The Long View

by Charles O. Hartman

• ISBN13: 9780819563804
• ISBN10: 0819563803
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-04-01
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

A brilliant new collection by a poet who is also a critic of jazz form & free-verse prosody.

Author Biography

Charles O. Hartman is Professor of English and Poet in Residence at Connecticut College.

Table of Contents

A Good Time	p. 3
Genealogy	p. 4
The Kaleidoscope	p. 5
Moving House	p. 6
Station	p. 8
B and B	p. 9
The Clearing	p. 11
Chant	p. 16
Shave	p. 17
An Afternoon	p. 18
The Days	p. 20
Just a Moment	p. 21
A Matter of Attitude	p. 22
Die Frau im Mond	p. 23
The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away	p. 24
Aftermath #87	p. 26
Condition	p. 27
Killing a Snowbank	p. 28
Desire	p. 29
Common Prayer	p. 30
Urgent	p. 38
Joinery	p. 40
The Theory of Sunday	p. 41
Things Coming toward Their Shadows	p. 42
Except to Be: First Quire	p. 43
Russian Lessons	p. 95
Homage to Jay Silverheels	p. 101
Fugue	p. 102
Three Train Poems	p. 103
The Famished Ensign	p. 105
Seventy-Six Assertions and Sixty-Three Questions	p. 108
Retirement	p. 113
68	p. 115
Saints	p. 117
The Masque of Measure	p. 118
Honk If You Love Jesus	p. 124
The Long View	p. 125
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

A Good Time

In all these pictures the adults look happy enough, as though they're having a good time, feeling the historical weight of pictures, which are to be albumed and sent to a checklist of relatives

and handed down to say this is how they were, before or after ... The children who have already altered the lives of the adults beyond recognition, are looking

at the camera with some distrust, not particular. It is 1953. To be suspicious makes sense. It makes no sense to look happy for a camera some shadowed person holds, and holds

you still for, if you can't think of the present as a past in the making, if history makes you numb in one arm or sits invisible on your chest, a war over before your birth

that you will grow up to remember, while the strange child on the other side of your mother's knee squints into the lens as though she couldn't quite catch the sentence, the sun's rays all bent to aim at her.

Genealogy

When a truck goes by down there it hums the floor and shivers my window more than it does the leaves articulating summer air between this trembling glass and the original shudders of Excel Cement's big minion

that rolls its belly righteously away to the loud building of another frail building another agent of the new will shake in the old way. Maybe the trunk takes up the shock. Before the dust calms down

a yellow like the laughter of a loon on a dark lake will settle on the still green veins like fall, and centuries of brick in wall and sidewalk fix the incident light like an archive photograph, for good.

The Kaleidoscope

By the open sash-- one tree seen through another, in a breeze like a cotton glove, a strand of spider silk slewing in sunlight, a sparrow stopping by for two shakes-- a naked man with a pen at the kitchen table

labors and labors. The sparrow thinks with those queer twigs he is building a nest tucked in that ingenious cave. She approves. The man considers lining his work with silk. He looks up. The sill offers a wishbone, a pair of pears,

a postcard framed in lucite like molten silk, describing the Grand Canal. He puts them in. He sees the sparrow in the last instant, her parting wink, and puts her in for the feathers. For the feathers , he puts in, carefully, along with the hairs of his left arm.

Will the spider come back, the wishbone break his way? If the light of one tree weaves its way to him through another, could he refuse to include both? This goes too fast , he thinks (he puts it in), dropping through empty space on a rope like air.

Moving House

is what the British call it. Over here we shorten as befits the phrases a tribe needs most often. Last summer I moved , as if the rest of the last few years were sloth to the point of statuary. People have moved houses from one hill to another, loaded them

on barges or flatbeds, driven heart in mouth for miles behind their homes achingly poised. We've held our breath entranced in audience when Miles or Mahler made us sit so still reviews could only say, The house was moved. Domestic lovers might revise: Dear heart, did the house move for you?

But moving house is a life while it lasts talk can't untrack us from. Another day, another dozen boxes marked Bordeaux of weighty words, book become volume and mass for months, the measure of our shelves. Science fiction twenty-four

to twenty-eight per foot. The old Britannica thirty-four inches plus the new forty-two: a Celtic forward's height in traveling fact. The knick-knack and the whatnot stand on trial and something furtive in us thirsts for fire, the all-devouring rose in the falling dusk, while real estaters whisper at our ears we do this every two-point-seven years.

The price of possessions is possession by our dream of order. Once if only once we know to the minute everything's place and everything is in it. We stand by the ramp of the empty truck, stuck in a moment of envy, and conjugate: habit, habitat, inhabituate .

Station

From the garage Coltrane fights his way out of the tinny speaker, through I Want to Talk to You . Across the yard

cicadas cast long nets of sound meant for other cicadas. A gang of new clouds mill up

intent on confusion of the air. I set the dial. Now someone else in a studio over the water in another state

does the deciding: something oldies, something news, something boring, something

blues. The TV, young & restless, calls them channels to make us think of changing midstream, but the radio

says I should hear Miles now: It Could Happen to You . I could bring down the CD player and something I know,

or knew enough to pick out from the bin at the store. How much do I want to have to say? The catbird crosses

the driveway in spurts, mewing his one mew. Bird comes on to discuss Ornithology in fluid detail

lucid as Proust. A mind writing its way across the sky riven by will, drawn by curiosity.

B & B

On an old bed in a country town carved behind a rail I found these words: Sweet frame and feather that bore my mother who bore me who now bear my long lover who does me cover cover him long in care We rent these places to play at living an idyll where we have no living, mimic

belonging here. I have the day to spend wandering the three streets, wondering what happened to the woman, who will have died generations ago, children who died or failed or fled the village. The new young couple came and bought the house --at what auction, after what disaster?-- to fill a dream, or live in one. Others like us support the house, the shops on the three streets,

sustained as always by the dream of money, of exchange and currency. It circulates the way we do: like blood descends and thins. It's what we give and take. It runs most messages among us. How should it not be real? As a teenager I wrote It is my lot to be discontented with my lot

with a dull pen inside my closet door and thought I was unusual. Evening comes

to the square the church defines. This pump nostalgic thirst preserved when water it long drew on drained or went poisonous with bad rain, and more nostalgia urged back to work when money came again, invites me to rest on its stone curb. I've written off the town. Now I can leave

in my rented car, like one who has eaten too much confection and declares he'll fast forever. For a few moments while night falls I gaze at the fixed linkages of the pump's skeletal body, scratched by tin cups and the hoops of buckets, and down at the base by something sharper, leaving us three letters and two digits, a person and a date, even the century hard to guess, a code nobody living now can break.

Copyright © 1999 Charles O. Hartman. All rights reserved.