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A beautiful debut collection of poems captures the juxtapositions and complexities of life and landscape in New England. Winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. Original. (Poetry)

small boat

poems

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By LESLE LEWIS

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Lesle Lewis
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-839-5

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Contents

Site 29......................................................................................1
Behind the Curtain...........................................................................2
Ode to Spring................................................................................3
Ode to the Cough.............................................................................4
Light in the Field...........................................................................5
The Doctor Throws Some Vehicle in the Humors and the Patient Is Animated.....................6
Ten Trees....................................................................................7
When We Grow Up We Want to Be Dreamers.......................................................8
Our Campus...................................................................................9
A Baby Crying on the Train...................................................................10
This Is Steaming Cow Dung....................................................................11
In Cricket Season............................................................................12
April House..................................................................................13
Waltz of the Wood Thief......................................................................14
The Better Person That My Dog Taught Me to Be................................................19
An Hour Back.................................................................................21
The Menders and the Breakers.................................................................22
Sunlight on Interior Barn Wall...............................................................23
Love in the Palm House.......................................................................24
My Say-So....................................................................................25
Young Lily...................................................................................26
Blue Comma...................................................................................27
We Love This Place Gently....................................................................28
The Lonely Arts Bug..........................................................................29
In the Grove of Hares........................................................................30
New Hampshire Spring.........................................................................31
Fleeing Woman Looks Ahead....................................................................32
Summer Solstice..............................................................................33
Me and Little Mister.........................................................................34
In the Mind of a Dragonfly...................................................................35
Burdick's Picnic Table.......................................................................36
A Dream Goes Out.............................................................................37
I Am Riding a Horse..........................................................................38
Ashintully...................................................................................39
At Ball Mountain Dam.........................................................................40
The Kitchen Light............................................................................41
Falling......................................................................................42
Snow, Paper, Love............................................................................43
Pictures from the Linden Farms Institute.....................................................44
The Butterfly's Daughter.....................................................................49
Walking through It on My Broken Hoofs........................................................50
Little One...................................................................................51
There's a Purring of a Lonely Poet Kitten in My Ear..........................................52
A Wild Place and a Town......................................................................53
Bait in the Havahart.........................................................................54
What Art Has Become in This Year.............................................................56
The White Triangle...........................................................................57
She Studies Algebra..........................................................................58
Getting There................................................................................59
To Cock-a-Hoop...............................................................................61
In Love Fields...............................................................................62
Sugaring.....................................................................................63
Small Boat...................................................................................68
Planting.....................................................................................69
Mowing.......................................................................................70
Offering.....................................................................................71
Ode to Boiling Sap Slowly....................................................................72
The Inclination to Be Gone...................................................................73
East Acworth Composition.....................................................................75

Chapter One

Site 29

I don't know if you're interested in turtles, but three painted turtles lie on a rock, no six with their reflections.

Now four, no eight.

Now five, no ten.

Now six, no twelve.

The rich must remember the poor and the poor remember the beautiful.

Behind the Curtain

She goes to Italy, to Teaneck, to Afghanistan, and Walpole and then her hands over her head and then she takes her feet off the ground. It is someone else's life she thinks.

She flies past John Blair's and hears such wailing noises she's afraid they are killing pigs today.

She thinks elsewhere.

Here's one degree of warmth.

Here a cat sleeps on a dog bed, a mistranslation.

Here is modern androgyny and emotional flatness clanging.

Is there anywhere around here to go? The question is like a snowball on top of the Buddha's head.

Here is a spring garden, all green and birdy with one hundred learned canary birds. A girl and her peacock travel through dangerous mountains. A young man greets a new life aboard the banana boat. A baby lives with a mouse family. We are all headless and cannot speak.

She cannot believe there isn't even one brave and necessary thing more, just a sledding night behind the curtain of a café.

Ode to Spring

I have so many things to think about; I haven't thought about you.

You've renovated the basement.

This is remarkable.

River broken bits of crust edge break and bubble down.

Everyone is rushing to look at the meat of your cough.

I will be yours to love in the dog sleep.

Ode to the Cough

Without all the froufrou and humbled by obstacles, let it be revealed to you how to love boring snow, two feet on top of two feet in the act of finding some eau de toilette.

"Ten times more happiness," says the gardener, "If you can't lift your feet, drag 'em."

You rearrange the furniture in your head, but first the rooms to make a cozy sick room: vaporizer, water, spit glass, clock, the bed opened up with sheets.

I believe in my version of transcendence.

I'm less sure of the other.

"You have two weeks to tell your story and I'll hear no complaints about the deadline," god says.

Light in the Field

Sun like gun cracks descends.

We attempt to mouth the various shades of asters, vetch, truck tracks, and overgrowth.

The effort runs itself to the ocean and foams and froths and caps itself in immensity and does not, no never, rests.

Hearkening to the call, we want to leave our lives and go on without them.

It's an illness and we're not to blame for these times.

The Doctor Throws Some Vehicle in the Humors and the Patient Is Animated

The world is round on a bowl, a one-two-three egg.

One spoon wants what another has to eat.

Wealthy artists of Annisquam spend too much time looking at their canvases.

My mood is rain.

The work to do there is the dark, the list grows with each bout.

Driving to the ocean with the time I'm growing into, watching lightning from the porch with Marie's dogs, I'm suddenly younger.

I'm roselike.

When your face laughs, my mortar turns to rubble growing flowering succulents.

As a woman cradles a bunny, the soil is temporarily one with the breath.

And then we can say, " What a fair country!"

Ten Trees

Get the drill. Check the battery. One hand gestures to the other.

It's a single act of attention to recognize a maple and drill the hole. You think in birds or like the insides of a wild horse.

You use substance tools, whatever, a transparent wash and matches. From young trees sap runs with gusto.

Wiser trees consider running. You'll have to check back tomorrow.

You cross-country to Lily Pond rushing back to check the sap flowers.

The sap ping pings in the buckets like it's tomorrow.

You sit under a bear-clawed tree imagining other choices.

You hyperfocus on each dribble of seeping and each sip is bleeding.

Tomorrow will become no longer vacant.

Overnight, the running will stop. Meanwhile, put a woman, a man, and a hat in the picture. Also some flowers and a mule.

When We Grow Up We Want to Be Dreamers

We started out in a city and drew the buildings squarelike.

We became oppressed by all the rectangles.

Next we know we're out of town.

Tonight's the blue moon simpering into its radical own face.

We are four humans in the woods watching a porcupine.

We live in a more fortunate day.

Between us and the laurel bush, a fire and lots of smoke and snow behind the bush.

We don't have to notice.

The ache pours out our backs.

It's syrup when it's half the sweetness of molasses, when it ribbons, when it aprons from the dipper.

With no calm base to leap from, we leap, leaving the biggest trees around the house, making the windowpanes be small, and giving up handsomely.

Our Campus

Some amphibians are new at being old.

The invention of zero follows the discovery of nothing.

The handsome rooster poisons our colons.

Pastel trees, a woman's sharp features, and her neckline slip.

Over a cell phone on the public green, I'm too shy to say the cheese grater is already dying.

A Baby Crying on the Train

Your mind knows a lot that it doesn't share with itself and the ignorant part wakes up and goes exploring drawn to the open for gold.

There was a she-dream about it, and she spoke irrepressibly, ambitions secret to be the most beautiful girl you know.

But you are sick of beginner's mind, the way of powerlines running by, the yes, the pretty river.

The air moves rawly believing that feeling the dark is this hard boulder dropped into an otherwise unbouldered woods.

So in the end, the end hangs.

This Is Steaming Cow Dung

My poet friends have a magician's club. They understand a little of their art and then not and then yes and then not and then yes and then ultimately not. But the birds are quite clear in what they are saying: "You live and then you remember living."

I really would like a self with a period after the s, a self with adjectives like necklaces named in art or love: art as the slight avoidance of suicide, the man-approval-woman-approval-mother-and-lover combo, like a night you get to sleep through, what you have to do like the drink you have to have, a this-is-how-you-do-it poem, and love as in I will touch you with affection while riding from Vermont to New York on the ferry and watch ducks in formation and not what it looks like watching ducks in formation. You will walk halfway into the water, then dive. Perfect circles will form like perfect therapists. I will blur my eyes into a painting with you swimming in the middle. You will recognize my sex. I will learn to make the laughing sound.

Defining and dissolving are two yankings and all smarts crack open like a nut in the midsummer sun and dissolve like mountains don't want names. No longer the dot in the dark inside myself I'd find after the bath on the floor in the pattern of tiles, it's now the sun shedding its clothes at me, everything at once. The sun violates me while the raindrops spit on me and flies dive-bomb my head. I have to ask, " What is this?"

In Cricket Season

Our bodies are flowers, our legs the double stems, our chests the petals, smoothed down and back like feathers, our heads the emerging seedcases, so smooth we can't get in or out. Nothing is graspable, nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished for certain.

If we let go of our seeds, bronze, paper, fanned air, daughters, olives, knees, an ivy-framed window, reincarnation, spiders, male from female, an old man's young male nurse, we will be empty. If we have to, we'd like to at least give them up grandly, like two million happy people, like young salmon released, like the number of notes sung to one syllable, multiplied and multiplied, the melody most "spiritual."

We wobble forward on our stems, our leaves the hands to make stews, cheeses, our own arrangements, a campfire. The fire finally cracks our heads open and our seeds sprinkle around our feet. Surrender.

We breathe in the flames smoky and wild.

It's very gentle and quiet and our skulls are left wide and completely eased.

Our flower bodies take their thousand year naps.

There's heaven after heaven.

We have our own fields to moonbathe.

We love every star.

April House

April is a generous house, a high heaven inclination to be a body with a toothy smile riding no-handed the beast of a bicycle whose two wheels let the mourning get done before the loss and the windows shut.

Waltz of the Wood Thief

ONE

In search of counsel and kindness, our house crosses the bridge to the park, the dog's bark, the monument.

It is the first time our house is sad and most inarticulate about his trust in the hammer of his construction.

The house is rough to his own feel like late fall dusks fall, and even the first bugs and blossoms.

In trying to feed and be kind to himself, he realizes that he is not kind.

He becomes happier in the silence of the pines that house birds he has ventured into.

We let the house when it's quiet be quiet.

We open the refrigerators of our hearts and take out the bacon.

We sleep around if that's what it takes to be warm in the pits of our pajamas.

TWO

You live in a long house of rooms each with its own clarinet; that's how the memory tastes.

Like when the real ghosts of your parents came to visit, tonight you have some real anxiety.

A train whistle wishes you well well well but your mood is not improving.

The physical world needs to stand up and slap you!

Cardinals flit around your teacher's ears like more cardinals in the snow on the cliffs under the George Washington Bridge.

How your face would look without all the hair is a birch tree, and a man in a red jacket I can see through your branches is your rosy mouth.

Coffee does its curve-ball and clears your thoughts so they at least appear clear to the side that stands outside.

One clear thought is one person skiing in the woods who meets a wood thief.

For my traveling companion I take you a dog; we'll whittle away at the silence wood with a reassurance that rides a bicycle original untranslatable.

If you see a red cape on a woman out the window in the blizzard, she's me; I tell you I'm home.

Who does not want to be loved like the snow falls and embraces evenly the earth and every branch of every tree?

THREE

They say "the value of adversity."

Is it nothing but that bark in the dark, a problem, a pill on a pillow out to float?

Is it Uncle John's soul hitting the white walls in squares?

How it disappears off the high walls in a waltz!

In a dream of repose under drama clouds he meets the guilty and tells them they are not guilty of ambition or suicide or anything.

They can, he says, raise their own beings to higher levels so finally they become great enough to overflow their barriers.

In the wood ravines where it is complicated and snowing he comes upon a tepee.

(The outsider doesn't have a job and his days pass just fine.)

Faint birds sing a meditation into warmer soil pockets.

Is there a teacher for it, the flowers of it?

FOUR

The driveway is too long to shovel.

Unreal computer tables are also not your dream discussion of hypertext.

Everything is hard about the snowmobile paths.

Winged theory could ascend but it would be too cruel to leave the faults of living flat behind.

I once saw a photograph of the soul rising in an abandoned agricultural area.

FIVE

There once was rain on the canal.

This morning is up to five degrees.

I am whining like a dog to go out, desperation in the bladder and the bark.

Look then to beyond to rest.

Fletcher's high snowfields are far from anyone who could possibly need anything.

Only deer have come to browse, reading what there is, walking what there is.

SIX

Over the top exhausting like a diebenkorn sky comes down, let me not get worse sicker, complicity and the crying sister.

I am a storm horizon flat in your face as a house.

When we were four, I remember you couldn't handle the truth of death, the depth of snow minus the fluff factor.

Now I offer my labor across white acres and to the river.

A springish party sighs in unison in romanticism and laughs in the valley.

The mission of their word birds with jumping legs is one fluffy puffy jelly filled for me!

The Better Person That My Dog Taught Me to Be

1.

If your body is your art, I'm sorry for you. If you study people's lips. If one fluttering leaf across the pond is female, quick we must decide how to treat her. Is she to carry the burden of the seasons or to be decked and carried herself?

I could swim. It could rain. I love my wife. I let the cats in at night. It's a fixed but elongated happy time, the hollow place meant to be hollow. Eyes close and hop.

You keep pets, and you don't make scenes in a world full of Bellini eyes and Bellini's Fortune, the woman with the globe and the babies in a boat, and lovers causing the almond to suddenly white blossom. To be more than willing to give up friends and occasional health, choose the quietest room. That blue is a slate plate, that green is coming, that breeze is a clean bed, and I say there's no joy.

You ask harder questions to make sure you don't know the answers. A critic rubs the feathers from his head and in the moment sees me where I am at home with paragraphs and spaces between them and the pauses are taken over a dying dog.

2.

Each rock in the river is a dog. Each morning is in fog. Each person is a god. God is another word for longing, my god, my longing.

Be kind to people, smile and help them in little ways. (Because of #1, the ways are little.) Don't shoo away insects who want to land on any part of your body.

3.

It's a pauper evening and there doesn't have to be life or even a universe, the baby goat cries and cries and cries.

The place we ask questions is a patch of grass and ten minutes in which the blank weight of self has a period of pinkness.

Like an infant looking out the window, nothing whatsoever being certain, the crow, the crickets, the cat, we are that chirp of the nuthatch. How grand to be everything! What a way to live!

You can always open your mind wider. If the leaves turn early red, it's a red dress or a red car you're buying.

A phone rings and the person answering it says, "This is His Greatness and Her Greatness," then hands the phone to you. You put down your bag of sanity.

Rain to listen to, I wish it were only that.

An Hour Back

When you find the plum trees fenced with posts waving music CDs, the youthful forest, and the cows, skirt them.

Time is a rabbit.

Lie down and release this odd urge and odd doing.

The thought is a suddenly discovered small whole number hiding between the five and the six.

Time is a big number.

It's not an adequate expression.

There's still the juniper, the grass, the pines.

Still the sky ceiling when you open your eyes in the ward.

Still wind blowing weeds, scattered plops.

Still you.

I am a complete head done with its turmoil and thinking.

The Menders and the Breakers

The rain does not cool and is a sticky one to the present and the place.

Is it a weakness, yours for narcotics?

The trees levitate and become mountains.

You stand in the water inside a melancholy boulder.

Now you're a flying sandwich.

Sunlight on Interior Barn Wall _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ The woman in the doorway panics (feels panic).

Her ice heart beats.

"It's whatever you want."

She carries a small dictionary.

A reticule is a small net bag.

She works with her god-given nose to make and keep what she will lack and need someday.

The work is called Sun on Barn Wall because it's raining like the world without her in it.

A pink crabapple blossom drops onto the back of my hand turning the page of ARTnews.

If she never lived, I would tell her life is like a canopy of flowers.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from small boat by LESLE LEWIS Copyright © 2003 by Lesle Lewis. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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