Contents:
from Birds of Hoboken:
Birds of Hoboken
In Early Spring
Fictions
from Not Till We Are Lost:
Hammering Stones
Water Dish
The Mysteries
Links to poems of mine on other websites:
"If I'm Reading You Right, Immanuel" at
Campbell Corner: The Language Exchange
"Picture of the Author with Vice President" at
The Paris
Review
"Goldsmith and Charity" at
AGNI online
Birds of Hoboken
Here there is space, and what innocence
I can hold on to, alone—
neither Adam nor Ecclesiastes.
The tremendous fact that is Manhattan
shimmers across the river's crumpled foil;
but the dweller upon vanity could find enough
behind him on this world that ends
at the concrete bumper of a railroad wharf—
a flatcar load of rusted wheels,
or the derrick of a half-sunk
wooden ship, unable to raise itself
from its berth of silt.
There is a recoverable grace
in the fine joinings of wood, soft grains
bleached by sun and the river's chemicals.
That it has remained this long
seems a bit of a miracle, but the very water
of this place has been abandoned,
a trapped rectangle, rainbowed only
with petroleum seepings, obsolete
to anyone, it seems, save myself—
and the birds, now half my reason
for coming here. It is too far
to call back the first time
the appearance of a bird above the river
opened a new world. It may have been
the croak of a heron, flying to roost
at seven o'clock, that struck me so out of time
as if the sky itself had spoken.
Now in winter, I stand in the disused
shadows of Pullmans painted the old
green, my fingers stiffened on binoculars,
to watch small rafts of scaup
and others brought here in the amplitude
of migration. There are black ducks, goldeneye,
mergansers, occasional pairs of tiny
bufflehead sheltering among still-rooted
pilings, abiding here on their commute
that measures a continent in a year.
As darkness obtains, I look more
for the significant flashes of white—
the pure body of the canvasback,
or the half-hid speculum
in the gadwall's folded wing, or, once,
the white crown worn like a lily petal
by a widgeon that had flown from extreme
spaces of tundra, of muskeg lakes.
The birds speak that way (oblivious
to my desire, to the whole city
brighter now in dark) of remotenesses
we haven't killed yet. They know nothing
of abandonment, and yet I think
they want this place simply
because we have wasted it
even of ourselves.
They allow me
to watch them, though by now I can see only
the way bodies keep their even keel
in waves that may be killing them.
They don't exclaim: again, as if
willing to forgive, they arrive.
Copyright William Wenthe, from Birds of Hoboken,
Orchises Press, 1995
First published in The Georgia Review, Winter
1988 To Top
In Early Spring
Midnight. The tentative prickings of rain.
Alone and wind.
How I count on
the return of things—rain, and bird,
the hard bud, the catkin—
so why won't I return?
Why haven't I written the friend
I grew up with, eighteen years?
Gone west: I saw him last, alcoholic,
tormented with his stories,
saying, "I've been teaching myself
to remember."
In the dark rain, where does the phoebe go?
It's been a year
since I thought of that lyric,
asking the wind to come back,
that the small rain down can
rain . . .
In my bed again, wind
breathing in the window's ear.
Copyright William Wenthe, from Birds of Hoboken,
Orchises Press, 1995
First published in Poetry East 37/38 (Spring 1994)
To Top
Fictions
Last night I finished the Paradiso—
where Dante, nearing the center
of heaven, had found children.
He was so lucky, born
into a language with words like rimbombo
to render the distant falling of water—
still, the struggle he had,
to encompass within the limits
of tongue and mind what he saw there;
and how he finally had to turn
to the earth to explain it: to a rose
that gives shape to Paradise,
to a river made of light;
and a hive of bees tumbling among blossoms—
angels ministering to souls.
But if we can translate in the other
direction, who, then, are these leaves
riding the wind outside my house?
They mottle the ground till it quivers like gravel
in pools where Rose River filters down from Hawksbill,
through greenstone and hemlock,
till just looking on them is to expect
the darting shadows of trout, wild, panic-
pulsed by the sound of my steps.
Does this river, then,
run through heaven? Is it possible to save
these leaves from a doom of merely spinning?
I can tell that cluster of flowers,
small white petals spaced like babies' teeth, appears
different now I've learned to name it
white wood aster—but if it's the falling, together,
of flowers into form that urges us
to name them, or only our need
for shape that we name, that I cannot figure.
The Bible tells us God
gave the naming of animals to Adam,
but God is another name too . . . strangely
unsayable.
And what is the name of this gesture
the asters make in the wind?
And who were these two people,
yesterday, huddled in the darkened booth of a bar?
We talked of our love never talked of before,
but it was mostly silence, our fight
for words almost a third person there with us,
when, as if one of us had thought of her—
a small girl inclined her forehead over the edge
of our table, and she became everything
we couldn't say.
But when the hand came to lead her away,
she left us face to face with our need
to do what Dante didn't have to do—
negotiate a journey back
from Paradise to where we are, a glass, a candle, the shadows
snagged in the cracks of a table . . .
a windy morning, the gesture of the asters
inviting us into fictions—extended names,
moving like angels or like bees.
Copyright William Wenthe, from Birds of Hoboken,
Orchises Press, 1995
First published in TriQuarterly 86 (Winter
1992/93) To Top
Hammering Stones
On the gospel channel, bodybuilders:
one rolls up a fryingpan, one uncurls
a horseshoe's steel Omega; one lays hands
on a pair of Georgia license plates, rips
them in half. Leather weight-belts, talc,
sweat, glutted veins in bicep, neck;
gnashing teeth, grunts bowel-deep, pecs
that surge and stress the words
on t-shirts: GOD MADE YOU TO WIN.
It's more than just a ten-foot log
one of them cleans and jerks above his head;
nor do they believe the single-mindedness
of the man hammering stones with his forehead
is enough. That something other moves
in the knuckles of the man clobbering nails
into hickory with his fists is concrete
proof: here is Grace made tangible.
In a motel room, the thumb of a man
clicks along the remote, looking
for something to distract him from one
moment to the next. Above the neon lot,
a few stars visible, spiked into the dark;
bats lift themselves in jagged wreaths
around the streetlamps. All day, with one foot
and one hand, he moved 2000 pounds of Chevy
across four states. If he can lift tomorrow
his eight pound head from the damp pillow
it will be enough. The sun could do no more.
Copyright William Wenthe, from Not
Till We Are Lost, LSU Press, 2003
First published in The Southern Review 35, 2 (Spring
1999)
Reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXV: The Best of the Small
Presses (Fall 2000) To
Top
Water Dish
It will happen sometimes, in a strange place:
waking surprises us—that rush
of surroundings, startled flush
of creation—for a moment, miracle.
Then, memory. We put on our stories
before our clothes: Oh yes, the motel in Beaumont . . .
Except once. Adam, that first morning,
with a mind only dust
and a divine breath, must have woken
as no one's woken since—continual
arousal to that warm, enormous light in the air
licking the river, spangled in leaves,
dangling its paws from the lianas.
Even Eve had to open her eyes
to that dubious mirror—his flesh
her history; his future
in her belly. Now,
the world he woke to banished
to story, chapter
and verse, to lurk
on the border of sleep, or, in odd moments,
to pounce: What is that shard of sky
that drops into a ceramic bowl outside my window—
in that instant before
I think it: blue jay,
walling myself out with the words?
Copyright William Wenthe, from Not
Till We Are Lost, LSU Press, 2003
First published in The Chattahoochee Review, 20,
3 (Spring 2000), under the title, “Adam Waking”
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The Mysteries
What you look hard at seems to look hard at you
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
I.
My reflection hangs on nothingness, a faded
ghost inside the window-glass, or rather
outside, hovering twenty stories over
Chicago, among snowflakes aglow with the city's
ambient light. The boundless snowflakes swirl,
like schooled fish turning on a hidden axis
inscrutable as instinct, the curved helix
(which now they resemble) of DNA, or the whorl
of fingerprints . . . though every single one
is a fingerprint. At times they look quite lost,
halting before the glass like travelers
befuddled in a hall of hotel doors—
like me, earlier tonight, having just
arrived in this cold, unfamiliar town.
II.
Arrived? In this cold, unfamiliar town
the word sounds jarringly inadequate.
Arrival’s what Odysseus did in Ithaca;
but here, this single room just tells me how
alone I am, my marriage newly failed.
But if I think of family history,
I’m led right back to here—one Friedrich Wenthe,
Bavarian immigrant carrying hod.
He had a son named Herman, a printer’s devil
who worked his way to owner of the firm,
and hoped his sons would carry on the name;
but the oldest son became a priest, the second
a victim of an auto wreck, and so it fell
to the son who’d someday be my father, Raymund.
III.
But the son who’d someday be my father
found one of the Baptist managers,
the year that Al Smith ran for president,
printing off some anti-Catholic verse
and punched him out, there on the shop floor.
In ’37 he married Betty Neil—
“prettiest girl in Chicago”—or so he swore
to me, after sixty years and married still.
They are my parents, a word that comes to me
fraught with stories happening before
my birth, a past that is and isn't mine—
a past of words I trace from memory
like verbal photographs of ancestors
in spectral whites and faded sepia tones.
IV.
Spectral in white and faded sepia tones
of snow and copper streetlamp glow, the city
is just a faint impression of itself, sketchy
but real as stories my parents handed down.
Spectral and real, I turn to them for rest;
though not such words as ground my parents' faith
in their religion, nursed them through the birth
of their nine children, of which I was the last.
And even with my birth, a shroud of words
recalled: a snowy night like this, it seems
my neck had gotten tangled in the cord;
placed in an incubator, there I spent
my first few days, another "brave infant"
unwilling, I sometimes think, to leave the womb.
V.
Unwilling to leave the womb: I sometimes think
that's why I gravitate to window-seats
like this one, overlooking city streets
but sheltered behind glass—my own fish tank.
Cozy in this amniotic warmth,
I count the bridges—six—across the river;
each car, bus, truck, and cab a shuttle weaving
and unweaving the city's endless cloth.
Like Penelope's, this weaving seems to lead us
nowhere; and yet she knew that it had something
to do with a long-awaited coming
home. And so I wonder what to make of
my arrival in this town: which would it be—
a joyful, sorrowful, or glorious mystery?
VI.
The Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries
are what my family used to murmur through
in Lent, when, gathered in the living room
we prayed the movements of the rosary.
There's Ray and Betty, most of the nine kids
(an older one or two away at college)
counting, bead by bead, along the stages
of Our Father's, Hail Mary's, Glory Be's.
On couch and chairs, we made a kind of circle,
each of us a bead, each bead a voice,
the voices linked in rhythmic unison
worshiping the single life of Christ
until, arriving at the last Amen,
we scattered back to individuals.
VII.
Now, scattered to our individual
adulthoods, a pin placed on the map for each
of us would look like broken rosary beads,
or unconnected dots—a child's puzzle
I'm staring at the way, all night, I've watched
the river's frozen skin, sliced by fireboats
into jigsaw pieces, heal, like platelets
in the bloodstream annealing what's been scratched.
And I'm the child who, pen in hand, would draw
those dots together again, heal the wound
of separateness carved into my life—
a wider wound now, separated from my wife.
But are these searched-out words enough—as though
by the very act of searching, it were found?
VIII.
By the very act of searching, it is found—
or so Augustine said, of seeking God,
since God’s the source of seeking, the very ground
of need, by which all need’s fulfilled.
Human love, he said, is like a travesty
of God’s (although I hope he’s wrong on this),
directed as it is toward human frailty;
but looking back on ours, I must confess
I thought that loving her made all the wrong
turns right—an arrival, yes—a destiny.
—Until our separate pulses proved too strong;
and so the Joyful leads to Sorrowful Mystery:
which means the question now before me is,
how can the Sorrowful lead to Glorious?
IX.
Or can the Sorrowful lead to Glorious—
if you're no believer, it's not a given;
and Chicago seems so far from heaven.
Transcendance is one thing that can't be grasped
alone—one enters it like marriage, a loss
of singleness; but that's a faith I've seen,
like the river's freshened sheet of ice, turn
cold and separate. But maybe there are ghosts
to help me—the trochaic pulse of German
fathers: Friedrich, Herman, Raymund. If not
in spirit, they are here in body: mine—
those rosaries of DNA, determined
and determining, reaching backward but
now arrived, in me, at the end of their line.
X.
When I arrive at the end of a line,
another kind of mystery emerges—
the rhythmic tug, the overlapping urges
of verse traversing back and forth in time:
the way syllabic repetitions rhyme
what's gone with what is now, and prophesy
a future seeded in the present. A sorcery
of sorts, for time moves through the poem
as the poem moves through time. Augustine knew:
the whole psalm happens in the syllable.
In the same way, he said, a life moves through
the heartbeat, a family through individuals;
something pulsing, untranslatable,
that reaches from the single to the whole.
XI.
Reaching from the single to the whole,
my starting point the mystery of loneliness;
if not exactly glorious, nonetheless
familiar—as much my life as Father’s tale
of Herman, his father, smoking a cigar
while swimming the breaststroke in Crystal Lake.
See: that woven water will also cloak
myself someday, and touches on me here,
companions me as now I look across
the window's doubled pane, into a blizzard
of arrival: where silent crystals, syllables
of settled whiteness taking in the city,
fall and rise in moving patterns, pierce
my reflection hung in nothingness—or cradled.
Copyright William Wenthe, from Not
Till We Are Lost, LSU Press, 2003
First published in The Southern Review 36, 3 (Summer
2000)
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