Christopher Howell’s Love’s Last Number

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I had a lovely day. This morning I saw two old friends, women I met in Nelson Bentley’s poetry workshop 30+ years ago. I had the time wrong to pick up my daughter, by an hour, and so was able to take a walk on a nature trail I discovered between Lynnwood and Edmonds. This afternoon, my husband I went to see The Post, which was splendid, and had dinner out.

Plus: I spent spare moments all day reading this luminous book of poems: Love’s Last Number, by Christopher Howell (Milkweed, 2017).

Choosing which poem to share with you is not easy. One of the things I admire about Howell is that he is able to begin with one subject–the disappearance of the dog he had in childhood, for instance–but deftly shift to something you wouldn’t have guessed was related: “And what of the sea, another sort of road, Beowulf’s / whale road, St. Brendan’s miracle passage.” Except now, thanks to Howell, it’s obvious that they are related.

Many of the poems here reflect on the poet’s experiences in the Vietnam War. Throughout the book, time walks rough-shod over us, and also hauls us back, willy-nilly, into memories that shatter — or delight.

Here is the first poem in the book:

A Short Song

This is a song of our consciousness, that faltering
old man who will never make it across the bridge,
who sits down in the grit and dust of it with his wrinkled sack
of groceries that will have to last. A song of his foolish bravery
and terror, his hope that will not stay focused, that wanders
a springtime path between peach trees
and the berries, humming something, forgetting,
and humming again. A song of his wishes
tossing their hats in the wind and watching the last boat
depart, its cargo of nameless meaning casting flowers, waving
out of sight as the sun goes down.
It is a song of memory’s little ways and sudden corner-like loveliness
turned to smoke and broken glass it eats and eats
to stay marginally alive. A song of the bridge that never ends
really, and never whispers this
as the old man listens for the one spot of silence
or the one clear voice that might be his.

 

You can buy Love’s Last Number on Amazon: 

Melissa Kwasny’s Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

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Who is Melissa Kwasny? How is it that I hadn’t known of her before this? How did she come to write this startling book?

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, the 2017 entry in the Pacific Northwest Poetry series, simply blows me away. It’s perhaps a tough sell to a general audience, but I’m going to try. (With one opening couplet that reads thus: “Faint. Uncombed. Awash in rain. / They share the kind of beauty shared by older women.” What on earth will this poem be about?) It was not the sort of book I normally set out to read in one day. These are poems that one needs to mull over, to live with. Ultimately, it’s a book I will keep on my shelf to reread at a slower pace. A book that I already know will reward rereading.

Here is one prose poem from a series of 6 titled “Another Letter to the Soul”:

4.

You are the sound of rain, if it weren’t falling but rising from below, a ground-nester, not a tree one, such as the bobolink or longspur, created below our feet, like the oil is. Rain in the ears and snowmelt rushing through the heart, a distant sound, as of the past retreating. Though loud, continuing its retreating presence. What can the flood teach me about you? I see frothing at the surface and watch myself pulled in, as if identity were an antithesis to gravity. Yet not knowing is part of you, whether I sink or swim, whether I abandon the body or stay and fight for it. When someone says, “you will know when the time comes,” does she mean the soul speaks? What part, then, indecision, net of doubts we might call debris, web of plastic tape roping off the danger? Mudbanks where the deer’s leg sinks in?

I’ve been fascinated by the soul, by the concept of the soul, since I was a kid. I won’t go into that right now, except to say that Kwasny’s book shows me that I am not alone in my obsessions. (And floods! “What can the flood teach me about you?”) Her poems make me want to open my notebook and write my own meditations, to ride them as far as they will take me, even if I end up falling into a mudbank. First, after all, there’s the soaring.

Improvisation on a Theme

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Okay, okay, I said I’d read a poetry book every day in April and report here. But the only book I read today (and that, rather obsessively) was my own manuscript of poems, which I told my editor I would send to him. Today.

It still isn’t where I want it to be, but I’m hoping that a good night’s sleep will help to get it to the finish line.

It’s after 10:00 (which means the date of the post will be tomorrow’s — grrr), and I have to get up early tomorrow to drive to Allyn, where my mother lives in care. So, to hold my place in April’s line-up of poetry books, here is an outtake from Bethany Reid’s Body My House.  It was originally a postcard poem and was published, with the postcard image, in First Class Literary Magazine.

Rainier

Her waitress shift began at six a.m.,
which meant setting out in darkness
on the river road to town.
Halfway there, the mountain
caught the sunlight,
breaking from the morning, bold as an egg
breaking onto the grill,
looming over barbed wire fences
and milk cows swaying, full-uddered, into barns.
Years later, sitting in the circle of light
under her desklamp,
she thinks of that mountain,
how it held a place for her,
like a bookmark,
between childhood’s locked diary
and this poem.

 

Linda Pastan’s Insomnia

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Just the title alone would be enough to make this book resonate with me. But it’s also by Linda Pastan, who wrote “An Early Afterlife,” and — so far as I’m concerned — could have retired after that and still stayed at the top of my list.

Instead, we have Insomnia (Norton, 2015). As Pastan grows older — she is 83  (“Why are these old, gnarled trees / so beautiful, while I am merely / old and gnarled?”) — her themes turn toward long marriage, illness, sleepness nights. She has always handled domestic subjects — like death — deftly, with grace and accuracy. Her eye is as sharp as ever.

Consider the Space Between Stars

Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
the margins around them.

Or the space between thoughts:
instants when the mind is inventing
exactly what it thinks

and the mouth waits
to be filled with language.
Consider the space

between lovers after a quarrel,
the white sheet a cold metaphor
between them.

Now picture the brief space
before death enters, hat in hand:
these vanishing years, filled with light.

-Linda Pastan