From a Person Sitting in Darkness : New and Selected Poems

by Barrax, Gerald W.

• ISBN13: 9780807123140
• ISBN10: 0807123145
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-11-01
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

New York Lawyer returns to his coastal South Carolina hometown to investigate literary mystery.

Table of Contents

Efficiency Apartment	p. 3
Drought	p. 9
The Scuba Diver Recovers the Body of a Drowned Child	p. 10
Five-Part Invention	p. 11
I Called Them Trees	p. 18
Your Eyes Have Their Silence	p. 20
January 16, 1967: 5:30 P.M.	p. 21
Obits	p. 22
Another Way of Dying	p. 24
First Carolina Rain	p. 26
Earthlog I	p. 27
C for Charlie	p. 29
Third Dance Poem	p. 30
Odysseus at the Mast	p. 32
The Quick	p. 33
Fourth Dance Poem	p. 35
The Dozens	p. 36
Earthlog: Final Entry	p. 37
In the Restaurant	p. 41
King: April 4, 1968	p. 42
The Singer	p. 44
Visit	p. 46
A Means of Travel	p. 47
I Travel with Her	p. 49
She Listens to Madrigals	p. 51
The Fourth Son	p. 53
Something I Know About Her	p. 55
Shani	p. 56
Ghosts	p. 59
Narrative of a Surprising Conversion	p. 60
"I had a terror - since September"	p. 62
Hubris	p. 63
Confession	p. 64
Gift	p. 66
Between Us and the World	p. 67
Another Fellow	p. 68
The Passage of Shiva	p. 69
Ligustrum	p. 71
Black Cat	p. 72
Moby Christ	p. 74
Near the End of a Savage Winter	p. 75
The Buffalo Ghosts	p. 77
An Audience of One	p. 78
The Conception of Goddeath	p. 83
Competitors	p. 85
Barriers	p. 87
More or Less	p. 88
Who Needs No Introduction	p. 89
In This Sign	p. 90
One of My Own	p. 98
Slow Drivers	p. 99
Spirituals, Gospels	p. 101
From a Person Sitting in Darkness	p. 102
One More Word	p. 105
Another Creation	p. 106
To Waste at Trees	p. 107
Symbiosis	p. 108
Poems Like This	p. 110
Two Figures on Canvas	p. 111
Portraits	p. 112
Recital	p. 113
Lovers	p. 114
Greenhouse	p. 115
All My Live Ones	p. 117
"School Days"	p. 119
If She Sang	p. 120
Dara	p. 121
Liberation	p. 122
God's Button	p. 124
The Death of Another Fellow	p. 126
Eagle. Tiger. Whale.	p. 133
Not Often near Such Water	p. 135
Domestic Tranquility	p. 139
Whose Children Are These?	p. 140
Special Bus	p. 142
Strangers Like Us: Pittsburgh, Raleigh, 1945-1985	p. 143
Haunted House	p. 144
Yardwork	p. 146
What More?	p. 149
Two Poems for Miller Williams	p. 151
Epigraphs	p. 152
Sportsfan	p. 157
War Film: Dying Forever	p. 159
Uniforms	p. 161
Adagio	p. 163
Cello Poem	p. 164
Counting the Ways	p. 175
Sainthood	p. 176
Sunday, 24 May 1992, 10:30 A.M.	p. 177
"... and tell the girls to pray for me"	p. 178
To My Mother, in Heaven	p. 182
Trio for Two Voices and Bass Clarinet	p. 185
Reunion Birthday Poem (With a Line After Cummings)	p. 186
Reunion: Our Common Language	p. 187
The Old Poet Is Taken in Marriage	p. 188
Perfect Stranger	p. 191
The Guilt	p. 192
Jeopardy	p. 193
In Their Heaven	p. 194
Pittsburgh, 1948: The Music Teacher	p. 195
Surreal Dreams: After Watching the Discovery Channel	p. 197
Hands Off	p. 199
Helen and the Animals	p. 200
No Answers	p. 201
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Efficiency Apartment

     My sons.

sometimes I can / not name you

until this magic room is sleeping,

and the stretched out ends our lives make

curl around

and stitch you through the interstices

behind my eyes.

* * *

(And ceremonies changed us

And equaled what we became

And ceremonial words preceded us

Into flesh and spirit and aborted us

Into the ends our lives made

With marvelous cadences to tell us what we were

And would be.)

* * *

One, Two, and Three

when the room is awake and shrugs the shadows off its walls

I see the papered magic I've added

scraps left over from the ends the world made

Roger is jolly on the wall and says Hi

Hippity Hop skips under the breast of a dragon's shadow

      that burns yellow leaves in green flame

The moonmen's marbled earth

      (that I gave your names to remember me)

floats in space above the telephone

And what you drew and gave me once on a visit

      One, your seraped boy with the cactus grin

      Two, your Sopwith Camel firing four lines

             of wavery pencil rounds into the dragon's mouth

                 (I arranged it that way to conserve the forest)

         Three's cycloptic snaggletoothed house

I call children's art when visitors ask

* * *

(Dear, lost, penultimate love

Poorer for, richer for rituals

Of birth and mortgage

We made formality of ceremony

And two or three and ten years

Was too long to live the deaths

That did us part.)

* * *

Your schoolday weather.

(Did she know the probability of rain?)

Winter mornings close the room.

She wakes you before leaving

and unthreads you from my sleep.

(Did she hear the forecast at all?)

Twelve and ½ miles and one river

is close enough to dress you in three warm apologies

for being here.

In bells and voices at noon

in the center of a cross--

                           church, funeral home and two schools--

it opens and I am imprisoned

by the shouting sons of other fathers

playing (

* * *

Did I play with you?

(We gave us One for our youth

Two for love

Three the image of me.)

Is a father with no sons

a nursery with no rimes

songs, music

now

roses no rings

but ashes ashes

down the hill we fell

rolling One sliding Two tumbling Three

out of the ends of our lives

now

I am black sheep

three boys empty

I will go hi                 (Spy in her eye)

round my base is

round my base

hidingO seekand

daddy's

(find me!)

(lost)

    it

* * *

(I wed thee

I ring this with what we were

In seeming real

One in

Two seemly

Three black

              sons.)

* * *

Books all over the place

my little people big people

slim and fat --boys

daddy does well in school--

they hunch in bookcase caves

and a box under the table

and squat on top of the closet

in my efficient kitchen

they are a comfort these days

chatting away in my unsleeping

exorcising the square deific

After opening the doors out of your lives

  boys

    I followed the little people leading the piper

and here I am

12 ½ miles and one river

wondering:what if I kill them

will they drown or burn

and then?

But no I guess

I have already given my only begotten sons

to save them

             and

every week

it seems

I buy at least one

more

* * *

Hello. Hello. Hello.

and to make him laugh I play my old game

Is that you, Sam?

I have no son by that name.

It was funnier when

they'd come home from

school and I'd keep

them waiting outside the

back door asking who

they were Is that

you Sam Harry Joe

and they'd fall all

over each other shrieking

no daddy

it's us !

Hello,Hello. hello.

what were you doing

how is school

are there grapes on the vine yet

I'll see you soon I dont know

goodnight goodnight goodnight

no tell her goodnight for me

* * *

(Even now

The cadence of our changes remains in phase.

I had only to become what I am

And you what you will not.

Hotter than a pepper sprout

I am learning to play the guitar you gave me

Trying not to smoke

So much.

Peace. Your hold forever

        And now speak.)

* * *

Here we go round

here we go round

the Supremes hover above my feet

    the 3 girls I'll never have

the telephone is sorry

the room is raining, efficiently

the room rains and rings

the ends are stitched together

One, Two and Three

                   will be fine

the fit will survive

I have made us all typical

now

true to myself

the nigger daddy of social statistics

(is it asleep? yes

sleeping and raining and ringing)

goodnight

goodnight

goodnight

Dennis

Jerry

Josh

Drought

This could be the way

the fire comes: God's

fine irony withholding rain.

We could wait for the comfort

of overstatement (half the Flood was tears)

such as something going out of orbit,

falling into the sun

as another kind of rain,

but where is His hand in fire

if the woods are dry?

The woods are dry.

Leaves curl, brown,

fall from God's head

and crackle underfoot like irony's laughter.

At twilight a forest burns

and the sun goes down in more splendor

than even God gave it.

Only I am its match.

My roots need rain, too,

but neither rain nor fire

tells me if it is man or god who is chained to this rock.

Copyright © 1998 Gerald Barrax. All rights reserved.