“His language is clear, without tricks or fancy moves, yet his directness is powerful, and the effects are human”—Paul Zimmer, Georgia Review
“His language is clear, without tricks or fancy moves, yet his directness is powerful, and the effects are human”—Paul Zimmer, Georgia Review
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Overview
“His language is clear, without tricks or fancy moves, yet his directness is powerful, and the effects are human”—Paul Zimmer, Georgia Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602230507 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2009 |
| Series: | Alaska Writer Laureate |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
For the Sake of the Light
New and Selected PoemsBy TOM SEXTON
University of Alaska Press
Copyright © 2009 University of Alaska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-050-7
Chapter One
EidersAfter a night of wind and snow I saw them out in the bay moving in a circle as wide as the moon can be to a child as white as ice from Labrador, as round as the Oh in my throat. I saw them far out in the bay after a night of wind and snow.
Passamaquoddy Bay
The moon was lifting the bay like a bowl of hammered silver from the dark, or so it seemed to us who had not seen it for many years. We left the house and walked past summer cottages to the water where we watched in silence, our tongues as mute as lead. Later, we placed our last bowl of blackberries on the table by the window.
Lubec, Maine
Sitting high on their hill above the bay the white houses seemed about to take flight into a swirling early autumn snow. I know that those old houses were not swans, but all night I listened to them calling to each other from the gathering storm.
Night-herons
A cold wind that promises snow has stripped the maples' deep red fire. Was it only yesterday when crickets were singing in that field? Nothing remains of the autumn I thought was encased in amber. Even the marsh seems old and worn now that the night-herons have flown.
At East Machias
The moon's pale light is a ghost in a white shift moving downhill past houses that mirror its whiteness as it goes. If a door opens, it will enter as it always has. At the bottom of the town, it will slip under the tongue of a tidal river before emerging, weightless, on the other shore.
In Waldo County, Maine
The small milk-white deer called "Tinkerbell" by those who rose at dawn to watch her cross the same field for almost a year is dead, shot by a hunter on opening day: the game warden was amazed by all the fuss, so many neighbors grieving for a legal deer and their talking of a pact to let her live; he saw her brought in in the bed of a pickup to be tagged at the store; she hardly moved the scale when weighed: a small albino deer, nothing more.
Crossing the Blueberry Barrens
No one else was on the road when we drove across blueberry barrens glowing like wind-blown embers. We gleaned berries from the edges of fields raked by migrant workers who had moved on into Nova Scotia. Glaciers had scraped the land to the bone. Dusk came on. Ground fog moved in. Boulders rose like the prows of ships, their long oars muffled and steady. And then the narrow road began to descend to a small river town's empty main street that was as dark and as wet as a seal.
A Harvard Millerite Ascends
Harvard, Mass., 1844 When the fateful day was about to dawn, the day the preacher's calculations promised Christ's return, his animals were left to wander the fields. Nothing of this world would be missed. He regretted only that he lived in a valley and would not be among the first taken up and purified. His bible was all he carried to the roof. The promised return filled his cup. The preacher had told him to wear a white robe and he did. He watched the stars fade and began to weep. What of the comet's flight at noon that promised Judgment Day? He stood shivering in his dew-soaked robe. Dark clouds gathered, and it began to snow.
Uncle Eli Glover Moving
after an etching by David Blackwood 1952, but the men in the boat towing Uncle Eli's house to the mainland seem medieval in their long coats and cloth hats. Their hawklike faces could be those of weary pilgrims. One of the men toward the stern of the boat has placed his large hands on the engine's cover as if to steady it. He's the only one who has turned to look at the light-struck house rising and falling like an iceberg. It's tied to the boat by a rope that disappears into a swell moving toward the door held fast by a plank. One mishap and the house, filling floor by floor, will go to the bottom of the bay. Their government has ordered them to leave the island where their families have been born and buried century after salt-stained century. What small faith they still have is in their sturdy boat, black as the inside of Jonah's whale, that is taking them away, towing Eli's house in its wake.
The Banishment of Saint Columba
"You will bring a heathen to our Lord, Jesus Christ for every widow's tears your arrogance has caused," the bishop said. And Columba rose without a word and approached the small boat made of wicker and covered with skins that would take him away. Columba bent to place a bit of sod inside each sandal so Ireland would be with him in exile. He watched a river falling from the hills, a river fat with salmon in its belly. Never again would he taste their flesh or kneel to scoop clear water from a druid's spring. He gazed at fields he would never see again because of his pride and the blood it caused to flow. He would be a fisher of men like his Lord, Jesus Christ, whose soul was as white as the hawthorn's blossom.
Trawl
The morning's snow was turning to rain when I saw the island far out in the bay, a white island that I had never seen, an island shaped like the fabulous whale that rose from the sea beside a battered curragh with three monks huddled inside. Storm after storm had set their course. They hauled their boat onto the whale's back and made a fire with the last of their turf before they knelt in prayer. They cut a cross into the whale's back and feasted on its fat. In the morning, one of them heard a gull. They followed its white shadow to the shore. I watched as the island slowly disappeared and the narrow bay became the bay again where yesterday a dead right whale calf was found wrapped in line cut from a trawl.
Arnprior, Ontario
I leave the hotel before dawn while the town is still sleeping on the advice of a local woman who saw wild trillium blooming by the river. A beaver slaps its tail. What would the French voyageurs have thought of my morning's quest? Let the ledger record that on the 11th of May 2005 below the confluence of the Mattawa and Ottawa rivers where the mist was burning off one red, three yellow, and several white trillium were observed at the edge of a stand of ancient pine.
On the Empire Builder Heading West
On the night after we left Chicago, Mennonite farmers were ready to step down at Minot when the train began to slow. A stranger said they follow the harvest until their brethren's fields are chaff and husk, as if time were somehow divisible by grace. How odd it was that the women's white bonnets seemed so much whiter in the dark, as a constellation first seen at dusk seems to deepen with the coming on of night. We watched them move away from the station beneath a cloudless sky that promised frost while we paced and paced, waiting to move on to Montana and the Cascades by dawn.
Burial Ground
Past the man who was kind to his wife and children, past the woman of biblical age, past the Grand Army of the Republic markers, past the child who knew only one winter, past the peddler who sold needles and thread, someone has knelt in the snow to fasten a Christmas wreath, with a spray of holly and a red velvet bow, to a defaced slate- now a door for the dead to pass through if only to see earth wearing the moon for a crown.
The Emperor
When his entourage arrives at a village, soldiers and their families are summoned to cheer the emperor's every word. The woman whose son lost both legs is kept far beyond the gate. The emperor has no time for the weak. He must keep the barbarians at bay even if the skulls of the dead outnumber the pebbles in a stream. This is the emperor's terrible burden. His banner proclaims "freedom for all." People tremble at his approach.
Broad Pass, September
Imagine that you woke blinking like a mole to this world of golden birch and aspen, to ridge after ridge of tundra as red as any matador's cape, to spruce and willow greener now that there is no other green, to the saffron- yellow of low plants on the shore of a narrow lake, to snow on high peaks, so white it must have fallen while you slept.
Cow Parsnip
August. For a few days the leaves of the cow parsnip, just now beginning to fade, seem to hold the brightest green in the woods. On their tall stalks, most of the flowers have gone to seed. Suddenly, yellow warblers drop from the sky and begin to feed, causing the flower heads to tremble slightly like a plate passed from hand to hand along a pew.
Mountain Bluebirds
The female is the first you see flitting from branch to branch of an apple tree, the sky-blue male, more cautious perhaps, appears a moment later, and a morning that began with sleet is suddenly all promise. Notice the blossoms and how your old shoes, wet from walking through grass, seem new.
Beluga Point
Remember those summer nights we drove the narrow road winding along Turnagain Arm to look for beluga whales and the inarticulate joy we felt when we saw a pod rising from the water like bright beads on a string of pearls, as if their rising was something we understood in our bones? They seldom appear now, but people still pull over and stop to watch for them when the tide is coming in. Hour after hour, they sit like family members at a wake.
Cottonwood Seed
Seed pods float down in long strings from the trees like DNA, or how I imagine DNA must look, the path is as white as October's snow; if there is a place for hope in their code, it must be that when we vanish, taking the earth with us, they will drift across the universe to a saner place.
Porcupine
Its movement on the ground is that of a bag of stones rolled downhill, a spilled quiver of black-tipped arrows, but now, on this cold March morning, it is raising the dark flag of itself to the top of an ancient tree like an explorer claiming the world in the name of all that is Porcupine.
At the turning of the Season
The new year's first snow- bunting and open water on the Talkeetna River to the south of here. Our world is still wind and snow. Above timberline, in the lea of a lichen- covered rock, we discover a wind-stunted spruce. At its base, rhododendron, our Lapland Bay Rose, that will show small red flowers when the snow-packed trail we climbed is lost in alder.
That other World
Out of heavy cloud cover, a shaft of light falling on the only leaf of a devil's club plant that has turned bright yellow a month before it should. Could this, and not the arching sky, be the portal to that other world, the place where the gods, disheveled and slightly sulfurous, enter ours trailing bright red berries for a cape?
Summer Waterfall
When berries are beginning to form in the marsh, you can see it falling like a braid of silver from its ridge. If you want to, you can find a way to climb beside it, but spray will soak you to the skin as you climb and your fingertips will turn to ice. When you reach the top of the ridge, you might discover a pool too deep to wade across and see another braid falling from another ridge. If you keep going, you will climb through cloud to the deep snow that is its source, or you can linger with me in the marsh.
Butterfly Lake
I put on my hat and the ancient oilskin slicker bought in a thrift shop for a dollar and walk to the old beaver lodge at the edge of the rain-pocked lake to pick blueberries that have finally ripened for our breakfast. When a drop of water dances on the griddle I pour the berry-stained batter. We have butter and maple syrup on the table. I'm so content that wings would cover my shoulders if I were to take off my shirt.
Juncos
They're the first sparrows to return north before spring's halting green. I watch one hopping from bare branch to bare ground: its song is like the sound of a telegraph key: dit ... dit ... dit ... insects ... in ... bark ... dit ... dit ... dit ... stop.
Snow Buntings
If the red fox that hunts along the inlet still mottled with late spring ice should appear now with its long tail moving up and down like the handle of a pump, the wet snow that fell all night will slow it down until those small chiaroscuro birds that are the salt on winter's tail rise, dip, swirl, and disappear.
Steller's Jay
A strong wind has stripped the crab apple of its sour fruit. I watch a Steller's jay take one peck, complain, and adjust its lustrous blue-black cape. When it spots me watching from the window, it tilts its head in my direction as if it were a naturalist about to give me an ill-fitting name.
Steller's Sea Cow, 1742-1768
Steller took it as a sign from a benevolent God when he killed the first sea cow. Commander Bering was dead. The shipwrecked crew had skin as white as the paper he used to sketch "that marvelous beast that moved across a bed of kelp the way a cow moves across a field before it raised its head and snorted like a horse." Steller sketched. He would be remembered now. They boiled its flesh to give them strength. Scurvy was the ghost that haunted them. Those who made it back to Siberia told of a land to the east and a fabulous cow whose flesh would feed a crew of otter hunters for a year while they collected pelts so fine and soft the Czar would envy them. "Its flesh was tender veal, its fat was almond oil." Wounded, the last calf sank before it disappeared.
Ursus Maritimus, the Polar Bear
Tourists come and go in the hotel's lobby where it has stood, whiter than December's drifting snow, decade after decade in a case thanks to Pipeline Real Estate and Jonas Brothers taxidermists of Seattle. It's easy to imagine it sniffing the air for danger or for the scent of a seal that has dropped its guard as it must have for a moment before the hunter's bullet stopped its heart. It stands now impervious to the seasons. I watch a woman pretend to put her arm around its shoulder as if it were the lover she has always wanted. Her girlfriend takes their picture. A man, red faced from holding his stomach in, takes her place and hands his camera to his trophy wife. At night, a cleaning woman pulling a cart comes by to wet and slowly clean the glass.
Driving toward Nenana
Coming down from Broad Pass onto flats quick with quaking aspen and the occasional larch's pale green needles, past sloughs heavy with glacial silt and lined with brush thick with mosquitoes that fit like a shirt, past marsh after marsh of pale blue iris, if you glance over your shoulder: the summit of Denali, massive and ethereal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from For the Sake of the Light by TOM SEXTON Copyright © 2009 by University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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
New PoemsEiders
Passamaquoddy Bay
Lubec, Maine
Night-Herons
At East Machias
In Waldo County, Maine
Crossing the Blueberry Barrens
A Harvard Millerite Ascends
Uncle Eli Glover Moving
The Banishment of Saint Columba
Trawl
Arnprior, Ontario
On the Empire Builder Heading West
Burial Ground
The Emperor
Broad Pass, September
Cow Parsnip
Mountain Bluebirds
Beluga Point
Cottonwood Seed
Porcupine
At the Turning of the Season
That Other World
Summer Waterfall
Butterfly Lake
Juncos
Snow Buntings
Steller's Jay
Steller's Sea Cow, 1742-1768
Ursus Maritimus, the Polar Bear
Driving Toward Nenana
Cottonwood
Mountain Lake
Walking the Marsh
Mew Gulls
Snowy Owl
Looking to the West
Brown Creeper
A Necessary Poem
A Snowy Morning in May
The Man Who Learned Dena'ina
Clear and Cold
Two Ravens in a Tree
Tugs
Under Polaris
Dawson City, Yukon Territory
Signs of Spring
Wild Swans
Saint Lucia's Day
The Kite Flyers
Redpolls
The Iris Hunters
from Terra Incognita (1974)
Terra Incognita
Uncle Paul
Astoria
At Daybreak
December
from Late August on the Kenai River (1991)
Poolshark
Anchorage
Homer
Trapper Creek
The Wedding of Cecelia Demidorf
Compass Rose
Nikolaevsk
Saint Marys
On Reading Wang Wei
Late August on the Kenai River
Open Season
Two Poems for the Solstice
Harvest
from A Bend Toward Asia (1993)
Kodiak
Yakutat
El Dorado
Chitina
Gulkana Berry Pickers
The Princess Line
Chenega
Cygnus
-60
De Rerum Natura: or Of Nature's Things
In the Snow
Ritual
Waiting for Spring
Aleutians
Iris
Extending the Range
Springs
After the August Rains
Wolves
Pass Creek
Hurricane
Walking to the Beaver Pond with My Wife
On the Russian River
The Marsh in Spring
Sweet Spring Grasses
Crows on Bare Branches
Wind
Muskeg
from A Blossom of Snow (1995)
Naming
Winter Landscape
Burnet
Lin He-Jing
Towns
Lament
King Island
Beluga
Pleiades
Transformations
Marsh Violets
Crows
Homage to Neidecker
Fiddlehead
from Leaving for a Year (1998)
Thinking of Yu Fu on a Summer Evening
Leaving for a Year
Crossing the Divide
At Feng-Hsiang
Poem Begun on Mother's Day
Portage La Prairie
Melting Snow
from Autumn in the Alaska Range (2000)
On the Death of a Homeless Man
Rowing Toward the Spirit World
For Art and Anna on Their Wedding Day
Spirit Houses at Tazlina
The Alaska Range
The Cross Fox
Rowan Tree
A Blessing
Landscape
A Letter to Tu Fu
Touch-Me-Not
Solstice
In Glacial Light
The Bear that Visits Our Cabin
Willow Ptarmigan
Lynx
Blue Flag
Wilson's Warblers
The Mountains in Winter
Winter Solstice
The Gift of Snow
Winter Finch
Denali
Poem About the Moon
Rising from the Dark
April
Poem Written Near Hurricane
Autumn in the Alaska Range
Numen
Paradise Valley
Setosa
Epitaph
For the Sake of the Light
from World Brimming Over (2003)
By an Abandoned Railroad Line
In the Kitchen
Butcher Bird
American Dippers
Pastoral
Kinglet
At Fort Egbert
Nearing Solstice
Bohemian Waxwing
At Dusk
Teslin Lake, Y.T.
A Flicker's Nest
The Mountains
Blueberries