"a little to one side it is there"*

Thursday afternoon I was looking for a poem or two to read for an open mic following a reading for First Draft Writers' Series, from Pendleton, Oregon. I was going to just read love poems because I thought that’s just easier and mine are those “seen from the corner of your eye”** and not overly sentimental. I’m opposed to overly sentimental in poetry and in life. Keep it in commercials and made for TV movies. I want emotions that are earned. Don’t give me cheap theatrics or sick kittens just to soften a heart. Jerry says for a poet you are devoid of a soul, my reply to that is I don’t believe is souls.

So I was shuffling through some older folders and found a poem of mine called Mythology, I had forgotten about it. What I find curious about it is the opening thesis, what is that about? I’m wondering if I wrote this before or after I wrote a poem called Considering my father’s heart. (quick note, I see I wrote them both around the same time about nine years ago) So here are two poems about hearts, gritty and scarred and curious. (And after the poems, a snoring cat!) Be safe, be kind!

Mythology

The heart breaks and ruptures, heals
itself, weakens and hardens with tough
new scars. No doubt it skips
speeds and causes reckless words.
It peers into the past, worships the future,
lays claim to whatever the brain says avoid.
And so I wait for whatever the world holds
knowing my heart, and its minor gods, can
wait for new stories, different outcomes.

These are the myths I grew up with:
China Gold, Sasquatch, D.B. Cooper,
the Northern Lights, a father’s unshakeable love.

One summer a hundred head of elk
crossed the just graded road
outside of Granite Oregon. Their meadow
caught in the gloom, as sun 
made its way over the mountain
and lit the top of the highest pine.

A quarter mile up, my father stopped
the road grader, as the tan
animals moved like a wave of honey
into the timber. The machine shuddered,
a reverberation that echoed
through the dawn with the distant
elk voices, and opened the day

to this last myth I thought I understood.
My father drove out of sight
into deep and unknowable shadow.

 

Considering my father’s heart

Which I haven’t, for years, really, since we stopped talking,
or he stopped talking, to me. But today, with news
that he is in the hospital with heart trouble, I think
about it, and him. His father died over fifty years ago
from a bad heart. And I wonder if he thinks about
that. If he weighs the heart ache and the heart break
the way I weigh mine. If he smiled wryly, like I did,
when my sister told me that he has heart blockage
but that his body had already created a bypass,
and it was working so well that doctor said there
was no need for surgery. Of course, I thought,
even in life and death he’s too stubborn.
And then I think about calling him for his birthday,
wondering if our hearts have found other ways
to survive, how mine has healed in miraculous
ways as well.
 

 “Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye**. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all, as I believe Frost used to say. It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there*.” William Stafford from What It Is Like, Writing the Australian Crawl Views on the Writer’s Vocation, The University of Michigan Press, 1978