Saturday Afternoon, Ansonia
Sixty years ago this winter
I am still eight years old, grieving
the death of my mother.
The mêlée of children
teeming around me could be
a tableau from a painting by Brueghel.
We are awaiting our turns
on a toboggan run in the open field
across the street from the railroad flats.
The children are mostly
Catholic school chums, intoxicated
with the freedom of Saturday afternoon,
and they have a tendency of running wild,
not unlike Gorky’s ragamuffins
descending upon the streets of Petersburg;
but this is Ansonia, a Connecticut milltown,
where my grandmother prepares
gwumpki that she will serve for dinner
by rolling hamburger and cooked rice
into cabbage leaves, then stacking each one
into an oval baking pan,
and submerging them with crushed tomatoes.
My father is working overtime
and will return after I do, if I am lucky,
since he doesn’t want me out with the boys
because he believes I will hurt myself,
as I do, on the last run down the icy slope
by battering my right ankle against a stone
sticking above the snow crust, the one I sprain
and on which I will need to limp back home
where my father will take off his belt
to my grandmother’s protestations in Polish
and beat me like he is whipping a dog,
the fragrance of ground beef and cabbage
permeating the air in the flat’s warmth,
the glow of lamplight filtering through
a slit beneath the bedroom door,
the clock’s loud ticking counting out
the lashes spoiling each second of oblivion.
~
Blue Evening: for Doug Brown
blue stream flowing gently over our heads
—an unattributed quote from Novalis,
from Penelope Fitzgerald’s Novel, The Beginning of Spring
You stood out
like the flute solo in Mendelsohn’s
Reformation Symphony, which
was actually his second and not
his fifth. You stood out:
bright yellow hair, sensitive lips,
your eyes an intense blue.
I was honored when
you chose to room with me,
share the third floor flat
on Lake Place behind
the Payne Whitney Gym.
I will always be grateful that
you did so because you trusted me.
People raised their eyebrows
and spoke in whispers when they
learned about your I.Q.
As a philosophy major,
in your freshman year, one
of your instructors thought so highly
of a paper you had written
they had it published in an academic
journal, despite it not being typed
but written in your illegible hand.
You never made it past
second semester, and there were
scars that marked each attempt
like permanent welts on each
of your wrists. I will always be
appreciative of your recommending
Novalis, the German poet-philosopher,
his Hymns to the Night, which
inspired Penelope Fitzgerald’s
masterpiece, The Blue Flower,
but we still drifted away: my going on
to take a job in another bookstore,
you staying on to take further comfort
in what was rote. Our bond
was one of quietude, our appreciation
of the sublime. The last meeting
was by serendipity, as was our first,
when we were both about to leave
New Haven, walking into each other
on Trumbull Street, in front
of the rows of brownstones, you relaying
that you were giving up trying
for a degree, to play it safe by taking
an administrative job your father had
arranged back in West Virginia.
I shared that my plans were to try
to make a new home in Massachusetts.
You assuaged me that whatever it was
I did that I would make it, but you
were much more uncertain
about how you might do, twilight
backlighting the dome of Woolsey Hall
in the near distance, into which
we turned to walk beneath a sky of high
clouds, and under which we departed
through a winter evening’s early blue.
~
Rose of Sharon
—Hibiscus syriacas
—a kind of crocus growing as a lily among the brambles
Harper’s Bible Dictionary
The distinctive mauve of your petals
is reminiscent of the color
of a courtesan’s lipstick,
the shade of which makes a tawdry
drunkard stumble, five petals
of dark pink, almost purple, forming
around an enlarged pistil
in the very center of your flower.
Your bloom is prolific
from May through September.
You are lavish, even lovely,
your color appears to suggest beauty
must go astray to proliferate
so much so as you do
since you usually bloom at night,
to think of you doing so
in the sheerness of moonlight
is to intimate you are a product
of a tryst with the best
of yourself and your shadow
that is not unlike ourselves
on our better days. By morning
you are only more promiscuous
by daylight, your preponderant
blossoms tipped cups brimming
with dew, reinvigorating
our imagination of your sustained
rose flush implies that your shade
is not only a color to savor but
also by drinking it in we come
to know the headiness of the taste
of your uncommon wine that
comes of age in our fields, and
whose branches announce you
by bending halfway to the ground,
making you appear to be
the tree of languishing kisses
and pure sensuality, whose
flowers resemble puckered lips
awaiting to be kissed.
~
I Went Back for My Father
I went back for my father
after calling him from a pay phone
in Chinatown on Christmas eve.
The call threw him into a muddle,
making me aware that being
on the phone confused him,
that he didn’t know where I was
which made it difficult to know
where he was and what he was doing.
I went back for my father,
after hitchhiking to Stinson Beach,
after reading at a jazz club in San Anselmo,
after going to a festival on top
of Mount Tamalpais and being exposed
to all that nakedness in the California sun.
I went back for my father
who taught himself to read and write
using a Polish-English dictionary,
who immigrated from Eastern Europe
just before Hitler invaded Poland,
who was wounded in France when he batted
away a grenade a German soldier threw
and saved his squad, who carried shrapnel
in his right shoulder for the rest of his life,
his purple heart laid away in a drawer.
I went back for my father
and saw him surrounded by mental patients
in a locked ward of the soldier’s home,
some patients rocking back and forth
in restraints, some stared stolidly into
nothingness, one wore a worn straw hat.
My father sat silently in a wheelchair in the sun.
I could neither weep nor speak because he was
beyond help and no longer recognized me.
I went back for my father
and after he died six years later when I received
the phone call I finally wept
not so much that he had died but for how he had
spent his last years, secluded in a nether world,
one I couldn’t enter, one he couldn’t leave.
~
Finding the River Within
For Duane Whitehead
1.
English colonists called the town Great Falls
but the translation of the original Abenaki name
for waterfall is Kitchee pontegu. The first bridge
over the Connecticut River, built in 1785,
the Arch Bridge, was replaced by
the New Arch Bridge, in 1903, and the factories
there produced iron castings, carriages, shoe pegs,
and organs, hence the name, Bellows Falls.
2.
You quote Carl Sagan, “inquiring minds need to know,”
exemplary of your being proprietor
of Arch Bridge Bookshop on Village Square,
connecting prospective readers with pertinent books
to fit their interests. As one browser says, “Like walking
into a time warp.” Another compares the bookshop
to The Strand, in New York City, but stresses that it is
“less organized” but “has a similar vibe,” that they “loved it.”
3.
You are not only a man of ideas, but you also have a passion
for discussing beliefs and plumbing information for facts,
espousing ancient history and the Battle of Thermopylae,
recounting what the Persian Xerxes sought to accomplish,
how the Spartan Leonidas won out in the sea battle
at Salamis, how you inflect in telling the story that
it is an example of a smaller force defeating a larger one,
that what was saved was all of western civilization.
4.
When you ask me about what it means for me
in finding the river I summon the journey of discovering
the heart, what draws us up into the center of our lives,
what moves us forward, what currents flow deeply below,
and I see you nod your head in agreement, having already
been a seeker of wisdom, exemplifying the way Thoreau
imparted the one mile climb to Table Rock on Fall Mountain
was a destination where one could consider the flow of the river.
~
An Offering of Grace
In memory of Linda Gregg
She appeared to me in the dream,
white frock flowing,
her hair shining, as if she had just
brushed it a hundred times,
as she often said she did;
and it was the sweetness
in which she could offer kindness
that could level most hardships
in an abatement, an assuagement,
which was an offering of grace,
until she morphed, as she
explained to me in the dream,
into all of these other selves,
younger versions of her, until
in the youngest I could only
last see her luminous eyes before
she disappeared when I awoke.
Her tone reminded me
of when we were at the gathering
after her talk on Dickinson,
and we were with Jack beside
the catered table when she mentioned
to us to wait there while
she would fill our plates for us,
and later she would fill her own plate
upon which she would return
to the conversation. Linda, always
intuitively in touch with the depths
of the power of her femininity,
resilient in herself and reaching out
to nurture others for whom she cared,
not unlike when she appeared to me
in the dream, rejoining me
to not only the best route but also
even the only route, despite
disappointments and distractions
to harvest the honey from the combs,
which, as she enumerated
by revelation, if you only remain
open to sustenance and nurture,
just continue to flow and flow.
~
Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. Recent poems and translations have or will appear in Asymptote, Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, and Poetry London.