Daniel R. Schwarz
Poems

Moon Blue


Huge brilliant gold disc
against sable night,
its phosphorescent brightness
walking on rocky edge.
Fat moon crouches heavily
over mountain backwoods;
snowdrifts touch its fullness
swelling like pregnant woman.

Moonlight crystals burst flaming on white evergreens,
as if winking at snow's abstract patterns,
Etched by winnowing wind and snowshoes;
winking, too, at the aspen--scarred,
mottled (with deadly red blight),
dappled grey, umber.
Moon blue seemed to bide its time
as if it were this once, this very once,
not to set, to recede, be overtaken
but rather stop us in our hurry
to watch its lighting, its birthing.

Generations

I.
We celebrated New Years Day with
generation older than ourselves.
Time--ghostly uninvited
guest--circulated like
stale medicated air in hospice room.
Conversational hum and buzz
touched by mortality
returned me to my past, even as
I saw my future self:
stooped bodies bent by time,
hearing aids, flaccid skin, canes,
wrinkled faces whose geographic
lines mapped worthy histories.

II.
A warm touching occasion:
Among them, men and women I once
held in awe, who were my current age or
younger when I first arrived in Ithaca
bursting with words and promise.
"She is in its worst stage, the time
when one knows one is caught
in its inexorable grip," grieved a luminary
of his still elegant wife now
ravaged by Alzheimer's.
A few of the guests huddled
In corner, sharing the pain
Of adult children lost to heroin,
alcohol, and mental collapse.

III.
Caught in warp of
another time, greeting me warmly
yet feigning full recognition,
others insinuated intimacy that never was,
as if I were bridge to
younger world they once knew.
Some never appeared, debilitated by illness,
loss of faculties, though present in
to and fro of regrets, memories, elegies.
Yet I imagined them as they were,
in full vigor, at similar parties years ago,
and realized I soon will be them,
my sons me, and the yet unborn
would watch my sons age.

Spring Sounds

Spring sounds: low-pitched baritone
of roaring creek, insistently,
slowly cutting shapes as it
gathers its strength,
rolls, tumbles, roaring
strongly in bass,
then, yes, tenor surge
over ancient rocks
in three discrete small cataracts,
before coalescing at next plateau
returning to orderly pattern,
softer, gentler gurgling
of soprano trickles and alto drips,
pleasurable cacophonous trilling.

Mother in Hospice, April 2005

"I am drowning," she mumbled,
"I am ready to die. I don't want
my family's lives in suspension."
But her mind was lucid.
Crowded into cubicle with
Living remnants of her body, four of us--
my taciturn brother who
put life on hold to be caregiver;
my second wife, Marcia,
who knew what to do and say;
my younger son, Jeff, who had never
seen death's color and texture;
and myself, guilty for not doing more,
frustrated that doctors knew so little--
were, in halting whisper,
counseled to love each other,
avoid strife, anger.
Her final words were who she was.
To my wife: "Take care of Danny."
Eyes close, few minutes silence:
"Marcia, you make wonderful rugelah.
How is your ailing father doing?"
To me: "You have found joy in
sharing interests with your wife." Pause.
"We need to find someone for you, Jeff."

With barely audible laughter,
she recalled defending me
to fifth grade teacher who
thought I was inattentive, even ironic:
"You were smarter than your teachers;
children need to laugh and have fun."

She taught us to die with grace and dignity.
"A great lady!" I tearfully told my son
as we watched her fight for breath,
"She was quite a beauty into her sixties, but
is she not even more beautiful
radiating love for family?"

In intermittent moments of clarity,
she lived in fabric of
human feelings and memories.
She always knew what I have come to learn.
Savoring small pleasures--smiles, touches;
sunrises, sunsets; cardinals feeding;
herons, deer visiting pond;
intimacies between tick and tock
when life momentarily blazes--
are not mere interstices
between ambition and career success,
but warp and woof of life itself.

Her favorite color was blue.

Interview with Dan Schwarz, Conducted by Professor Helen Maxson, About His Poetry (Published in Westview26:1 [Spring/Summer 2007], 11-14)

Note: All the poems referred to below that are not in this issue or prior issues of Westview have been published elsewhere and most are accessible on Daniel R. Schwarz's web page: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/drs6/

Helen: Why do you write poetry?

I think most writers--and I include myself--write primarily when we need to delve into our psyches and discover who we are and, secondarily but still importantly, when we need share the results of that process with others. I use words to understand myself and the world I live in. I have kept a diary most of my life, briefly recording events and my responses daily. Poetry is a way I come to terms with my feelings in a disciplined form. My poems respond to events and experiences about which I need to say something to myself.

Life's serious events evoke in me a need to put my thoughts into form, and that form on occasion becomes poetry. May I quote a 2002 poem?

WORDS

Are my mind's mirror,
editing what I see of self and world;
transforming brine in which ideas soak:
Imagination's amanuensis and muse,
giving shape to what might be.

Are nets in which I try to catch
swimming ephemera of my life;
while I have woven them tight,
from filaments of experience,
I do not always know how to set the nets
to catch tortured thoughts, tender feelings.

Are closets and drawers where I put my things,
ordering tentatively life's disorder;
honing tools to shape inchoate thoughts;
putty to fill insignificant gaps
where tiny drafts penetrate;
are whetstones to sharpen memory;
intricate mosaics shaped by experience
into elaborate patterns.

Are memory's archaeology
by which I excavate my past;
recall or create lost visions of childhood,
capture evanescent dreams;
nocturnal fictions of fulfillment,
undoing day's fantasies;
are soul's music, tongue's plaything,
mind's geometry and poetry.

Or as Stevens put it in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (1949), "The poem is the cry of the occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it, / the poet speaks the poem as it is/Not as it was . . . . [The] words of the world are the life of the world"

My subjects often, but by no means always, take their inspiration from my personal life: the aging and recent death of my parents--my mother died in 2005 and my father in 2004-- my sometimes difficult relations with my father, the evolution of my two sons' lives, my divorce and remarriage, family love and even some strife, romantic and marital love and Jewish themes. My poems balance carpe diem or seize the day with a deep sense of mortality that takes the form of awareness, fear, and reluctant acceptance of the inevitability of aging ("My Father's 84th Birthday"), illness, disability, death. Elegy echoes in many poems whether it be the premature death of friends' children ("Elegy for Elizabeth Rose Lane Galloway," "Cindy at Schroon Lake") or the accidental death of a colleague ("The Garden of Our Saying: Elegy for George"). Sometimes elegy intersects with nostalgia ("Vermont: Family Thanksgiving, 2006," "Generations," "On Seeing a Family Friend for the Last Time"). My poems often express my love of nature as I contemplate nature's wonders, including seasonal changes contemplating nature I often relate its movements to human rhythms, I am interested in cultural differences within America ("Lobsterman at Porpoise Cove," "House Razing," "Jim Thorpe's Daughter") and the world ("Utz," "Banquet Delicacy: Beijing, 1993"). Finally, in the spirit of Stevens's "It can never be satisfied, the mind, never" ("Asides on the Oboe"), my poems respect the power of the human mind.

The scope or corpus of my fifty or so published poems takes into account a good deal of my life and interests--art, travel, nature, food, literature, teaching, writing, and, of course, family-- I address illness, aging, loss, loneliness and death as if one could exorcise these demons by writing about them. Writing does have therapeutic value, but alas, those fears that we all share are part of living.

Helen: Why did you begin writing poetry in your 50s?

I had a creative impulse that was re--channeled by graduate school and the demands of teaching and publishing. I would like to think that creativity found an outlet in scholarship and criticism, but clearly my imaginative impulse needed other expression. I started writing creatively in my later 40s after a painful divorce and began a novel, which is still in draft but from which I published a short story that was later anthologized.

I think writing my book on Wallace Stevens concentrated my attention on poetry and sharpened my powers of observation, my auditory sensitivity to words, and my desire to distill experience into a succinct form. When I first began writing poems, I also had some valuable help and encouragement from two experienced poet friends, Lynne Knight and Rob Morgan, who was an accomplished poet before becoming a novelist and the author of Gap Creek.

Helen: What do you see as your recurring themes?

I write as a humanist who believes that in our relatively brief time on earth we can make a difference to those we care about, including family, friends, and, yes, students. Playing on the theme time is money, I counsel that time is time and really all we have.

A major theme is that we can learn from experience, whether it be confronting the illness of loved ones, observing the patterns of nature, unexpected encounters in travel, or reading literature and visiting art museums. Other themes are the need for resilience when confronting difficult times in life; belief that sharing a life in a day-to-day relationship, with all its special small moments, is a source of pleasure; and stress on family continuity and, on occasion, discontinuity and conflict.

Throughout my poems is a strong consciousness of mortality combined with a sense that life is to be lived and enjoyed fully. I have written a fair number of elegiac poems about times past and lives ended. But ended does not mean lost. For example, "Mother in Hospice, April, 2005" is an encomium to a great lady whose life gained value from what she passed on. "Performance " reflects on my student Christopher Reeve's tragic accident, and who he really was separate from his role as Superman. Related to the elegiac mode is often nostalgia for what we imagine as simpler times, even while we know--as I indicate in the poems--that we reconstruct the past according to our dimly acknowledged needs. In my poems, nostalgia goes hand in hand with a sense that we do learn from experience and that even in my 60s there is much life to be lived if luck holds out. And I have written lov poems about the joys of falling in love and remarrying--"Garden of Intimacy" and "Remarriage"-- and poems about a relationship that didn't quite make it ("Talk"). My passion for travel often informs my poems, whether directly ("Banquet Delicacy: Beijing, 1993," "Travel," "Charleston Lake, Ontario, August 1996 ") or indirectly ("Utz," "Tapestries," "Spring Sounds").

Helen: What do you see as the salient features of your poetry?

In terms of form, a salient feature is a small story--often derived from a simple observation-- and narrative shifts back and forth from present to past and often back again. Thematically, a crucial feature in my poetry is the place of memory even while understanding that there is always a distinction between what happened and what we remember happened and a second distinction between what we remember happened and how we select and arrange that memory into words. My poems often focus on the presence of the past; as George Eliot put it in Middlemarch: "A man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present . . . . It is a still quivering part of himself." Rhetorically a major feature is a belief in language and a belief that if we can only find the right words, we can communicate. Thus I respect the audience and I strive to be lucid. I think of the epigraph to E.M. Forster's Howard's End: "Only Connect." Like Forster, I believe in personal relationships as a cornerstone to the building of a life. I believe in the capacity of the human mind to understand, and, believe, despite all our failings, that we need others--family, friends, community.

My belief in language even carries over to my naively optimistic belief in communication through language as a way to solve larger misunderstandings between different political visions, although I do not often address in my poems explicitly political themes. If we can only talk about a problem, I believe we have a chance to solve it.

Helen: Do you see continuity between your role as one of the leading humanistic literary critics and your poetry?

I think we overestimate the distinction between reader and writer. I think an active, passionate, imaginative reader responds to words with joy, and it is not surprising that many of our great writers--Borges, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Joyce--are also perspicacious readers. To be sure, compared to the aforementioned writers, my poetry is only a drop in the literary ocean, but I do feel that write as a reader. Joyce understood the continuity with reading and writing when he has the jejune Stephen Dedalus think in the opening line of the third chapter of Ulysses, "Signatures of all things I am here to read."

A serious reader is a person for whom literature--imaginative and serious non-fiction--matter, and for whom literature is not simply something to be skimmed as a pretext for finding ideas for essays and conversations but rather as an opportunity to enter empathetically into--depending on the text--the author's imagination, memory, value system, historical milieu, indeed, way of being present at a particular time and place.

Reading is a kind of travel, an imaginative voyage while sitting still. Reading is immersion; reading is reflection. Reading takes us elsewhere, away from where we live to other places. We read to satisfy our curiosity about other times and places, to garner information about what is happening in the world beyond our lives, to gather the courage to try new things even while considering admonitions not to try dangerous ones, to learn about experiences we might try in the future and to help formulate narratives--of personal hopes, plans, putative triumphs--that help us understand our past and make proposals for our future. As Stevens put it in "The Idea of Order at Key West," words enable us to discover "ourselves and our origins" and perhaps to experience "ghostlier demarcations" and "keener sounds" than we may find in our own lives.

We do read to supplement our life experience, and that surely includes reconfiguring the values we are taught. W e also read to delight ourselves, to recuse ourselves from the painful, sad and lonely world we at times live in--a world that can be fraught with political and personal problems. We read not only to alleviate pain but also for amusement. Reading, we must not forget, is a kind of play. We read to enjoy the pleasure of words, their sensuality and materiality, the smells and tastes and visions they evoke, the desires they elicit, the laughter as well as the tears and even physical disgust and pain they arouse.

As reader, critic, teacher, and poet, I would subscribe to James Wood's idealistic view of the implicit contract between artist and reader: "[W]hat I am most interested in is what we might nebulously call human truth--a true account of the world, as we experience it, and of the full difficulty of being in that world. Creating living characters, and writing fiction expressing what Henry James called 'the present palpable intimate' entails, for me at least, some kind of morality. Requiring readers to put themselves into the minds of many different kinds of other people as a moral action on the part of the author" (D3, " Ideas & Books," Boston Sunday Globe, Aug. 15, 2004). I would extend Wood's remark to apply to poetry, drama, and perhaps even serious non-fiction.

Helen: How have your writing and teaching about literature affected your poetry?

I am a humanist as teacher, critic, scholar, and poet, and that means I place a strong emphasis on how humans live. Even in the high tide of theory I have--without sacrificing attention to the formal aspects of literature as well as the need to understand historical contexts-- focused on literature as artistic works by humans, about humans, and for humans. Humanistic criticism believes that the doing--technique, structure, and style--is important because it reveals or discusses the meaning inherent in the subject. Our goal should be an empathetic reading of a text to discover the conscious and unconscious patterns of language that the author built into a text; those patterns usually convey a vision of how humans live. We should read literature as an imagined representation of historical events and human behavior. Human behavior is central to most works and should be the major concern of analysis. Thus our interest as readers is in how fictional people behave--what they fear, desire, doubt, need--and fictional includes poetry and drama as well as novels and stories. . Although modes of characterization differ, the psychology and morality of characters need to be understood as if they were real people; for understanding others like ourselves helps us to understand ourselves. Even the seeming exceptions prove the rule: complex plots enact and represent human actions; descriptive poems reflect the perspective of an observer.

When I write a poem I descend into myself, but the words are not only for myself but others whom I hope respond to them. As the 2006 Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk puts it, "[O]nce we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books--the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself " (Orhan Pamuk, "My Father's Suitcase," The New Yorker, Dec-25, 2006-Jan. 1, 2007, 88).

Among other things, I am--like all of us--in part what I have read. We are what we experience, and for me reading and visiting museums are central to my experience since I have spent much of my life engaged in these activities. As your fine essays shows, I have studied the modernist literary tradition, which I teach and write about, especially the English and Irish tradition--Joyce, Hopkins, Stevens, Auden--as well as such painters as Picasso and Cezanne. My poetry has been influenced by my study of the relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature entitled Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature (1997). Examples of the influence of art can be found in the following of my poems: " Picasso's Women" (Westview, 23:2), "Cornucopia," "Still Life: Raspberries, Apples, and a Sheet of Paper," "Pentimento," and "Cezanne in Philadelphia, 1996."

To return to literary influences, I have been influenced by Hopkins in terms of my use of phonics and in dramatizing confrontation with nature; "I caught at dawn", in my "Charleston Lake, Ontario August 1996" echoes the opening of Hopkins's great sonnet "The Windhover." "Reading Texts, Reading Lives" and "Ocean Pleasures" show my familiarity with Stevens. It is hardly surprising since I am a Joyce scholar that "Snowbound" begins with an epigraph from Joyce's "The Dead" and that I have written a poem entitled "Reading Joyce's Ulysses." I have also been influenced by the American tradition as my epigraphs from Hawthorne ("Depression's Visions") and Emerson show ("The American Scholar")--and with Emerson I have even borrowed the title of one his best known essays.

Helen: Does your narrative focus derive from your interest in teaching narrative?

I think the uses of multiple time frames and the desire to tell a small story come from my interest in narrative, but also from my sense that stories--even anecdotes--enact values. Narrative is both the representation of external events and the telling of those events. My interest in narrative derives from my belief that we make sense of our lives by ordering them and giving them shape. The stories we tell ourselves provide continuity among the concatenation of diverse episodes in our lives. Each of us is continually writing and rewriting in our minds the texts of our lives, revising our memories and hopes, proposing plans, filtering disappointments through our defenses and rationalizations, making adjustments in the way we present ourselves to ourselves and to others.

Furthermore, the emphases on a dramatizing a distinct voice within my poems comes from both my interest in lyric and in strong fictional characters--including reliable and unreliable narrators--who reveals their psyches and values, their personalities, with their quirks and idiosyncrasies, in their speaking voices. Of course, the dramatized speaking voice changes with the subject, and sometimes the voice is a dramatized version of my response to a particular moment, other times more of a persona as in "The American Scholar" or "The Muse Returns."

My strengths are the efficiently told tale rather than the striking image, although I occasionally hit the mark with the latter as in "Remarriage." I think I am at my best as an observer; opportunities to travel have afforded me opportunities for observation of nature and people, whether it be a refugee from the Holocaust or a lobsterman in Maine. I would say lucidity, succinctness, the ability to control multiple time frames within a brief poem to represent a small but illustrative story are my strengths and maybe the failure to find the most original way of saying is a weakness. Nor do I do much with rhyme although I do often write in regular lines.

Helen: Is the persona yourself, as seems evident often when you write about family issues, or is it a dramatized person?

Certainly, in "The American Scholar" and "The Muse Returns," the voice is that of a comic persona who is trying to find his voice. But even when the voice originates within myself, it forms within the ontology of the poem another self speaking. As Palmuk explains: "For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge that the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing." (Orhan Pamuk, "My Father's Suitcase," The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006-Jan 1, 2007, 90). Writing poetry discovers the deeply buried self--the fixations and obsessions, the dark memories, the pain we barely recognize--what Palmuk calls the "secret wounds" and creates a persona different from our every day social self. For a poem about secret wounds, I would cite my "To My Only Brother: A Letter" ( Westview, 24:2). The speaking voice in my poetry is not the everyday self who gets up, brushes his teeth, has breakfast and drives off to work but an intensified and particularized self whose words are carefully chosen and refined with an imagined audience in mind. The voice exists within the imagined ontology of the formal poem.

Helen: How do you compose? Can you take us through the creative process?

I begin a poem when I feel strongly about something I have felt or seen. I write something down in my computer or in a notebook or on a slip of paper if the computer isn't there. At a later time--hours, days, weeks, and months-- I might sketch a draft of a poem, and revise it and play with words. I might let it rest for days or weeks, returning every so often to fine tune it and tighten it and omit unnecessary words, especially articles. The need to communicate to the imagined audience enters more prominently into the creative process at the time of revision. Sometimes, I fine-tune for months and years, and then suddenly I think, "Yes, it is ready." Even after submitting a poem, I may notice a place where fine-tuning is necessary or an editor may makes a valuable suggestion for revision. When I begin to like it I show it to my wife, Marcia, a retired professor and perhaps to another reader I respect. I might add that I find computers help me immeasurably; I think now with frustration of the experience of retyping of my earlier scholarly writing. It takes little effort to change a word when in the past an entire retyping was necessary.

Helen: Has your feel for nature been affected by living in rural upstate New York?

I grew up in what we thought was country in suburban Long Island, and remember even then having a favorite birch tree in a yard, enjoying the still beauty of a snowy day, and my family nurturing baby rabbits abandoned by their mother. Living near the ocean helped me appreciate the seasonal effects on the sea and marine life, and a handful of my published poems reflect that (" Lobsterman at Porpoise Cove," "Perkins Cove, Ogonquit" and "Ocean Pleasures"). But certainly living in Ithaca for 39 years (excluding a few visiting professorships) and as I do now, in the country with a home overlooking a pond--albeit within a mile of Cornell--has deepened my appreciation of seasonal rhythms. I enjoy bird watching and snorkeling. I revel in the process of nature--freezing and thawing, snow and sunshine, suns rises and sunsets--and the variety of birds (" Blue Heron," Westview 24:2) and the observable differences in plants virtually every day ("Predetermined Patterns," my first published poem in 1993). That appreciation carries over to my response to nature wherever I am. Writing poetry helps me see and hear the natural world--as in "Spring Sounds"---but seeing and hearing the natural world also helps me write poetry.

Helen: How has your poetry evolved?

Since I often return to and revise poems begun years ago, it is hard to see an evolution or teleology. I have learned to omit irrelevant words--partly under the tutelage of Rob Morgan--and write a sparer line. I have experimented a bit with haiku in recent years and that has helped me be more efficient. And I have done more with regular lines. My travels influence me, too. Visiting Japan and its gardens, which accentuate the sound of water over rocks, certainly influenced "Spring Sounds." For the past several years, I have been in general writing more regular lines, and I am now writing about a larger range of subjects, such as "Bethe at Cornell," Westview, 25:2.

Helen: Does your Jewish background play a role in your poetry?

I am a secular Jew with respect for Jewish traditions and history but without a certainty of God's presence. I when I ask myself, "Where was God during the Holocaust or the killing fields in Cambodia or during black enslavement here and elsewhere and why is there is so much individual and collective suffering in the world?" I have problems. Yet I was Bar-Mitzvahed and so were my children. I have been married twice by a rabbi in Jewish wedding ceremonies, and have belonged to a temple for decades. So clearly the Jewish tradition is important to me.

I have published several poems on Jewish history ("The Sarajevo Haggadah"), the Holocaust ("The Shape of Memory in Prague," "Utz"), Jewish rituals ("Tishah b'Ab"), Jewish holidays ("Rosh Hashanah") and the Old Testament ("Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin"). Certainly writing my book Imagining the Holocaust (1999) brought some of these themes to the forefront of my thinking.

Helen: Is there a spiritual dimension to your poetry?

I do not believe in an active intervening God, but I do believe in human energy, imagination, intelligence, and passion. How these qualities transcend the hum and buzz of everyday life when they connect with the natural world and human experience and when they become creative forces are my version of the spiritual. Much of modern literature derives from our anxiety and dubiety when it comes to believing in an omniscient and omnipotent God as well as our recognition of the limits of a single perspective. F. H Bradley wrote a century ago: "My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside . . . . In brief . . . the whole world for each is peculiar to that soul." (Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay). Our writing is an effort to break out of that closed circle and find, if only for a moment, an empathetic other. In the midst of what seems to many of us a chaotic universe, where senseless killing goes on in battlefields across the world, and we frequently read of local violence in our newspapers, we have the potential to create community, intimacy and art. Is there not a spiritual dimension in believing in the magic of language, in sharing with Stevens the faith that language communicates if we can find the right words, and that our private worlds can be made into efficacious--even transcendent-- words?

Helen: Thank you, Dan

Speculations on the Lyrical and the Narrative Modes in Poems by Daniel R. Schwarz
By Helen Maxson (Published in Westview 26:1 (Spring/Summer 2006), 15-20)

In his poem "Spring Sounds," Dan Schwarz describes the sounds of a creek as a musical composition of separate voices sometimes singing in unison and sometimes carrying distinct parts. The structural pattern ascribed to the creek takes various forms throughout Schwarz's poetry, helping to define it as a whole.

Spring Sounds

Spring sounds: low-pitched baritone
of roaring creek, insistently,
slowly cutting shapes as it
gathers its strength,
rolls, tumbles, roaring
strongly in bass,
then, yes, tenor surge
over ancient rocks
in three discrete small cataracts,
before coalescing at next plateau
returning to orderly pattern,
softer, gentler gurgling
of soprano trickles and alto drips,
pleasurable cacophonous trilling.

There is much about this brook as an image that can speak to several themes and, thereby, to several of Schwarz's poems, revealing among them a common dynamic that unifies them as the brook unifies its trickles and drips. The brook participates in both order and cacophony. It flows over ancient rocks. Its flow is both urgent and casual. It carries impact, cutting "shapes"--(of self-expression and of impressions made on the surrounding landscape)--that mirror the workings of other poems. There is a universality to this brook that, engaging Schwarz's other poems, reflects what it means to him to be human, to be alive, and to describe, as music and language and paint describe, those experiences.

Schwarz's poem "Mother in Hospice, April 2005" enacts the creek's dynamics in various ways. A dying mother, surrounded by her family, honors individual members by tenderly commenting on their personal needs, struggles, and strengths. At the same time, she counsels them to become a unified whole (as the brook does), "to love each other, / avoid strife, anger. " In the final stanza of the poem, the concept of coalescing as a family becomes a mode of being or living in which individual elements of experience comprise the strands of life's fabric, rather than moments between them:

In intermittent moments of clarity,
she lived in fabric of
human feelings and memories. She always knew what I have come to learn.
Savoring small pleasures--smiles, touches;
sunrises, sunsets; cardinals feeding;
herons, deer visiting pond;
intimacies between tick and tock
when life momentarily blazes--
are not mere interstices
between ambition and career success,
but warp and woof of life itself.

There is a mystery in these lines: just as individual trickles and drips combine to form a larger stream as well as "discrete small cataracts," the individual moments of life form a fabric that celebrates each one separately and gives them precedence over any totalizing agenda that we might be tempted to impose on our lives and in which the moments would be lost. The mother's moments of clarity as she dies come to her naturally rather than as a function of her will. Coming and going on their own terms, they produce a fabric of individual feelings and memories that are "warp and woof of life itself." Embracing this aspect of her dying as a way of living, the poem's speaker affirms the workings of the brook as a mechanism that can detach us from what is artificial, connecting us with what is genuine and can help us to live well.

The poem "Generations" describes a similar mystery involving the coalescence of human experiences that, yet, remain distinct. The speaker of the poem remembers a New Years Day celebrated with his elders, whose poor health and approaching deaths have much to do with the atmosphere at the party: "Time--ghostly uninvited / guest--circulated like / stale medicated air in hospice room." Yet, even as the irrevocable marker of life's end is much in evidence, the generational boundaries defining the party guests blur for the speaker: "Conversational hum and buzz / touched by mortality / returned me to my past, even as / I saw my future self." The speaker imagines those at the party as they were when they were younger, "in full vigor, at similar parties years ago, / and realized I soon will be them, / my sons me, and the yet unborn / would watch my sons age." The speaker finds himself in both his elders and in his sons, in a perception that softens the influence of time, as well as the ravages of life itself represented by "Alzheimer's, . . . adult children lost to heroin, / alcohol, and mental collapse." There is a power here coming from identification with others--a form of coalescence with them - that defeats time and rises above distinctions that we take for granted in our day-to-day lives.

In fact, there is a component of transcendence in the mysterious coalescences of all these poems. It is helpful to remember here that Dan Schwarz has spent much of his scholarly career studying the workings of modern British fiction, a body of stories that behaves in various ways like the poetry of British high romanticism. We think of the language with which D. H. Lawrence describes human passion, language that sometimes leaves behind the linear, syntactical logic of prose for the more associative logic of poetry. We think of the moments of discovery and epiphany that inform the stories of Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf. These novelists reinforce the impulses toward transcendence that their readers have found in romantic poetry, and Schwarz's poems frequently enact those impulses.

At the same time, Schwarz's poems make use of many literary elements generally associated with fiction. The lyric moments of feeling and perception he describes emerge from narrative contexts of setting, situation, and character. To be sure, the lyrics of high romanticism happen within narrative contexts too: Coleridge studies the secret ministry of the frost in a midnight lull in life's activities as the parent of a baby in the English countryside, and the poem tells a story about that parent even as it explores his inner musings and discoveries. But the narrative dimension of Schwarz's poems is not often upstaged, or upstaged for long, by the sort of lyricism or epiphanic experiences for which the romantic poets are known. Perhaps we might see Schwarz's poems as poetic versions of the modern fiction he has studied as a scholar. Perhaps we might liken that the interplay between the narrative and the lyrical in these poems to the dynamics of his brook in "Spring Sounds," as it passes among its separate cataracts and the plateaux on which their coalescing transcends them.

One of the features of Schwarz's poems that emphasizes their narrativity is their use of quotation and dialogue. Schwarz's poems often advance an underlying theme by remembering words and verbal exchanges of the past. In fiction, even as it develops a story's underlying themes, dialogue helps to develop character and scene. In lyric poems those goals are usually secondary to more ephemeral or transcendent explorations. In Schwarz's poems, however, we find a balance between the narrative and the lyrical in which dialogue participates in an overall--ultimately transcendent--fabric of voices that together constitute the poem. It is a balance akin to that between the individual and the blended that we have already traced in Schwarz's brook and in the lesson represented by the dying mother for her son. The characters' voices in Schwarz's poems stand out as individual expressions that help to conjure a narrative, even as they are absorbed by some lyric exploration that is carried out by the speaker's voice.

Schwarz's poem "Snowbound" expresses well the balance between the concrete subjects that usually inform narrative, and the abstracted or transcendent experiences that tend to comprise the subjects of lyric poems. Schwarz introduces the poem by citing the lyrical ending of Joyce's story The Dead, in which snow is falling all over Ireland so as to bury the differences between individual things and diminish the differences between, "all the living and the dead." In Schwarz's poem, the snow, "buries roads, / homogenizes houses, / nullifies difference." For both Joyce and Schwarz, the snow clearly suggests some state that transcends the distinctions among concrete things, but there is at least one important difference between their views. Critics of Joyce have long disagreed on whether to find hope or despair in the final image of The Dead (and, for that matter, in many images throughout Joyce's work in which he seems deliberately to resist interpretation). Schwarz participates in that ambiguity in the first of his poem's two stanzas -- the snow is peaceful, but it nullifies, but in the second stanza, he casts the state of being snowbound as a process of gestation and hope.

Blizzard awakens my soul.
It's as if I were enclosed in womb
from which I emerge reborn,
or crypt that magically reopens.
Smoldering passion, creativity, curiosity
melt snow, prepare
ground for flowering, renewal.

In Schwarz's re-envisioning of Joyce's snow, it nullifies the individual only to prepare for individual birth. Distinct cataracts that coalesce in a brook, threads that intertwine in a fabric, delineated scenes and characters of narrative that transcend worldly distinctions in some form of lyrical experience --perhaps we can say that in the cosmos of Schwarz's poems, all these things gestate for a time in a loss of self that will, in the end, enhance each cataract, thread, and character. If so, perhaps we can also say that the relationship between the dialogue of Schwarz's poems and the speaker's voice that, in the end, absorbs their individual voices, mirrors that between cataract and brook, or between thread and fabric and, so, enhances those voices. Certainly the voices of the speakers in Schwarz's poems rise often to the level of the abstract. The nouns his speakers use are frequently offered without the articles that, in common speech, would attend them. In "Snowbound," the speaker describes being "enclosed in womb . . . or crypt"; in the poem's first verse, the extensive whiteness is "still as frozen pond " The family in "Mother in Hospice, April 2005" is "Crowded into cubicle." Throughout Schwarz's poems, his speakers' nouns rise--leaving behind articles--from the specific to the general, from the concrete to the abstract. As a result, the characters' voices are defined against them, to a corresponding degree, as reflections of specific individuals. Perhaps we might say that the abstracted language of his speakers offers, among other things, a fertile snow against which his individual characters are defined--a womb of thoughtfulness and transcendent realization in which the specificity of narrative is subdued in order to be later enhanced. To be sure, Schwarz's speakers tell their own stories with specific details. But they provide, too, something akin (though not identical) to the "conversational hum and buzz" attending the New Years Day celebration in the poem "Generations," in which individual voices are muted, and against which the quoted voice of the "luminary" grieving his "elegant wife now / ravaged by Alzheimer's" gains clarity.

The themes of speech, voice, and artistic expression are explicit throughout Schwarz's poems and reinforce our sense that the voices of his poems work in much the same ways as the sounds of his brook. The creek is "baritone," "tenor, " "soprano." In "Mother in Hospice, April 2005," the mother's "final words were who she was, " and the figure of Marcia "knew what to do and say." The speaker remembers his arrival in Ithaca " bursting with words and promise." The speaker's muse instructs him on the writing of poetry in the companion poems " The American Scholar" and "The Muse Returns." In treating the theme of expression, Schwarz's voices play out the opposition and, at the same time, the mysterious partnership between the narrative and the lyrical, the concrete and the transcendent that we have seen in his poems. In her advice to the character of the poet that he avoid burdening his readers with his narcissism, Schwarz's muse likens the poet to Joyce's Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who cannot find his own poetic voice because, in his self-conscious attempt to write as thinks a poet should write, he cannot silence Shelley's voice in his own work. Schwarz's muse warns the poem's speaker against the same mistake: "Are you having delusions that you are Shelley or Wiesel?" Counseling against rhapsodic self-inflation that is out of touch with one's own reality and that of others, her advice is reminiscent of the wisdom of the dying mother who counsels her family to avoid conflict; both women urge a form of coalescence rather than self-assertion. Yet, the muse exemplifies to a T the premise that Schwarz's dramatized voices gain clarity against the voice of the speaker. The speaker rhapsodizes that when "I feel fine frenzy of a poem, / my emotions overwhelm me like incoming tide surging over sand. / I need to chew on bones of experience, / Drink dregs of bitterness, / taste ashes of regret." The muse responds "You need to take out our garbage and walk the dog." It is a comic triumph of the concrete over the abstract, of characterization over lyric rumination. While her message transcends the self-absorbed individual on behalf of service to others, her voice celebrates the genuine individuality that eludes both Stephen Dedalus and Schwarz's speaker. It is a healthy balance between lyric and narrative.

The allusions of Schwarz's poems to earlier works of literature repeat these dynamics, offering characters and situations well-defined, in part, by their familiarity to the reader as well as by the artistic strategies of the earlier writers. Against these specifics, Schwarz's speakers come to their own conclusions about them, generalizing in sometimes lyric terms. In response to Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," Schwarz's poem speaks of "cry of mothers who / have lost their kin and kind. . ." In response to Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Schwarz writes
His scars are psychic scars,
like ones we all bear,
and his, like our, Hades is within:
fears, obsessions,
and dimly acknowledged needs.
He, too, is teacher;
his subject is humanity.
He is Stephen's Nestor
but also his Virgil,
accompanying him - and yes, us--
through divinely human comedy.
The phrases "He, too, is teacher" and "through divinely human comedy" underscore the abstraction of their nouns by omitting articles and speak with the graceful cadences of lyric. Furthermore, both poems treat broadly--inclusive subjects: the suffering of Icarus is extended to all mothers who have lost children to violence; the Hades of Bloom lies within us all and, like Dante's Inferno, is part of the cosmos of all people. Schwarz's citing of transcendent truths adds to the lyricism of these poems.

And yet, in these poems, the images of Brueghels's painting about which Auden is writing, the details of Picasso's painting hat Schwarz mentions, the historical detail of Max Jacob's seizure by the Nazi's, the plot details from Ulysses listed in Schwarz's response to that novel: these concrete specifics are the stuff of narrative. Perhaps this mingling of literary modes evokes Schwarz's brook on the subject of literary allusion, finding in it an author's personal experience with a prior work, through which the work transcends the specifics of its original creation and contents. As such, allusion becomes a gesture of both narrative and lyric impulse.

Not only the language of Schwarz's response to Auden and Joyce, but also their visions celebrate the specific while urging that we

transcend it. In the response to Auden, Schwarz's speaker urges an empathy for those who suffer, and a willingness to " imagine / paranoid fantasies triggering / psychotic explosive acts" that reminds us, in its extension beyond our own experience, of the speaker's willingness in "Generations" to imagine the elderly guests as they were when they were younger, realizing that "I soon will be them." In his response to Joyce, Schwarz's speaker celebrates the same impulse while meditating on the character of Leopold Bloom, his pain and courage in the face of insult as a Jew, his tolerant and forgiving nature reflected in a citation from Ulysses with which Schwarz begins his poem: "Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not the life for men and women, insult and hatred." It is the same tolerance and forgiveness that we, as readers of Ulysses, see when a hurt Bloom gives his persecutor the benefit of the doubt: "Perhaps not to hurt he meant" (Joyce 311). In their urging of understanding rather than self-centeredness, both poems celebrate the plateau on which the separate cataracts of Schwarz's creek coalesce. Ironically, in both poems, it is in exploring and honoring the experiences of specific individuals, and thereby lowering the boundaries between them, that both poems abstract to an overall practice of tolerance that would embrace all individuals. From this perspective, tolerance seems like an abstraction fostered by specifics. Perhaps there is a suggestion in Schwarz's poems that allusion is a lyrical process that starts with the detailed familiarity of narrative.

Schwarz's poetry is highly allusive, referring to classic works of literature from Dante to Auden, to works of visual art, and to figures of mythology and religion (like the Christ implied by the punning phrase "divinely human comedy"). In a letter to a Mr Kean, John Keats referred to the creative process of alluding to one's artistic forebears as an "immortal freemasonry" (quoted in Bate 201); in its allusiveness, Schwarz's poetry engages in just such a process, building an artistic edifice that combines the bricks of prior works with his own creations. It is a coalescing activity, and it enacts in the arena of art the same work of empathy for which Schwarz, echoing Bloom, calls. In his 1939 elegy "In Memory of W. B. Yeats, " Auden wrote, "For poetry makes nothing happen," appearing to disagree with Yeats's view that art could respond in constructive, efficacious ways to the events of history. However, Auden's skepticism is belied by his poem's celebration of Yeats's potential impact on the hatred of the Hitler era:
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
. . .
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

For Dan Schwarz, there is no doubt that poetry can make things happen. In its images, in the dialogue of its characters, in its allusions, Schwarz's poetry claims for art the work of his creek, making music that is a sound of spring and renewal, embracing the cacophony of disparate voices in "orderly pattern" that transcends them and suggests some improvement or desirable condition toward which we might work.

Works Cited

Bate, Jonathan. The Romantics on Shakespeare. London: Penguin, 1992.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Gabler Edition. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1986.
d in Westview 26:1 [Spring/Summer 2007], 15-20)

The Muse Returns

"I am in elegiac mood,
nostalgic for what should have been,
anxious to mourn days gone by
to find paths not taken,
words not said;
I need to drink from dregs of regret and loss."

"Let us not live in the world of
what if or might have been
or I should have and could have,
and almost or but. . . .
She's gone and it's time to build a tomorrow."

"I need to scold and blame myself and suffer
romantic agony."
"Ah poor man,
there you go again.
Revel in the world's
delicious cornucopia of pleasures;
each day's your harvest, banquet, and bouquet."

The American Scholar

"The world is his who can see through its pretension" (Emerson, "The American Scholar")

"Write a simple happy poem;
Your pain bores me."
"I can't write what I don't feel."
"Had you any sense, you would
not write your damned poems
of gloom and doom.
Write a romantic love poem,
speak of lovely moon,
changing colors of October leaves,
red sunset hovering on Cayuga lake."

"Ah, but when I feel fine frenzy of a poem,
my emotions overwhelm me
like incoming tide surging over sand.
I need to chew on bones of experience,
Drink dregs of bitterness,
taste ashes of regret."

"You need to take out our garbage and walk the dog."
"Do I not know well that
cynicism is mortality
of attitude and sarcasm is
mortality of speech?
I need sing of unrequited love and early death,
hear woozy bluesy sounds of saxophones,
think of the Sorrow and the Pity of my people,
and render my vast capacity to feel pain."
"Are you having delusions that you are Shelley or Wiesel?"
"We poets respond to agony
driven by the lyric spirit."

"My advice to you," she said
leaning forward in her chair,
"is work hard enough to pay bills;
write funny poems
if poems you must;
avoid burdening your readers
with narcissistic accounts;
above all, dear man,
take small steps
accompanied by modest words."

Snowbound

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead" (James Joyce, "The Dead")

As far as eye can see,
quiet as pure white,
peaceful as country landscape,
still as frozen pond, snow
bends trees and ragged bushes,
blankets earth, buries roads,
homogenizes houses,
nullifies difference.

Blizzard awakens my soul.
It's as if I were enclosed in womb
from which I emerge reborn,
or crypt that magically reopens.
Smoldering passion, creativity, curiosity
melt snow, prepare
ground for flowering, renewal.

About Suffering: Response to W.H. Auden

About suffering they could be wrong,
The Old Masters: when and if they ignored
effects of massacres,
cry of mothers who
have lost their kin and kind,
when and if they could not imagine
paranoid fantasies triggering
psychotic explosive acts:
fingers wedded to guns,
perambulatory mindbombs.

For every Guernica,
there has been sound of silence.
Take Picasso's Vichy days:
Did he notice when
friend Max Jacobs disappeared?

Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Oklahoma City:
The Massacre of Innocents
is everywhere, takes many forms.
While Icarus drops from sky,
Others lose parents, child, hope.

Vermont Family Thanksgiving, 2006

We were six.
After feasting
with my wife, sons,
their lady companions,
I didn't say much
as I left the room,
catching sight of
organic turkey carcass,
leftovers--applesauce, cranberries,
stuffings, mashed potatoes, breads--
unwashed dishes.

II.
With conversation dulled by
sounds of televised football,
I fell into a brown study,
yearned for older ways:
Marriages, grandchildren,
respectful hierarchies,
eldest male carving,
saying thanks,
others responding,
polite to and fro
of blah de blah,
perhaps masking
pain and truth,
yet no less satisfactory.

III.
Memories of
gregarious thanksgivings:
I watch my father
sharpening, twirling
carving knife,
grandparents
elegantly dressed, blur of
uncles, aunts, cousins--
chic, slick, shabby--
those whose footsteps
will never be heard again.
Twenty years forward:
Myself presiding
at sumptuous gatherings
serving roast goose;
children still pliable, playful.
Final scene:
Half-awake, I imagine
set table
fully decked but
lacking guests.
I am oldest, maybe last,
taking stock.

IV.
Chatter, laughter,
displace my dumb show:
I feast on life's banquet: health,
hospitality, intimacies:
gestures, smiles.

Cornucopia

What summer raspberries are to sexuality,
fall apples are to mortality.
Whether green or russet or pied,
crispy, sour, hard or chewy,
they have feel of incipient autumn,
shorter days, grown children.
Cider is juice of middle age,
tart, tangy, and easily fermented.

Berries of our days and ways,
raspberries are to moment
what apples are to nostalgia.
Green succulent asparagus,
with brushy grainy flexible heads,
atop proud stiff reeds
stimulate memory of prior seasons:
Artichokes offer opulent pleasures
Within moist leaves.
Pale green honeydew melons
proffer soft lush whitish center;
ripe rich summer tomatoes
resonate with redness of sunset.
Sweet cantaloupes anticipate
bright orange yams, which play
their part in holiday rituals.

Banquet Delicacy: Bejing, 1993

After I was
invited to eat
succulent filament of
red snapper's eyes,
I reflected:
We, too, see
to find sustenance,
to protect offspring
to avoid predators
by slipping into crevices,
spying warily hooks
set by two legged creatures.
Then, biting the fish's
hard eyeball, I recalled
that woman's darting motion,
fragile splendor, rainbow colors.

Strawberries

Ripe fragility,
succulent juice on palate:
tinctures, stains, regrets.

Daylight Savings Time

Suggests spring's bright blooms,
promises fecundity,
ripening berries.

Spring, 2005

Awestruck, I beheld
Goldfinches, dancing birches,
birthing catkins, leaves.

Bethe at Cornell

(10/18/01):

"The beginning of the universe
must be older than the oldest stars.
I was called in when astronomers,
seemed to have shown
by their deft measurements
that the oldest stars were older than the universe,"
he says with a twinkle in his eye.
Speaking with his heavy German accent,
but lucid and witty, totally focused at 95
gesturing, looking at his audience,
using overhead graphics,
he unravels the mysteries of the universe,
to an audience of thirty in a crowded elegant seminar room.
He speaks of giants and dwarfs among the stars,
even as we think we are watching a giant
among if not dwarfs us ordinary humans.

His phrases whirl about in the cosmos of my mind:
"In the core of stars;" "the temperature at the center of the sun"
His periodic silences--pregnant pauses--
reveal a mind at work, as hot and
active as the stars he describes:
"I spent lots of evenings on these problems
but not as much energy as the supernova."
Isn't his mind like the "excited state of energy"
he attributes to the stellar world?

Listening, watching, I am puzzled by
"C+H==N 17 and 12C +11--13n+Y"
Yet I find in the folds of his speech
a kind of order and his delight in the
pleasures of sharing his discoveries.
Five weeks after the twin towers tumbled,
I exalt in this affirmation of learning
in time of turmoil,
and am humbled.

Jigsaw Puzzle

Immersed in the doing:
feeling once again boyhood excitement,
turning 500 pieces face side up,
touching gently pieces one by one,
sorting contoured edges,
looking for exact fits,
holding up almost similar
colors and shapes to light,
ignoring bedtime admonitions,
watching pattern come to form,
savoring mindscape
as design emerged,
peeking at box's picture,
fearing missing piece
that would deface whole with hole, but
dreading consummation.

Utz

"Utz was the owner of a spectacular collection of Meissen porcelain which
through his adroit maneuvres, had survived the Second World War and the years of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia," Bruce Chatwin, Utz

"I'm a collector," and then a pause, "of ancient Chinese artifacts,"
I turned to the voice in what I thought an empty room
at the Stockholm Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.
"I too am a collector," I thought, hearing
a mysterious stranger. This time:
a man about my height and age
dressed also in black, a short slightly stooped
angular figure of middle years,
pronounced pointed nose, preternaturally thin,
concave chest, and hollowed cheeks,
Giacometti's Walking Man,
bent and carved by experience and history.
By the kind of unspoken rapport that
develops among those who obsessively
frequent museums, he became my guide,
speaking in imperfect English about ancient
Chinese pots and statues, admiring details of one,
declaring another "not quite as good. . . ."

His eyes blazed with passion.
In him, I saw other figures
who had approached me in Europe
when a twenty-one year old student: survivors
collecting me, a fellow Jew, a reminder of lost
sons and brothers. I met him after visiting
the Stockholm synagogue on a June Shabbat
on the year's longest day.

Were it not for my probing,
he would have shared nothing about himself:
His father had volunteered to fight Franco.
When I asked if he were a
Jew, he responded, "I am a Marxist Leninist,
but I go to the April Holocaust service. I left Prague
thirty years ago with my mother. We survived Terezin,
but left Prague following the 1968 purges."
Marked by history like the Chinese relics,
his face seemed etched with the shifting
map of twentieth century Europe.
Divorced, lonely, cautious, yet intimate,
he spoke haltingly of painful visits to a daughter in Rome.

He was the connoisseur, my Utz,
but was I not collecting this cadaverous
treasure from archives of lost Jewish Europe
for my memory and imagination?
We parted without exchanging names.

Remarriage

Wrung, wrinkled by time,
ringed by custom, wrought by need,
we converge, yet keep our individual markers,
bumps and potholes etched by prior journeys.
Our places on life's map already drawn,
unlike decades ago,
when I and another Marcia carved and curved
other roads with our sons. Now
country roads winding
through familiar venues--
let us say the Poconos,
or perhaps the Berkshires--retrace
the geography of memory,
meshing portals of discovery
with inns where bodies briefly sang.
Remarriage after mid life is more
a circumnavigation than a thruway.
On sailing days we are Magellans
sharing new discoveries of self,
revisiting past lives:
flashes of recognition, nuances of regret.
On port days, we need remember,
as routines fall into place,
to forget compass, discard maps,
let intuition dance.

House Razing

For Margaret Anne, Huntsville, Alabama

As flame ebbs, smoke clears,
we stare at charred remnants ofrafters,
foundation stones,
two chimneys amidst ruins,
stairs to nowhere,
broken glass, ashes, shards.
More: tattered clothes, torn mattresses,
overturned swing, carriage remnants,
rusted, derelict cars
among huge shade trees.
Scattered bricks
mark history of house that
stood when Union army crisscrossed
Northern Alabama--a serviceable abode
nurturing inhabitants, reaching decrepitude:
A living organism with
muscles, tendons, nerves, and
bones peeking through flaccid skin.
My companion stands alone,
her pale fragility outlasting its wood frame.
History is writ in her ancient Jewish eyes,
wrinkled face, graying hair, seared memory:
last survivor of a homestead family
whose abandoned house now
attracts, like rusty magnet,
dispossessed squatters, vagrants.
After execution, dumb show elegy:
we picnic silently,
tasting dregs of wine,
staring at the burnt corpse.

History Speaks: Sept 11, 2001

History thrusts its horrors on television,
Planes flying into the World Trade Center,
Massacring helpless victims, destroying buildings,
fragmenting family histories.
Desperately searching, rescuers discover
hieroglyphs of death: charred carnage,
smashed corpses of those who jumped,
Unreachable voices buried beneath rubble.

Childhood. History's malevolent wink.
A collision of two commuter trains:
Tightly holding my mother's hand
I stand transfixed, helpless to intervene,
as smoke curls into the night,
acrid smell of scorched human flesh,
fire trucks, ambulances helplessly hurrying,
frightened fearful women scan the scene.
Even today etched images still live of
twisted metal, fire, bodies,
transforming wives into widows,
depriving my playmates of fathers.

Adulthood. Veraciously immersed,
as reader, as writer, in horrific
conflagration of skin and bone: The Holocaust.
Escaping extermination by geographical accident,
trying to enter into horrors that
resist language, yet require words,
I retrieve, elegize, imagine a buried world.
Indifferent History echoes in nightmares,
whispers in torrential memories.

Reading Texts, Reading Lives

I wired blue flowers
in the shape of a guitar
with a message:
"Woman in Sunshine:
After the final No
There comes a Yes.
I love you passionately;
Forgive me;
Keep hope alive.
The Man With the Blue Guitar."
A few weeks passed.
Her response:
"It's too late;
Time will not relent.
I wish you well
but I am not it.
Mrs. Alfred Uruguay."
Alas, we begin and
end with Stevens.

Performance

For my student Christopher Reeve

I.
I recall teaching you as Chris twenty-five years ago,
confident, articulate, and ambitious--
a scintillating peacock among brown wrens--
a freshman adored by magnetized young women
who dressed for your approval,
who waited to see where you would sit
before choosing their places.
Feeling the presence of Joyce, Mann, Kafka,
your mind darted sharply,
like a rainbow trout in stream,
seeking its nourishment but at times impatient
as if hurry were thought.
Bright, engaging, you bestrode
the college mindscape like a Colossus,
never quite separating performance from living.

II.
I guess when I told my sons that
I taught Superman how to fly,
you still occupied a corner of my mindscape.
It piqued my vanity's palette
that you remembered me
when you thought of Cornell,
singled me out during a visit two years ago.
I took unreasonable pride
in your public stances,
and preened myself
that in some oblique way,
I had infinitesimal influence.

III.
Who would have thought that I
a generation older
would be running and swimming
while you,
thrown from your horse,
would be saying:
"There is more to me than my body."
Vacationing far from my moorings,
walking among sea oats,
wandering on the fishing dock,
exchanging stories with folks
with whom I have only in common
the love of fishing,
and forgetting momentarily
issues of mortality,
my father's aging,
my sons's efforts to find a way and a place,
sickness that becomes
common subject of conversation,
I discover your handsome smile and blue eyes
staring past Barbara Walters at me.
But between sentences you gasp, and
arm-like tubes embrace you like a mechanical octopus
enveloping an elaborate chair
designed to support muscle refuse.
Does it matter if your indomitable spirit
performs your greatest role
or if the audience is your wife, your son, yourself?

Cindy at Schroon Lake

As we wander through fields
of your family homestead,
even after thirty long years
you search for traces
of the past in the debris
of tennis courts and softball field,
reclaimed by brush.
Seeing the shards and remnants
of a collapsed backboard,
you think of your
long ago childhood play
and that of your late son
senselessly killed.
Images of my living sons
flash suddenly
as if our sons were at play
on these very grounds.

 

On My Father's 84th Birthday

Elegy for Elizabeth Rose Lane Galloway (b. 5/7/97 - d. 5/9/97)

Pentimento

Travel

is for me hermetic,
an ordering: each trip
a life, with its own defined
beginning and ending,
an escape from
thick textures
of adult life--heavy weights
of work and relationships.
Travel is world
out of time:
anxieties controlled,
mortality put off,
attention distracted.
Trip is oasis,
an abbreviated lifetime,
sealing world
from intrusion,
creating space
of two spare,
bare weeks.

Talk

As she packs, takes down woven
baskets she has collected,
boxes precious trinkets and treasures,
she speaks in detail of histories of things--
bowls, masks, fabrics--
gleaned from a lifetime of travels and friendships.
She gives gentle orders to my son
while I do not lift a finger.

The Sarajevo Haggadah

"Bosnia Jews Glimpse Book and Hope" (NY Times headline, April 16, 1995)

The book as bibliocosm:
Marked with smudges,
children's scrawls,
richly colored illustrations--
the Creation,
Moses blessing the Israelites--
frail vellum,
wine stains of 600 years of
peregrinations:
Exodus and Diaspora
--testament
to perseverance, resiliance,
deliverance,
even thanksgiving.
Mysteriously appearing--
as if sent to the Passover sedar
by Elijah in his stead--
speaking of Jews persecuted in Egypt
bearing the scars
of its own diaspora from Northern Spain;
surviviving intermittent
shelling, civil strife,
Haggadah
tells and tolls
its history in Saravejo,
ancient suffering land.

Jim Thorpe's Daughter

Cezanne in Philadelphia, 1996

Charleston Lake, Ontario August 1996