
until an earthen
effigy uncurls
its cursive form
across the ridge.
The snake god
swallows an egg
as Draco slips
through tattered leaves.
Beyond the creek,
a white truck
catches the last
light of day
and sends it back.
HIGH AND LOW
Placid Pan
snores in the sun
as a thunderhead
comes to rest
on the canyon's rim.
From a hump
of high withers
a ridge descends
to a moist rhinarium
or the puckered phrase
e pluribus unum.
Bison bison,
periodic
as prairie fire,
graze its aftermath
of new grass,
their burnt heads
slung low
and panicked by any
cracked report.
The lightning bolt,
lord of everything,
drawn on a skull
in red ochre,
draws a herd
whose delicate hooves
thunder to raise
a cloud of dust.
STORM AND STURGEON
When a thunderstorm
trundles down the Wabash,
revealing the form
of flow in every flash,
northerlies lash
the walls that keep us warm,
rummaging grass,
scattering flock and swarm.
Beneath an icy
column thick as phlegm,
this cold coyote
of our river system
peers through a scrim
of silt and leaf debris
as lightning skims
the shoals of Harmonie.
As each percussion
shakes the sturgeon's bladder—
a loose vibration
felt in fleshy matter—
her switch-tail stirs
beds of hibernation,
bottom dwellers
lost in cloud formations.
TANGLED YARN
Darner, sewing needle,
exclamation damsel,
pennant, flying adder,
tang- or sanging eater,
fleeing eather, bluet,
steelyard, spindle, booklet,
skimmer, scarce or common,
sand or shadow dragon,
cruiser, shadow damsel,
devil's horse or saddle,
darning needle, dancer,
meadow hawk or glider,
water naiad, threadtail,
sylph or sprite or penny nail.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Traveler by Devin Johnston, First edition 2011. Copyright © 2011 Devin Johnston. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Epigraph,
FROM MEDICINE LODGE,
NOTHING SONG,
EXPECTING,
AUBADE,
CESAREAN,
TRAVELER,
FOREIGN OBJECT,
ROGET'S THESAURUS,
NOWHERE,
SET APART,
COLD-BLOODED,
HIGH AND LOW,
STORM AND STURGEON,
TANGLED YARN,
THE INLAND ROAD,
EARLY APRIL,
MARCO POLO,
AT SEA RANCH,
ORACLE BONES,
THIN PLACE,
RELATIVES,
APPETITES,
KID,
ROUGH PATCH,
CRUMBS,
STATIC,
A LOST NOTEBOOK,
THE YOUNG PRETENDER,
BURREN,
IONA,
THE ROUGH BOUNDS,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Devin Johnston,
Copyright,