WAIRE
I appeared once to myself
as a wracking thirst and
spent the day devising ways
means of forcing
and pressing that green
depth, depthless square
of green into my waiting black head.
It’s all in the depth,
you know he said
the mirage silver mirror
line between the
green depth, green &
aching open joy of blue.
UNDER THE SUN
The megaphones of the demagogues
create a new space over the grasslands,
a flat waste of abrupt authority,
a one-way highway into boxes of the mind.
There, with an iron adhesion,
the lockjaw of an angry will
and magnetized puffery of prestige
unite with a bit of crisis management
to form a glutinous ministration
of upright pipe-dreams, pep rallies
entering the maelstrom, pagan science
magnifying the divine body,
a visage of the ordinary emperor,
vacationing in lonely places
where the earth settles down to sleep
under the foot-stomps of the believers.
NOTES
If I begin to speak to you
without blurring the sounds,
without shouting out lies.
The hill is the road’s father.
The valley was my mother’s path.
The stars do not smudge the night,
they wheel slowly on their lost trails.
They are silent tonight, grace notes
of a deeper composition. Listen –
now they begin to tune the instruments.
The road was my father’s hill.
The path was my mother’s valley.
LATE SUMMER
Evening makes way for night,
and outside, the wind
is bringing autumn in from Canada,
the last of the ice-cream trucks
rattles home to Johnston,
ringing its off-key chimes.
The locusts are all gone.
The crickets are still turning
spirals in the inner ear.
Children still go to bed thinking
about the first day of school.
And the world fills with helium,
heading out on its long journey
over the hills, into the cool
sky – weightless now, letting go
the ballast – an enormous yesterday.
BALLADE INDUSTRIEL
Now that the world is one great marketplace
and all its treasuries (from sand and tar
to elephant and diamond, outer space
to ocean floor, urbs to jungle) are
for sale – now Party is turned Commissar
and Russia, China, even Cuba climb
that pyramid (from serf to millionaire). . .
Now is the time, O now is the precious time.
Now that computers prowl at cheetah pace
combing the earth for Cheapest Laborer
and every digit in the human race
must scrabble for superfluous welfare
and bide no time, by coffeespoon or star,
no time to dawdle, fiddle with a rhyme. . .
(you've got to get those groceries in the car!)
Now is the time, O now is the precious time.
When hoary banks account your state of grace
and future hands are cloning in a jar
and skillful engineers can scan your face
and clever churls can turn you into char
while mafiosi split their wanderjahr
between Manhattan and some sunburnt clime
one mourning dove still murmurs from afar
Now is the time, O now is the precious time.
A lame albino gypsy cried: I lost my dear
sweet darling's ring – I'm liable for this crime!
Lord, if there's justice in this world – draw near.
Now is the time, O now is the precious time.
EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE
Some Saturday evening, summer, years ago.
When you are small, everything seems larger.
Closer. Alive to the touch (as in a dream).
There was a painting in my parents’ house.
A painting of a house. At dusk. Hidden,
lost at sea. In the anonymous ocean
of the farmland. As dark as it could be.
The palest of pale yellow light crept out
through a small window, into a mud-green
yard. A kitchen door. A pickup truck
under the cloud-crown of a brooding elm.
A voice calls through that window. When
you are a child, everything draws near. A
light wind through the dusk is everywhere.
❂
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, forthcoming soon from Dos Madres Press, will include the poems featured here.