Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
1997; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nhr.1997.a925183
ISSN1534-5815
Autores Tópico(s)Island Studies and Pacific Affairs
Resumo John F. Deane Filíocht Nua: New Poetry the return to Ursula I These are the Carolina boulevards, these are the cities built for cars. I have been walking for hours, solitary, only my own deluded footsteps cluttering behind me. There are copperheads among the grasses, mosquitoes, scorpions, raccoon, cotton plants, mockingbirds . . . the confusing paradise of childhood & in its belly, the slimed uncoiling serpent of necessity. I had been down to the gate as usual, watching; in the hedge some dust-life stirred— sparrow, field mouse, rat; he's just late, I said, but mother's frame gathered a frightening rigidity; she busied herself a certain distance from the phone; the house braced itself, attentive, as if the surge of happening could somehow be restrained; when the news broke, it brought the bustle of relief, Filíocht Nua: New Poetry anger released like spray, the long outbreathing already begun to shore away into the past, leaving the man's words hollow, his grip unsure. II I have been walking on the tracks, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, counting days—tracks in a long sweep running between Philadelphia and Tampa, through Baltimore, St. Petersburg, and Raleigh. How the rails gleam, ahead, behind me; I lay my head to the iron and hear— not angels on Jacob's ladder ascending and descending— only my own heart hurting and the Carolina breeze brushing tree-tops into sea-sounds, waves gentle along the sands, those summers when all manner of things seemed well. All night I could hear it—after the day's schooling—soothing, the sea, like the whispering of winds across the pines with their offered shelter; father was by, his partridge stance, and mother, her encompassing wings; after the self-accusing rituals that placed me in a wilderness of sins, for I had map and chart and compass long before I knew the journey, that we were fallen, that the pines would stand too soon shivering and scrawny like plucked fowl. Filíocht Nua: New Poetry III Wires hummed above us, making the world one. If you put your ear to the creosote poles you could imagine the high buzz of Chinese, Yankee, French; sometimes the winds that riddled in from the Atlantic raised high-pitched, sliding fiddle tunes along the wires till you could think the air an intricate score of world-music hummed by a pottering God; with a good aim you could ping a stone off the cups and send clay chips flying everywhere like pattern plates smashed to jigsaw fragments. Such a small island, remote, enclosed, my people old as oracles, diffident, true but sending their sons and daughters out into the big world, earning. Now it is Fall, and I am hanging high above the Blue Ridge ocean of mountains, rust-orange, dust-lemon, I am crossing—Virginia to Kentucky—floating on a soundless score of ghost-lives, dead words. Filíocht Nua: New Poetry IV Granny was big and mothering, wore off-white corsets and soft blacks. Her thin grey hair seemed soiled suds gathered in a net; but she darned my grey socks with purple wool, my white vests daffodil yellow. I wonder how she saw me, in some brightly colored future? or as if, with love, you could sunder things and put them again together? I see her, always, unraveling into grey and white. Grandfather said the universe was ordered as his workshop was: angles, T-squares, the mathematical necessities. Along the walls hung rows of cartridge belts with all the tools in constabulary order; on the kitchen mantelpiece he kept his pipes; I watched him rub fragrant plug between the heels of his palms, fill it in, and pack it down and clouds of smoke went drifting on a perfect sky. When he died she had a grave-space kept beside him, this final double bed conceived with a quilt of marble chippings; the stone had space for her name, too; the plantain grew up between the chip-stones, tiny lichens spread age-flecks across the stone's face; she died two hundred miles away, obedient still to the world's ways, and was laid down in a narrow suburban bed among strangers...
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