September 11, 2017 | Occasus | Issue 7 | Poetry
2 Poems by Kevin Heslop
Screen
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This morning I am listening to Robert Hass’s reading in Waterloo Village, New
Jersey on a Saturday night in September eight years ago, tweezing Loose hairs from the arms of the keys of my sterling typewriter Which, itself, is an American product of enduring manufacture. It was born, so to speak, like Hass, in 1941, a time when Smith-Corona Was just beginning to assemble the first of the quarter million M1903A3 Springfield rifles they would produce during the second world war. “Though the US military doesn’t count ––,” Hass is reciting, “Why put a weapon in the hands of your enemies? –– By conservative reckoning, 9500 Iraqi civilians were killed During the invasion of Iraq. By conservative reckoning, 300 000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during the occupation of Iraq.” A bright green key helicopters from the great maple overhead Landing upright between the Tab. and Margin Release keys. “Two and a half million Iraqis have been driven from their homes And are living in exile. Two million Iraqis, having been driven From their homes by ethnic cleansing, are living in internal exile. Last night, on television, a candidate for the presidency Of this country described the state of affairs as ‘winning’.” In the singsong voice and syntactical imprecision it gives me pleasure To affect when speaking to my five year-old yellow lab, I tell him, As he struggles with having too quickly swallowed six red flakes I scooped from a halved watermelon on the black granite countertop As water was boiling on the stove for tea, I tell him: “Hang on, puppy. I’ll get you some good cold water because what else is there?” Coming outside with the broad clear bowl of water slopping from lip to lip, I’m astounded by the number of houseflies whom each morning And every afternoon appear about the screen door to the backyard’s porch And overgrowth of green life with plaintive little supplications. Part of me Thinks that, if they could, they would be praying; another part suspects That they are praying –– there are no atheistic houseflies holed up Inside in springtime –– each one about the length of your thumbnail And half that nail’s width, like little typewriters with wings bumbling Against the still-unfamiliar net of which their consciousness assures them, again And again. “Walt Whitman,” Hass is asking, “where are you?” And the applause That follows is eight-year-old applause. I reach back to open the screen door –– Most of the flies get caught between the screen and its now-adjacent pane of glass –– Then slide the door back and forth on its dry track, back and forth, until the last fly Tumbles into the freedom it has been permitted. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, Rosa Parks,” recites Hass, “Henry David Thoreau. Where are you?” I turn back to tweeze the last few hairs, the breeze making wriggling little longings From beneath the concave dishes upon which the letters of the Roman alphabet Lie in ready repose; and already two more flies are caught behind the screen. Where do they keep coming from? They won’t say, “No.” Glosa
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It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.
Dance with me dancer. Oh, I will. Mountains, sky, The aspen doing something in the wind. - R. Hass Into the waters still dark under a sky still packed
to the very door with the glittering stars, the angler, whose spincteral hand, stippled with the scales of the two young pickerel he had woken to clean as the woodstove bloomed into the ample cabin, held steady the two-stroke outboard’s pneumatic fuss, as, disheartened, having lost all motivation to torque and coarsen the rhythms of his body with recollection, his unlaced boots battered as proverbs, he sat thinking thus: It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us. The warm water sank to the tug of the knicked steel bow as it made of the silence an animal thing, a labour. The angler let go the throttle as over the far pines, dawn’s first beige ache soughed and the engine spat, silenced. He clawed at the KFC coleslaw container’s damp muck, pinched by its wound a fat blind writhing untill punctured, fixed, it was cast with a wheeze and a thwop. The dark drew line, stopped; the angler reeled twice. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Trill. Dance with me dancer. Oh, I will. Fury is elegance lashing an unfathomable inevitability. As the skiff swallowed its space at the dock, with stringer in tow he made for the hut. The blade ached from its sleep as noon massaged dawn. The wagging of the hefted remains slapped shallows. A heron jettisoned the spike of its hunger, fissuring a shy, guzzled bullfrog. Something thwacked in the forest. The angler lazed from the shack with the fillets in plastic. Ripples snaking the lake, evergreens nodding a sigh, mountains, sky, two bears in the thick of shrubbery onshore unseen, a moose all head and upturned crown swimming. A tail and stripe darts across a mossed root. Slender-throated aviaran aimless song thwove. An acorn. Somewhere a fox lifted its dewy face from the grass. Somewhere a frenzy-drunken spider pinned the powdery wretch of its flagellating saviour. The cast-iron pan spat as the woodstove spoke. An anagram in ripples at the lake’s navel thinned. The aspen doing something in the wind. |
KEVIN HESLOP is a student of poetry and an English undergraduate at UWO.
