Walter Dorwin Teague; Manufacturer: Sparks-Withington Company (now Sparton), United States, 1883–1960,“Sparton” radio, 1936, Mirrored glass, wood, chromium steel, electrical components. Courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis.
MY LEFT HAND
My left hand has grown shaky, so
I continue to write
all’ebraico, Leonardo –
you, Vitruvian star-man
with the furnace in your entrails.
My body too, which was so strong
trembling, now
at the mid-point of autumn
in this seedy cedar octagon
(my Oblomovian gazebo).
Driving home from the store this morning
I glimpsed, peeking above its Mississippi ridge
layered with maroon oak leaf-shawls, a quaint
white water tower, with conical green top –
the famous Witch’s Hat – highest point (is she?)
in flat Minneapolis – still there, still endearing
as a vertical twig from a children’s fairy tale
over my mother’s primary school (Sidney Pratt –
still standing too). Later, she would spin
with arm-muscle and leg-muscle
the heavy wheel, she would etch in copper plate
& knotty woodcut, unbreakable emblems
of that early round wonder – that stone spiral spring
lifted to the imagined perihelion
of her so horizontal nesting-ground.
Slowly growing there, beside the riverside
swinging on her father’s rasping, throaty iron swing
amid those other shadows… the huge and hulking
citadels of garnered sweat and manual labor
(Granddad’s grain elevators, nailing down
with massive concrete tent-stakes
the geometry of all midwestern heavy industry).
She drew them too – a soft fall watercolor
beside the tracks, at the south edge of town
bordered by October aspen and willow.
And the grim brooding dark one (off Highway 7,
over the tracks from Northrop School
and Walker Art Museum) – like a mute monolith
from some medieval myth (torn down now,
gone).
What my mother felt, molding unmoving images
out of a childhood not so far away. What
I need to do today, this morning
here in this swaying skeletal octagon –
faced by optimistic forces of deracination
that would uproot the tacit harmonies
(sweetness that grows from simple concord
and coordinated labor toward the good)
for those cabals of overweening conspiracy
(the choice of evil against good,
of no against the yes of human dignity).
Oh wisdom that is wiser than we know…
the intuition of an equilibrium, a just return
above that rust-green whorl atop the Witch’s Hat.
Oh you uncanny grace… undulating up and down
and back and forth… like whirlpools, spirals
beside the steady river’s unconstrainable flow.
KAIROS
That time in Minneapolis, at the end of May,
spring slowly comes into its own – the lilacs
begin breathing, showing forth their portion
of glory – the liberated air flies free,
laughs – sailboats skim across the lakes,
and bluebird sky splashes those oval mirrors
into a bubbly embrace. Life shimmers like dew.
Meanwhile, on the labeled grid of dried concrete
the dryness and the noise of chores and cars
hums with its ordinary commerce of need,
in spite of all green weather. Summer dust
floats looming premonition – heat and asthma
and the strain of breathing infiltrate the veins,
impose hot silence – desiccated by suspense.
Monitoring springtime crowds, an absence;
in suppurating yeast of metals and motors
a sudden emptiness. That tall man hustled down
to blacktop – he is superbly alone. The void reveals
malice, glinting in broad day. He begs for mercy –
Momma, Abba, Father… why, why me?
Lilacs are still now – axle resting by his ear.
❂
HENRY GOULD, a Minneapolis native, returned to Minnesota in 2015 after 45 years in Rhode Island. He graduated from Brown University in 1977, where he was recipient of the Rose Low Rome Prize for Poetry and the Charles Philbrick Memorial Prize. After graduation he managed a storefront food coop in Providence, and then worked as a VISTA volunteer for 5 years. Beginning in 1983, he was employed for 30 years at the Brown U. Library. In the 1990s he helped organize a local literary non-profit called the Poetry Mission, which sponsored readings, talks, and the journal Nedge, which, with Janet Sullivan, he co-edited for 10 years. His poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as DiVersos, Poetry, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Notre Dame Review, West Branch, Boston Review, Mudlark, and Critical Flame. Three books have been published : Stone (Copper Beech Press, 1979), Stubborn Grew (Spuyten Duyvil, 2000), and Ravenna Diagram I-III (Dos Madres, 2018-2020). With Susan Brown and Thomas Epstein, he published an expansive festschrift of poems and essays in honor of poet/translator Edwin Honig, called A Glass of Green Tea – with Honig. He also edited and published a volume of Honig's collected poems, titled Time & Again : Poems 1940-1997. His book Continental Shelf: shorter poems, 1968-2020, is now available from Dos Madres Press.