Hugo, Roethke, & Wright

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 6


"Hardly a ghost left to talk with." Richard Hugo
 "What’s madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?" Theodore Roethke
 "I have wasted my life." James Wright

The silence is impossible,
always a rush of noise:
a train, leaf-rustle, thump
of heart, or house whisper.
Nothing stops the procession:
so much memory to alleviate
some choose liquid, pen, or pills.


Then there is the giving in:
dancing with the heavy bear,
is it time or is it spirit?
What was it the Greek said
about the river, always?
Never doubt the soaring chicken-
hawk nor the blessed ground.


For me its pictures, a line of
tinted bottles, foreground,
a haze that might be ghost-
flesh dancing just behind.
What is the strange reflection
in the glass? It could not be me,
not without a hand to chin, a tug.


Is it a waste to lay the day,
to look, to wake, to see?
Isn't it madness to doubt
your own devastation, all
the while courting the edge?
What the blood begs is not
silence, is it? Merely fluctuation.


When the three drunk ghosts visit,
never together, they speak, each
in a lonely room. One of cancer
stealing the cells, seven at a time.
Another swears sobriety: I'm dancing.
I've been dancing all this time.
The last one just sings: Kapowsin,


Kapowsin, sunfish, perch, & trout.
They are nothing if not gentlemen
ready for one last night at the fights
that will never come. Of course,
ghosts don't really wear flesh,
nor scuttle their way into pictures,
& best: they have no need of shaking hands.

The Triggering

I forget the names of towns without rivers.
A town needs a river to forgive the town.
Whatever river, whatever town –
it is much the same.
The cruel things I did I took to the river.
I begged the current: make me better.

The above lines comprise the opening stanza of Richard Hugo's poem "The Towns We Know and Leave Behind, The Rivers We Carry with Us" written for his dear friend and fellow poet and struggler James Wright.


Two years after publishing the above stanza (which was also the year of James Wright's death), Hugo published his conversational poetry manual: The Triggering Town; he defines the title in following paragraph:

In this case I imagined the town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse forty years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t. It is narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish, and hateful to assume emotional ownership of a town or a word. It is also essential.

We blogging poets or, in my case, poetasters know all too well this narcissistic obsession of following the triggers and getting the words and images, arriving like recurring dreams, down and dealt with. Here is a new poem (perhaps one day to better revised--I'd appreciate honest feedback) triggered by Hugo, my blogging friends, and mostly a recurring dream.


________________
The House


If I could smell in dreams (and whose to say that I cannot),
I imagine I would smell a river, train smoke, and fermenting barley.


A large plot is scattered with children's playthings:  trucks,
balls, a sandbox, and an aging but solid, metal swing-set painted green.


The grass, green & wet as mid-spring, gathers in neighborhoods
scattering the yard; clover & dandelion roads crisscross throughout.


But these I notice last, if you believe the waking imagination,
the thrust & grasp of memory after the dream's disappearing act.


It's the tall & wide, white house rising in the middle of the yard,
where the dream begins, inside, in any of a hundred rooms, all somehow familiar.


Always slightly different than the previous slumbering inhabitance,
once a vaguely yellow kitchen with nook and spiraling wooden staircase.


In another, a library of unmarked books, Victrola, console radio, miniatures hung upon the walls; an endless hallway's walls are perfectly spaced with black & white photographs:


Never a face I recognize, but each door, each room branching off has 
obvious inhabitants: brothers, sisters, roommates, friends but never mine.


I never make it to that room I'm searching for.  Stairways leading up, end back 
at the ground, steps turn to slides, secret passages open to whole new wings.


A green chair changes patterns in front of my eyes, a friend's suitcase packs itself and leaves.
A window opens, a breeze enters and a fraying feather floats in and I chase it through the house.


The house shrinks and I find myself on a patch of green looking back & forth between swings
and now the house sinks: a white window half in the ground takes the last bit of light down with it.


The dream ends before I decide what to do. Birdsong intervenes. 
My own house, small and less than quaint, lightens for morning.


Nothing is lost in dreaming, and yet a subtle haunting remains through the day.
Somewhere, a looming white house rises above a green yard and children's playthings.


There, in the half-light, another version of me considers the magnitude of making a move.