The thematic motif found within these poems is one of "knowing," the desire to know the mystery of love of different types and on different levels—touching earth and pushing off, flesh and spirit, the life of the senses complementing the spiritual, the dream life of the imagination, desire for the word that speaks light from darkness, the ethereal within the mundane. This "knowing" is contained by our daily living, the sensuous world with which we interact, mostly unaware of its spiritual dimension. The book’s four-section poem sequence is one of immersion into the paradoxical life, the life we come to know and spend a lifetime comprehending its inexplicable beauty. The poems examine our lives of displacement from family, love, ourselves; displacement, however, does not necessarily mean despair. We may discover that our mundane lives transpire in an austere and holy place peopled with angels unaware, and that faith can exist in a place of stone, absolution is available daily, and redemption is found in strange places we never knew.
The thematic motif found within these poems is one of "knowing," the desire to know the mystery of love of different types and on different levels—touching earth and pushing off, flesh and spirit, the life of the senses complementing the spiritual, the dream life of the imagination, desire for the word that speaks light from darkness, the ethereal within the mundane. This "knowing" is contained by our daily living, the sensuous world with which we interact, mostly unaware of its spiritual dimension. The book’s four-section poem sequence is one of immersion into the paradoxical life, the life we come to know and spend a lifetime comprehending its inexplicable beauty. The poems examine our lives of displacement from family, love, ourselves; displacement, however, does not necessarily mean despair. We may discover that our mundane lives transpire in an austere and holy place peopled with angels unaware, and that faith can exist in a place of stone, absolution is available daily, and redemption is found in strange places we never knew.
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Overview
The thematic motif found within these poems is one of "knowing," the desire to know the mystery of love of different types and on different levels—touching earth and pushing off, flesh and spirit, the life of the senses complementing the spiritual, the dream life of the imagination, desire for the word that speaks light from darkness, the ethereal within the mundane. This "knowing" is contained by our daily living, the sensuous world with which we interact, mostly unaware of its spiritual dimension. The book’s four-section poem sequence is one of immersion into the paradoxical life, the life we come to know and spend a lifetime comprehending its inexplicable beauty. The poems examine our lives of displacement from family, love, ourselves; displacement, however, does not necessarily mean despair. We may discover that our mundane lives transpire in an austere and holy place peopled with angels unaware, and that faith can exist in a place of stone, absolution is available daily, and redemption is found in strange places we never knew.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609403034 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wings Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 821 KB |
About the Author
Robert A. Fink is the W. D. and Hollis R. Bond Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, Texas. He has five books of poetry, including The Tongues of Men and of Angels and his most recent collection, Tracking The Morning, one of three finalists for the Violet Crown Award from the Writers’ League of Texas. His literary nonfiction book Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace and Survival won a silver medal for second place as one of five finalists in the “Essays” category for ForeWord magazine’s 2006 Book of the Year. His first poetry collection, Azimuth Points, was the 1981 Texas Review Poetry Prize. His poems and literary nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Image, The Iowa Review, The Iron Horse Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, The Texas Review, and TriQuarterly. Fink graduated from Baylor University with a B. A. in English. His M. A. and his Ph.D. in English are from Texas Tech University. He has done post-doctoral work in The Graduate Poetry Workshop at The University of Iowa. He has been at Hardin-Simmons since 1977. In 1990 he was elected to membership in The Texas Institute of Letters. Since 1996, he has been the poetry editor of the Walt McDonald First-Book Competition in Poetry, Texas Tech University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Strange You Never Knew
By Robert A. Fink
Wings Press
Copyright © 2013 Robert A. FinkAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-305-8
CHAPTER 1
Thin Places
Heaven and earth are only three feet apart,
but in the thin places, that distance is even smaller.
— Celtic saying
This desiring isn't indiscriminate,
nor quickly satiated, surprised how skin
pressed to skin can regulate its fever,
cooling to apology for pushing through
a crowd toward memory's blue and white print,
cotton flannel dress, handfuls of auburn hair
lifting and falling as I call a name
and stretch to touch a shoulder,
and the woman, almost whom I expected,
turns and smiles.
It must be the desire of angels for angels
or God for the mother of his child.
Only in dreams may I press my fingers
to the cupping just above your hips
taut and quivering, your lovely, lower back
arching. Only in dreams ...
no end to touching
the thin places, almost translucent
skin on skin,
heaven and earth.
Robert Henri's "The Old Model"
Oil on canvas, circa 1912
She has gathered about her
a shawl of bleeding colors,
shades of Iberia and Egypt,
warm and cool sands sliding
into, easing beyond each hue
as a drop of oil, the feathers
of a raven, contain the mystery
of purple and what seems at first
black, then Pyrenees green,
flash of a Parisienne
summer dress, the rippling Seine,
Eden's palette, plumage of
jungle birds, the shades of blood
woven in a matador's cape,
the agitated skirts
of flamenco dancers
swishing the darkness.
She is regal, the shawl her cloak
of royalty dictating a presence
she has garnered for such a sitting.
Her eyes, the ebony of polished marble,
absorb all colors, the only relief
two pin points of white that hold us
mute and obeisant before her,
as it was for Henri, his brushstrokes
trembling, that indelicate nose,
those cheekbones, like the eyebrows,
built high and hard, against which
a lover would break asunder
and tumble to the blood-full lips
no Leonardo could paint,
her feline smile that of a lioness
fixed upon the artist's heart.
Daphne
after Steve Neves' painting "Strange You Never Knew"
Not yet the lead arrow, not yet the gold,
young Eros stringing his bow only for minor poets
and minstrels, adolescent boys flexing before mirrors,
fantasizing sixth-grade girls tall as their mothers.
Daphne is safe, Apollo busy revving up his chariot,
its flames, for now, stylized. She is inviolate
as the bay laurel leaves teasing down to touch
her hair, her cheek, hint of eucalyptol,
Mediterranean breeze.
Soon she will transform into skin-slick bark
and lithesome limbs, spear-tipped glossy leaves,
forever green, pale flowers paired, the only fruit —
small, shining, dark-purple berries.
She will need no tending. No spurned lover's ax
can fell her, each blow regenerating, healing
heedless of the slow turn of seasons — winter to spring.
Hers is no fanfare resurrection. For no man
she dies and rises anew from his bed.
It is only men who paint her, sculpt her soft lines
into marble, smooth, cold to the touch,
the best they can know. Eros is petulant
and unforgiving, his arrows irony-tipped,
mightier than chariots and music, the feeble poetry
of middle aged men at writing tables cleared of
all but a lined tablet, a soft-lead pencil, gooseneck lamp —
forty watts against the dark of 4:00 a.m.
And yet, even now, a young man steeped in the classics,
the poetry of having loved unknown, poetry of dying
the far, far better death, dreams his Daphne
in repose, seated before an open doorway, demure,
eyes pensive, the note unfolded in her lap.
Her long, auburn hair, her olive skin,
Grecian nose, pomegranate lips ever so slightly parted.
He believes the note she reads is his, shy, secret lines
to hold her, virginal, the only way he can.
Coming of Age
How can he know, being sixteen with no license,
his only hope for a car his father's 1955 Fairlane Ford
purchased new seven years ago, no memories forthcoming,
a junior-high math teacher's serviceable vehicle,
the wife in her Sunday shirtwaist dress, her prim hat,
its veil ambiguous as her eyes, knees together
even here in the passenger's seat, vector
her husband did not count on, and the boy
indivisible on the back seat wide enough for two
prone and prime, writing his story as it eases past
safely within the speed limit.
How can he know walking the two miles
to the start of his junior year, his zippered notebook
under his arm, that housewives are positioned
before sinks of soapy dishes, watching out
the window for this boy they could teach
what their daughters already know,
older boys having already picked them up
and driven to school, their mothers loosening
apron strings, drying their hands
on the front of their dress, imagining
the boy fumbling with all those buttons
until they laugh and take his hands and say
here, like this, let me help you.
Miss Burkham
Senior English, WHS, 1963-64
Even at seventeen, we knew she was more
than Athena, Amazon queen, Diana with
a quiver of words fitted to the bow
pulled back to her ear, the song of release
reverberating. We feared and loved her,
tall before us, conjugating our desire
for each other, knowing only that we were teenage
and unlovely, needing that beauty she lifted up
before us — Hester Prynne in her austere garments,
the luscious release of hair dark as the forest
of pine and mushroom, the whispers
of a creek, its moss and fecund mud ripe
as splendor, that word we had learned from
movies and dared not say to break the spell
of fingers and lips and belief that Love
was secrets contained between us pressed
heart against heart, that organ throbbing
even after we rose and brushed off jeans,
smoothed out skirt, and returned to
high school corridors and pep rallies,
souped-up Fords and Chevys in the parking lot,
and did not give away our knowledge
by turning in class to glance and smile
in each other's direction when, stately,
defiant, she held the book before her,
and we all believed it burned like that
emblazoned letter, our faithful adoration.
The Early Darkness, 9:00 p.m., Abilene
Just past the low reds and ambers
and then the purples and almost blacks,
the streetlights (I would prefer streetlamps)
have come on like the coal oil lantern
in a farmhouse window, an old man
sitting in a platform rocker, seeing
mostly himself reflected back a ghost,
or almost, his lips moving as if a song
remembered or the name of a young
and lovely woman who once waved to him
from the crest of a hill, distant line of his farm.
This is the time of night I choose
to harness the dog as if slipping
a sweater over a child's head, shoulders,
and lifting each arm, the elbow given,
as if in supplication, to each sleeve.
He is more wolf than dog but gentle
until he recognizes the tug
at the end of the tether, the long leather
horse leader by which the dog lifts me
to my toes as if just touching these neighborly
streets, tonight no moon, only the compelling,
soft light at the far corner of each block
where the dog must veer and pause and sniff
to read some earlier traveler's message.
How good it feels — this yellow and green
Ticonderoga pencil, its 3/H lead touching
and lifting like feet on the pavement,
hauled through the night by a long-maned,
gray and white and black creature's fury
and joy slinging me into the wide arc
of his leaning into yet another turn,
toes clicking too fast to take hold.
It is a neighborhood of ranch or 1940s
cottage-style homes, brick distinguished
only by its color — calico and merle, even red,
not primary, more adobe reminder
of the soil from which we come
and return to sprinting behind a
fifteen-month-old Australian shepherd dog
caring nothing for my bone spurs
grinding the right knee to meal,
my leaning back against the force
compelling me past these houses, kitchen
and bedroom windows a soft hum against
the dark. Inside, a wife is taking her
husband's hand across a table or upon her
belly, and asking, "What are you thinking?"
and when he cannot say, asks if he remembers
a moment from what has become their
long past when he walked away, and she said,
"I will meet you," and when she did meet him,
asked, no, rhetorically declared:
"You didn't think I would come, did you?"
And pulling back against
the heaving shoulder and chest and leg muscles,
the neck vein pulsing, the dog choking for speed,
I am almost certain the word that young man
thought, though did not say, was No.
This pleasure is more than just the pencil
with its hard, delicate lead leaving not only
an erasable record, but one that
given weeks closed inside this lined journal
of what must be ivory paper or maybe
the shade of already-yellowed-Emily-Dickinson
fascicles tied with ribbon and arranged
inside a bureau drawer to be found
by a worthy reader, will fade
pressed page to page, the already tentative
words closed upon words opposite
until not even the writer will know
which the word chosen, which the one
he might have believed. Only the mad
can decipher such language as they open
this record of nights dragged behind
a huffing dog, muscle burning to bone,
to spirit rising incorruptible, coherent unity
of dog and wolf, man and poet.
Victorian
At the check-out counter of the campus bookstore,
religious college, the clerk studying to be a layer-on-of-hands,
consoler of desperate women, whispers, in the voice
of one who could never forgive himself if he kept silent,
that this book contains dirty poems.
And the poet purchasing his own book smiles,
thinking ahead to his wife receiving this story and laughing
that there are still young men who sneak books into bed
under covers with a flashlight, the eye of God
researching what it means, becoming flesh.
And what, the poet tries to remember, would cause
a young man to advise against such poetry
undressing a young woman, young wife,
the front door latched, the curtains released
in the manner of an auburn-haired woman
wise in the ways of taking a man, lifting her hair
and letting it fall, flaring across the pillow,
a heavenly being unfurling wings, shimmering,
the poet accepting this blessing given as recompense
for having once been a Christian college boy
ignorant — no, fearful of looking exposed
at a woman, Mary of Magdala, her filly's mane
rising and falling, her flanks quivering?
Maybe what the young preacher boy means by dirty
is raw, marquee superlatives, nothing left to savor,
carry with him through a life of decorum,
taking the deacon's wife's damp palm in his
following Sunday morning worship
as she pauses at the open door, her turn
to shake the pastor's hand, and knowing her husband
is safely past, lifts her eyes and does not pull her hand away.
Or maybe the young man is embarrassed,
thinking of his father, West Texas rancher
raised to be ashamed of nakedness displayed,
a different kind of poet, one who took his wife
to town one Saturday each month
to what he preferred calling the dry-goods store
and a plate-lunch café where farmers
still smoked Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco
rolled in translucent tissue between their thumbs
and first two fingers, the cigarette
sealed sliding the tissue's edge along their nether
lip like a quiet wife's finger tracing her claim
where mouth and lips join, and sometimes
of a moonless night, the tips of tongues.
The young man, of course, cannot know this.
He can only remember his father smiling
when he recalled those Saturdays parking
in the early evening along 1st Street to watch
high-school boys and girls cruise the strip,
streetlights easing on as his wife scooted close
and placed her hand upon his thigh,
touched her lips to his ear, and whispered....
"Among School Children"
How important to grow old,
William Butler Yeats' poem
presaging this night, a local video store,
the young wife, a former student
speaking his name, standing before him
smiling, an intimacy neither could imagine
back when he questioned her poems,
her fists almost pounding his chest,
tears flung like stingers into the flesh
of boys frightened of conversation,
flesh of fathers frightened of boys
throbbing for that which
a father knows he can neither forbid
nor live with. How important this night
to be old enough to permit this young woman
her embrace, appreciate what she is yielding,
flesh inconsequential against such
pulsing between them, video patrons
brushing past selecting romance,
adventure,comedy, not questioning this love
both young and old can finally meet
to give and receive.
The Hush
My favorite place to be is a place that I'm most safe.
— Beth
It is a breathing,
the small sounds
of a child positioned
at the tree toad green
table in the corner
where robin's egg walls
touch like the fold
in the middle of
an open picture book.
And on the walls
the inspiration
of shadow trees,
leaves inhaling
and exhaling,
limbs supple as
a young mother's arms,
her long fingers caressing ...
the sound of a reed flute
beside the brook
the child hears
and in the hearing, sees.
Hush. ...
There is a bird, calling.
A small wind,
the silhouettes of trees
bending to the child
like her mother who was lost,
but now, having found
her daughter, enfolds
the child as if she is
the mist rising from
the bank beside the water
clear as kindness
moving over
the carefully placed pebbles.
The Midway, Friday Night, 1951
And a sword will pierce your soul too'".
— Luke 2: 35
Imagine your mother young, waiting
for the slowing carousel of painted horses,
front hooves poised as if a boxer sparring,
as if to climb the air, lips flaring, teeth bared —
less whinny than banshee cry, scream of a mother
who has already blinked the absence
of her five year old on the rider-less horse,
holding her breath for the wheel to spin
one more revolution before she takes off running.
The garish horse. Pale stallion, the color
of bones bleaching in the desert.
She thrusts the other mothers and fathers aside,
calling out a name no one wants to recognize.
And then, the carousel unwound, the calliope
gearing down to lead feet bogged in nightmare
slow motion, a young woman appears
holding your hand as if you could be hers,
then lifts you into your mother's arms,
turns and walks into the crowd of parents
and their laughing children, high school girls
and their dates tugging each other toward
cotton candy, fun house, tunnel of love.
Claustrophobia
He had learned to watch for signs of closeness,
a closing in — her hesitation before entering
an empty elevator, positioning herself
just inside the compartment, counting
the other passengers breaking around her —
a rock in a meadow river run, the current
never swift, no riffles on the surface.
They were playing hide-and-seek.
She had crawled inside an ice box
in the alley behind her house.
The door clicked shut. No light.
No room to breathe
until her sister found her,
unlatched the door.
Once, she had followed him
to the back wall and turned to feel
the press of bodies pinning her arms,
constricting her lungs, her mouth
opening and closing — the sound
a small fish might make washed ashore,
the sand hot, suffocating.
Someone caught the elevator doors
when he shouted, shouldering
a wedge between the passengers
just wide enough for his wife
to squeeze through before
the seam closed. Outside, one hand
on a knee, the other bracing her heart,
she raised up and turned,
surprised at all the ordinary
faces staring back.
Anniversary
When had they come to stand a modest distance
apart as they argued, no chance of inadvertent touch
like, in sleep, turning toward each other?
Sometimes he found himself braced against
the circumference of their breakfast table,
as if needing something substantial
to lean against, hold him up, hold him back.
She had said, when they first spoke of
what might hinder their vows,
that she was afraid,
then looked at her hands in her lap,
and said ... of him. She never feared
he would strike her or ever pull her
to him without her seeming permission.
She feared the silence he had grown up with,
the closeness of closets heavy with wool
and flannel — family secrets hanging
above him, knees hugged against his chest
as he watched the unrelenting line
of light beneath the closed door.
The space between them gave him room
to shape the syllables volleyed not at her,
she understood, but at himself
or at the ones who had closed
the closet door. He was holding on
to furniture to stay him ... only so far, so close,
or to give him a few steps head start
should he push away and run. Once he began,
she knew, he could not contain himself.
His Name
Samuel lilts off the tongue, burnishing the ear
as if God called him by name to rise,
middle of the night, sleepwalk the path
he knows by heart, that syncopated organ
drumming him upright from covers,
the siren call he will hear even years from now —
perimeter breached, incoming, someone
already taken in sleep, changed,
now face to face through that glass,
smiling or not at what Samuel can only see
darkly, feet and fingers feeling his way
down the hall, the twists of passageways,
the turns expected now, God's conduit
through rivers and rice paddies,
through fire, the boiling flames
that in his dream-walk nightly do not burn,
others given in exchange, taken,
so Samuel can stand above the child beds
he built with only a handsaw and hammer,
and lay his fingertips, then palm
on the almost imperceptible rise and fall
of each son's easy sleep, and count
the unstressed, stressed beats that ease
his own drumming, no longer martial,
for now, a feathering, one-two, three —
the long eeee dissipating into reeds
and willows, the bamboo shoots
and waist-high grass of fields
God has redeemed for him, Samuel,
his twin sons, three years old and counting.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Strange You Never Knew by Robert A. Fink. Copyright © 2013 Robert A. Fink. 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
I. Thin Places,Thin Places,
Robert Henri's "The Old Model",
Daphne,
Coming of Age,
Miss Burkham,
The Early Darkness, 9:00 p.m., Abilene,
Victorian,
"Among School Children",
II. Sandalwood,
The Hush,
The Midway, Friday Night, 1951,
Claustrophobia,
Anniversary,
His Name,
Sandalwood,
Walking The Apostles,
Dominion Over The Beasts,
Mutt Monday,
Again, the "House by the Railroad",
After All These Years,
III. God s Country,
God's Country,
How He Came To Abilene, Texas,
Father,
Loafers,
Your Mother's Death,
Adoption,
"Develop A Scene That Defines You",
Incident,
Local Man Hit By Train,
Tornadoes on the Ground at Tye,
The Song,
Valentine's Day,
IV. That Time of Day,
Quilts,
Nursing Home,
"United",
That Time of Day,
The Word of God,
Forgotten One,
Daniel,
Little Marie,
Peace, Like A River,
And Having Found,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,