Sycamore: Poems

by Kathy Fagan

Overview

These "flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve" as the author explores nature, love, and mourning in a landscape all her own (Publishers Weekly).
This collection of meditative poems by Kathy Fagan takes the sycamore as its inspiration—and delivers precise, luminous insights on lost love, nature, and the process of recovery. "It is the season of separation & falling / Away," Fagan writes. And so—like the abundance of summer diminishing to winter, and like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree's expansion—the speaker of these poems documents a painful loss and tenuous rebirth, which take shape against a forested landscape.
Black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them. Cottonwood sends out feverish signals of pollen. And everywhere are sycamores, informed by Fagan's scientific and mythological research. Spellbinding and ambitious, Sycamore is an important new work from a writer whose poems "gleam like pearls or slowly burning stones" (Philip Levine).
A 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571319296
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Kathy Fagan is the author of four previous collections, including the National Poetry Series selection The Raft and the Vassar Miller Prize winner MOVING & ST RAGE. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Field, Ploughshares, New Republic, and Missouri Review, among other literary magazines. She teaches at Ohio State University, where she is also the poetry editor of OSU Press, and advisor to The Journal.

Read an Excerpt

KABOOM PANTOUM

I'll ring the bells,
Ohio, tomorrow,
when stars come due
like lice to a grackle.

Ohio, tomorrow
is winter,&every winter,
like lice on a grackle,
we must drive defensively.

This winter&every winter,
I wait too long to wear a coat.
We must dress defensively,
but last minute still counts.

If I wait to wear a coat,
will you wait with me?
Last minutes still count,
maybe more than last words.

Will you wait with me?
Take sequoia, for example--
maybe more than last words
word games reveal a lot--

sequoia, for example, is
the shortest word to use each vowel once.
Word games reveal a lot.
Short word. Tall tree. AEIOU.

The tallest tree to use each vowel once
does not thrive in Ohio.
Short word. I. Double O. No UAE.
Bell in the mouth at either end.

______

SANTA CATERINA’S TOMB
Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome

On her feast day, recumbent under
glass, St. Catherine was open
for business. We queued up to touch her
hand, that never learned to write,

a hand original
to her body, most of which rests
here, waxy fallen pillar
in a church built over
a temple, virgin on goddess.

Catherine’s head lies at home
in Siena. Her heart could be
in my breast pocket right now--
something’s dead in there.

Touching her reminded me of the match
stick we used for the votives;

of fava shells we piled together at table;
of our lips out of practice;
of the lily, her emblem;
and of the sycamore, which is mine.

Having painted the miracle of blood
sacrifice again and again, word

made flesh, angel
wings of gold and mica, Fra Angelico
rests nearby.
So you lay
beside me once, my body so often
a ruin beneath you.

_______

SYCAMORE, WICK&FLAME

With my wet feet
and thinning hair,
with what passes for river
and what passes as weather,
with my dark patches
and bright spots, I’m
camouflage, a shrugger,
reflecting nothing, a molting
wolf, all upward
expansion, not a thought
for my roots.

4:17
is my digital time. Akimbo,
the spoken word.
When I’m found by a hand
in a series of hands,
I pool like milk in a blue bowl.
There’s a key out there
lying in the grass,
and then there’s me,
not looking for it.

_______


LETTER TO WHAT’S MOSTLY MISSING

after Christopher Howell’s “He Speaks to the Soul”

At first I thought I’d write
you about the sycamore that won’t dress for supper,
preferring its white limbs bare, and how the oak
it dotes on returns the favor by offering chartreuse
hankies on every hand. Then I thought that’s just me
again, swapping summer for supper, canopy for canapé,
and surely we’re beyond that now. So instead I guess
I’ll give you news of the silver lining, which was dreaming
until Wednesday when it woke to say Cloud, Sun,
Sliver of Glass. Lucky for me I was wearing my safety
goggles and asbestos gloves at the time. Lucky the pink
heat had my hair to burn or who knows what limestone
brimstone Joan of Arc shit I’d be subjected to next.
It was the meteorological opposite of that time
in the graveyard cracking ice with my boot heels
off the headstones to find her. All that pristine weather
and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.
That’s what our ghost says anyway. She says
she hears us best when we can’t speak. She’s
nicknamed you Kodak--for the colorful memories
we create, I suppose--or perhaps it was Kodiak she said
through the ice. In any case, one can only ask how many
names for the past there are. I am one. You may be
more like the alarm clock sounding off out of nowhere,
and the boy sprinting toward it and me on his way,
who met me as warmly as if he were mine. I think,
for a moment, he thought that, too. When we refer to
parallel lives, don’t we mean lives lived besides?
That’s all for now, except to say that, unlike other trees,
the sycamore’s bark can’t expand, so just breaks off,
which accounts for its Bernini-like sheen. The old ones
are nearly hollow, therefore unstable. The fox and rabbit
like to make their dens inside. Empty isn’t always
the opposite of perfectly full. The oak says Let me spread
this mantle of blue over your cold marble shoulders,
Sycamore. And what can she say but yes.

Table of Contents

Platanaceae Family Tree

I

Caro Nome
Cinder
Snow Globe
Sycamores at High Noon
Poem With Its Heart Buried Under the Floorboards
The White, The Red,&The Pink In-Between
Convent of Santa Chiara and The Poor Clares
Kaboom Pantoum
The Plane Trees of the Seine
Sycamore Stacked in Lengths&Pieces
Sycamore in the Weak Light of Early Spring
Santa Caterina’s Tomb
Sycamore, Wick&Flame

II

Letter to What’s Mostly Missing
Shoo Fly
Elelendish
Cottonwood
Heads
Sycamore Envies the Cottonwoods Behind Your Place
No Meteor
Diagnosis
In Black Walnut Season Stride
Structural Engineering
Ode to Julia Morgan
Life, With Eyeliner
Sycamore in Jericho
Ruin
How We Looked

III

The Signal Master’s Song
Suburban Canticle
Waiting Area Atrium
Split
Middle-Aged Sycamore
To You For Whom I Broke
Nervure
Word Problem With Waves in Its Hair
Perpendicular
February and August
Widows and Brides
Tactile Sycamore
Self-Portrait as Sycamore in Copper&Pearl
Choral Sycamores: A Valediction
Inscription
Eleven-Sided Poem

Notes

Editorial Reviews

It’s hard not to fall in love with this book, with its bravado and vulnerability. Kathy Fagan’s mind is endless with depth and truth—her thoughts like songs, her heart and wit twin birds flying in the air of the pages, landing on the tree limbs of her lines. How fierce and immense to imagine living in her grove of sycamores, hardy, odd, and gorgeous. There, we are bigger than ourselves—we are each other too, living and remembering within each other’s shadows, limbs, sky. Sycamore is a book a reader clutches to her chest, eyes closed for a moment in bliss and recognition.”—Brenda Shaughnessy

“Sycamore is a complex and layered poetic consideration of the mortality of relationships, of the body, of eros, and, most generally, of the moments in time we momentarily inhabit. These are timeless poetic themes, but what Kathy Fagan does with them is stunningly original. From the cryptic and fascinating ‘Platanaceae Family Tree’ that opens the book, Sycamore is erudite and referential and nonetheless consistently welcoming as we navigate Fagan’s inventive structures and nuanced wordplay. This collection gives us a full view of the human heart and mind simultaneously in action.”—Wayne Miller

“Kathy Fagan’s poems burn like halos, and if sycamores could bow, they would bend to kiss her hands for rendering them in such haunting light, in such daring reach. Don’t miss this beautiful, knowing book.”—Barbara Ras

“Kathy Fagan’s poems are pitiless, sensual, mythic, and steeped in elucidative mystery. I admire her sleek armor of language and landscape: she may ‘dress defensively’; however, ‘all that pristine weather / and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.’ Fagan’s sleights of hand reveal yet withhold, out of mercy, hard-won beauty and pain: ‘Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more.’ Sycamore is one of the most inventive, vulnerable, and moving collections I have read in years.”—Randall Mann

"This fifth collection from Fagan burns like ice, with a seemingly cool crystalline surfaces nonetheless hot to the touch. Fagan’s flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher