Seven-Star Bird: Poems

by David Daniel

Overview

David Daniel explores a city-entire lives-swept clean off the map in this haunting debut

As breezes lap the shallow-tugged tide flow

And swallows twitter and skirt the dusk,

We lie within the wreckage of the stars-

The moon spill, our planets' pull-this sad machine.

—from "Seven-Star Bird"

You will not find Friendship, Texas; it now lies at the bottom of a lake of floodwater, forgotten. In Seven-Star Bird, David Daniel rescues the town's-and the poet's own family's-stories and memories, from an immigrant past and from the clutches of devastation. In a weaving of elliptical and elaborate voices, lyrics, and narratives, Daniel's debut collection-guided by Heraclitus-discovers an ethical, religious, and aesthetic antidote to the disasters of loss and disappointment, why the gods call down their inexplicable punishment, why we can never step into the same river twice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555973889
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	10/01/2003
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.24(d)

About the Author

David Daniel has been a carpenter, a clam digger, a tennis pro, and an assistant in the Harvard Medical School neuropathology lab. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and at Middlesex Academy Charter School. He is the author of the short story collection, Six Off 66.

Read an Excerpt

Seven-Star Bird

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By David Daniel

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2003 David Daniel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-388-4

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Chapter One

THE WORD As brutally as bees drive their tongues to flower, As gentle as that seems to us, So let us live our ordinary dying, This morning glory, this fiery star gone nod: Here's the pure tongue of words becoming As they also pass away: Listen, then kiss me: The last sound we'll hear will be the silence Of our first word finally formed, our first sweet and violent tasting. THE FOUNDING OF FRIENDSHIP, TEXAS The burial of Anna, age six months, First dead in the new land, Was a cause for celebration. Not only had her soul-they saw it!- Risen with a flock of scissortails To join Mary's virgin train above, But they knew, being gamblers also On the fleshy souls of cotton and maize, That she did not, in fact, rise But burrowed into the black soil To mingle with eternity here. After a year of traveling, the family Could finally stop, for the love of Anna And the promise of the land She had become, land that rose so slightly At the San Gabriel River, Where the only trees in sight Shimmer a string of emeralds On the dusty breast of Friendship, Texas. SUN, MOON, STARS, RAIN Ever since the dam was begun All roads but one wind out of Friendship, Texas, and most of those are flooded, Bridgeless, or wrecked by mesquite or dynamite. What's left of the jackrabbits, coyotes, Coons, skunks, and the most stubborn ghosts Takes a west road that is mostly clear. My grandfather said the year the state tied ribbons To the trees that God left on the same road, Shaking his head, then my family, and now these ... The only road still leading in comes from above. The sun rides on it, as does the moon, The stars, and, occasionally, the rain: These come freely to all places and never leave- Even to the godforsaken, the soulless And pastless, even to this shithole Which is, at least, a place. THE STAR-STEERED GEESE OF YANCY MILL, VIRGINIA for Donald and Doreen Davie Hundreds of geese gathered at the cow pond Late that late fall afternoon, their barking Barking hard against the mountains behind them: They were so alive the day Seemed to dawdle in its last light Before it gave over to the first stars That would lead the clambering V's Southward along the ridge. I imagined the geese as drunken sailors Headed for some fateful, ancient field, heroic And loud, but now I let them go-as birds- And think rather of those that waited behind In the darker dark to fly in pairs, the full galaxy Wheeling above them and the frost-lit grass below. They were the heroes I was waiting for: How terrifying it must have been, how beautiful. When I think of them, I think of you, As if your bodies, too, will pull through the air, Be held by it, guiding by the strange fires of night.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Seven-Star Bird by David Daniel Copyright © 2003 by David Daniel. 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.

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Editorial Reviews

Fusing history, folk wisdom, ancient religious thought, and a decidedly contemporary sense of the ironic, the poems of Seven-Star Bird are poems of homecoming and nowhere-a-home, of spiritual quest and of the earthly struggle to survive as a people and as a self. Daniel nimbly clocks and captures for us 'the terrible speed of beauty born and passing.'” —Carl Phillips

“These poems feel long pondered over, deep sought for. The more I read them, the more I felt in awe of them. Their wisdom is more than promise, a gift "not owned, but forever theirs." Forever ours? If we as readers are attentive to the "hand-shredding truth"-or is it an open-handedness of spirit-that fills these poems. David Daniel is a poet one can believe in, devout to both his affirmations and his doubts. Seven-Star Bird is an auspicious debut.” —Bill Knott

From the Publisher