Forward Prizes for Poetry: Highly Commended for 'Classic Blunder' and 'Lois in the Sunny Tree'
Forward Prizes for Poetry: Highly Commended for 'Classic Blunder' and 'Lois in the Sunny Tree'
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Overview
Forward Prizes for Poetry: Highly Commended for 'Classic Blunder' and 'Lois in the Sunny Tree'
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226038704 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2013 |
| Series: | Phoenix Poets |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Thresherphobe
By MARK HALLIDAY
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-03870-4
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
LOIS IN THE SUNNY TREE
When in August 1920 I smiled for the camera
from my perch on the limb of a sun-spangled tree,
says Lois, long dead now but humorously seven years old then,
with a giant ribbon in my hair, the sorrow of living in time
was only very tiny and remote in some far corner of my mind
and for me to know then, as I smiled for that camera
in Michigan in the summer of 1920
that you would peer thoughtfully and admiringly
into my happy photographed eyes eighty-some years later
would have been good for me only in a very tiny and remote way.
QUITE FRANKLY
They got old, they got old and died. But first—
okay but first they composed plangent depictions
of how much they lost and how much cared about losing.
Meantime their hair got thin and more thin
as their shoulders went slumpy. Okay but
not before the photo albums got arranged by them,
arranged with a niftiness, not just two or three
but eighteen photo albums, yes eighteen eventually,
eighteen albums proving the beauty of them (and not someone else),
them and their relations and friends, incontrovertible
playing croquet in that Bloomington yard,
floating on those comic inflatables at Dow Lake,
giggling at the Dairy Queen, waltzing at the wedding,
building a Lego palace on the porch,
holding the baby beside the rental truck,
leaning on the Hemingway statue at Pamplona,
discussing the eternity of art in that Sardinian restaurant.
Yes! And so, quite frankly—at the end of the day—
they got old and died okay sure but quite frankly
how much does that matter in view of
the eighteen photo albums, big ones
thirteen inches by twelve inches each
full of such undeniable beauty?
SWEET AND DANDY
Music poured from the big brown house
It was sweet and dandy, sweet and dandy
and a man sixty years old may have passed
along the dark sidewalk wearing a sensible raincoat
and a spelling-out of his thought would be
Bright oblivious mediocrity of common animal-vigorous youth
as he moved further into the chilly dark outside
but wait just a second, sir,
be careful of glibness, because I was there
amidst the reggae, I the me in 1973
as we tried to embrace the hour
(because if we didn't do it, who would?)
having already heard a rumor that I would become you
so I danced hilarious with Maggie P. and Mary K.
RETURN TO ELMGROVE
In this dream I fly above a thousand thousand suburban trees
as the crow flies unconstrained by streets of time
I do fly swoon-swooping weightlessly
to my house of thirty-eight years ago
where I should leave notes for my old friends
but where is a pencil there must be a pencil in the kitchen
down that hall of shadow light of ghosted air
I float into the kitchen a bowl of cereal appears in my hand
my lover of thirty-eight years ago appears beside me
and leans her head on my shoulder weightlessly
I should give her a note
to remind her that we must have so much to remember
so much to hang on to
there must be a blank page in that book near her hand
I should give her a note explaining how things have gone
but she seems so quietly nostalgic there is nothing to do
everything is over I have no pencil only this
bowl of cereal which is so much heavier than it looks.
VACATION DAY IN 1983
Sunny day in Chatham and we've said we'll play tennis
but we're all doing things. Annie is working on her bibliography.
Carl needs to record in his notebook a long dream he had last night.
At one point in the dream he said to these two Korean girls
"I'm being chased by a crazy lady with a machine gun,
if you can help me in any way I'll be very grateful."
Carl in his dream is polite and respectful
as if to keep chaos under superficial control.
He disappears into a bedroom of the cottage.
I add sugar to the coffee I should have drunk an hour ago.
Peter notices the picture on the Morton Salt box
and says when he was a kid he wore one of those slick yellow raincoats
and Annie says he must have been so cute. Peter says
oh you'd say that about any kid in a yellow raincoat.
Peter puts Nashville Skyline on the stereo. I'm trying to read
D. H. Lawrence on what a novel should and shouldn't be.
Peter says "Girl From the North Country" might be
Dylan's only song about his early life but I say there must be others,
Peter thinks of "Something There Is about You" on Planet Waves
and I think of that one about riding on a train going west
though I forget the title. Carl reappears and lies down on the sofa
with The Soft Machine by Burroughs. We're all like plants trying
to locate the right kind of sunlight to grow in. I write this
insight
carefully on an envelope. Peter says "Tennis agenda?"
and Annie says "Just two more citations
and I'm ready to go." Peter finds his white socks. I'm nursing
my precious tepid coffee. Everybody senses that I'll be the reason
we don't get out the door soon. One side of Nashville Skyline is already over
and Peter puts on an album by Kraftwerk. I roll my eyes
and Peter grins at my ignorance of what is Euro-cool.
He and Annie eat a few strawberries. Lawrence wants life.
Carl sees a rabbit outside and shouts in his Star Trek voice
"Captain, the Xyrilians have us surrounded!"
I look for the can of tennis balls, someone already found it,
suddenly everyone is outside at the car
except me—life just happens absurdly full absurdly quick
ripeness is you know what all right Peter stop honking
away we go.
THERE WE WERE
You know what's so dumb about your abject devotion to the past?
I mean this fetishy nursing of the traces of everything you ever did,
like the photo of Laurinda wearing her buckskin fringe
at that party in the field behind the Kingfisher Pub
where you thought she was hinting you up to be her Sundance Kid
or like those letters Margie Lou sent you on lavender paper
ostensibly about John Le Carré but really about possible romance
in Pittsburgh. What's so dumb is—oh my god—you so don't get it—
when you cherish those two-dimensional traces of whatever was
you are basically focusing your existence on something that does not exist.
Because the past is nothing but shadows spilled over other shadows
in your head
and by the way that book you published seven years ago?
That book is ancient. That book is practically as dead as Thomas Hardy.
It's so funny how you can't admit this. That book,
okay I know you think you poured your best self into it
but even if that were true it would still be a gone self that got poured,
a now hypothetical person who merely resembles from certain angles
the person we see in those photos from a decade ago that you keep
flipping through or slipping into your wallet, that person is essentially dead
but I know you think when you stare at an old picture or old letter
there's a certain way to sigh
that breathes magic life back into the ancient traces
and it's like you're the shaman of this cult, this wacky superstitious cult of
Ah there I was, there we were
so I have to hear about when you and Rosanna sang "Waterfall"
at some club in Toronto or when you and Nancy sang "Tossin' and Turnin' "
at that summer camp oh my god how pathetically quaint!
So my suggestion to you is: Wake up and live. Like, today.
And if you decide to do that, call me because frankly
I think we need to talk about last night.
HISTORIC SHIRT
Ran into Alyssa and Todd and Alyssa said "I like your shirt"
and I laughed because it's obviously very old and she said
"But it looks so soft and comfortable" and I agreed
and Alyssa said "And that little heart is so sweet"
referring to the red velvet heart sewn on the left shoulder
so I said "There's a lot of history in that" and then had to explain
that my first wife sewed the heart on this shirt
for her boyfriend before me—and Alyssa said
"Wow, that seems symbolic of something!" and Todd laughed
and I said "It probably means that I refuse to let go of
any trace of the past" and Alyssa said "Or maybe it means
you refuse to be oppressed by the past" and I said
"That sounds good" and Todd sort of half smiled and Alyssa said
"You accept the past so it can't then turn around and bite you"
and for a half second this idea sparkled alarmingly in the air
and then we all smiled in order to let the scene end
and Alyssa walked away arm in arm with her new husband
to go on making the life that would be their past together.
THANKS TO ACKER BILK
There is a mosaic. It makes the background
on which amidst which can appear the figures
upon which in which you have concentrated
desire, fear, fascination, worry, love, regret.
There is for you this mosaic
assembled in bits every day this mosaic in which—
through which—by which and maybe even for which
you have gone on living; there had to be this context;
for example in 1962 there was that melody
"Stranger on the Shore"—
played on clarinet by a man named Acker Bilk—
I didn't care, it was just some tune that older people probably
liked
and it just showed up on the radio—in the kitchen or from car windows
a dozen times—a hundred times?—in the years—I
didn't care—
it wasn't rock and roll!
Yet it formed
one bit in the mosaic—
forgotten and then
decades later revealing itself to be unforgettable:
the melody of
one version of
eternal wistfulness in which
you must slowly staringly wander until you die.
For the chance to build a mosaic I am grateful
to my parents and America and chaotic Earth
and I send now this belated Thank You to Acker Bilk.
FRANKFORT LAUNDROMAT
Smooth plastic chair, thoughtless heavy air, my eyes closed,
my father walked in, he had his bag of laundry.
My laundry was in a machine already, some forty years prior to my death.
Like me my father was alive, he was eighty-one. We were both
sunburned and tired, this was after hours on the beach,
after the picnic, after when the Honda got stuck in sand,
this was after, then came the laundry; my father said
"Did you get burned much?" I said "Not too bad" and
he put his clothes in a machine. Small box of Tide.
My eyes closed over The Burden of the Past by W. J. Bate
and my eyes opened, hot room smell of soap and hot fabric,
and my father's shirt was dark pink, like a heart I half thought
but my eyes closed, after the hours in the sun and
buying the stuff for sandwiches for everybody and
making sure Nick and the girls didn't really hurt the seagulls
and after Asa felt sick at lunch and we took him to his mother
and after the humid tennis and so my eyes closed....
Then they opened
apparently for more living,
I put my laundry in a dryer and my father was reading the New Republic,
he was concentrating, with his reading glasses on, and caring
about the truth, despite all the sun and all the sandwiches and
tennis and
driving
and I loved him reading there in his dark pink shirt. But my head was
gravitational to the floor, my chin to my neck, I tried to read
The Burden of the Past and closed my eyes some forty years before my death
unless it comes sooner, and a fly shifted from People magazine on a
to my father's shoulder to a Certs wrapper on the floor
and the fly was the word and....
Then my clothes were dry
and impressively hot and I held my face to a hot dry towel—
I wanted to live—to live enough—to be living—but to live all day
with the sunburn and the smell of Tide and the
gravitation—was it possible?
But my father was still reading. He still cared about the New Republic—
therefore with the normal courage of any son or any daughter
I folded my laundry and carried it out to the Honda for more
living,
as my father went on reading for truth in his shirt dark pink like
a heart.
240 SNEAKERS
This old guy sits in a car beside a road in Illinois
near a five-way intersection at the edge of a town;
there's a Dairy Queen a hundred yards away
but it probably hasn't opened yet.
The old man is a little confused about whether he is heading
south or east but everything will eventually be clear.
If his daughter were here she would be impatient
but she is in Montgomery, Alabama, at her job
and that is a clear fact.
He sits in the car and looks down at his shoes—sneakers
because he knows he's still a boy really
though people don't see it; a boy trying to sneak quietly
through the world without getting caught by
whatever catches people....
How many pairs of sneakers
has he owned—he estimates one hundred and twenty pairs—
how many of those two hundred and forty sneakers still exist?
The oldest ones must be decayed, softened, obliterated
in some landfill in Indiana—Indiana landfill—
Indiana landfill
—a few birds twitter
in trees near his car—there was a rainstorm earlier
and now the birds have to start their day again;
there's a question he needs to ask—
he watches the Dairy Queen carefully:
he can walk softly to the ice cream window when it opens
and if the person there seems impatient
he can order one scoop, they might have peach ice cream,
then he can ask about directions—sometimes the first answer
isn't the one you need so you have to ask again—
rushing just gets you to the wrong spot too soon;
so the plan is to ask, and wait for an answer that makes some sense.
TED'S ELEGIAC WORK
Ted's father died, and in the next eighteen months
Ted needed to write about his father and death
and if you look at these writings sympathetically
you see that they are intelligent and sensitive, in some respects,
they make many delicate choices among words.
But if you step back, several steps back,
you see that basically what Ted says about his father's death
is what you mostly could have predicted,
including gratitude for the dad's patience
when the boy had trouble learning some outdoorsy physical skill
and regret for silences near the end
when they could have discussed the family's way of life, or Shakespeare,
but the Angel of Meaningfulness is not distracted or dismayed
by such broad parameters of predictability,
the A. of M. is interested in the most subtle shades of embodied spirit
and the A. of M. says quietly "Good for you, Ted,
your writing is worthy and in a related way so are you,
and I like the way you walk as if amused by distance
and the way you look at winter trees
with a sense of their metaphorical dignity
and the way you speak humorously to children."
Unfortunately the A. of M. is so soft-spoken
Ted is never totally sure he hears the heavenly voice
except when it ventriloquizes through a human reader who says
"I love you" or
"I enjoyed the stuff about your dad, especially
the detail about the sardines with mustard."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thresherphobe by MARK HALLIDAY. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago 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
Acknowledgments*
Lois in the Sunny Tree
Quite Frankly
Sweet and Dandy
Return to Elmgrove
Vacation Day in 1983
There We Were
Historic Shirt
Thanks to Acker Bilk
Frankfort Laundromat
240 Sneakers
Ted’s Elegiac Work
Bev and Broadway
Spunktilio Awaits the Biographer
Visionary Age 79
Yvette Vickers
After You Die
Classic Blunder
Just In Time
*
Ferguson High
Sorority Softball
Double Reverse
Wide Receiver
La Marquise de Gloire
Flang Flight
Ducks Not in Row
Pathos of the Momentary Smile
*
Huge Party
Unconversation
Before Dawn
Wheeling
Pathos of the Detective
Threshed Out
Tossed
Assisted Living
Livin’ in the World
*
Lingo Bistro
New New Poetics
Thanks for Your Book
Glancers
Talented Youth
Mildewed Anthologies
Reader Depressed
His Alley Metaphor
The One for Her