Among the Boughs

 

Tonight, the slow release of summer rain

sweeps through my pear tree.  Gentle is the sound,

the metronomic lullaby that rolls

across each limb and patters on the ground. 

 

Outside my room, traversing streamlets run

along the open pane—I try to count them all.

And leaves are soaked a darker green, while buds

appear to peek between the lattice wall.

 

The sent of blossoms filters through my screen.

I lie awake, yet, caught up in the romance

among the boughs, where whispers hum to me,

and all my evening thoughts have learned to dance.

Of course, this is a blue-haired projection, a neo-victorian poetry that prefers the well-kept garden to the overgrown forest, Eden to the fallen world, harmony to cacophony. 

She began publishing early in small press journals such as Beloit Poetry Magazine, The Formalist, and Hellas, just to name a few. As far as I know she learned her craft alone, was mentored by no one, never workshopped or networked. Before she was 25 her poems had already appeared in Poetry, had been included in major anthologies, which were reserved, by and large, for establishment free verse poets. Her poems had made it through the slush piles for all the right reasons. There had been no phone calls from Dana Gioia pleading her case to the editor of Poetry (Christian Wiman hadn’t yet been appointed), no Murphyesque name dropping, no grandiose claims of greatness. She made it where no other formalist had been since Richard Wilbur, on merit alone.

In those days (the 1990s) I concluded that the reason for her literary success was her age, beauty, mental and spiritual health, and her WASP origins. The older WASP poets are as lecherous as anyone, I thought, and gladly promoted one of their own.

Some erring critics have claimed that she is a poetic descendant of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, and that her poems are almost as good as theirs. I beg to differ. She writes better verse than both of those gifted (albeit allegedly degenerate) woman ever penned. Stallings is a healthy woman, mentally and spiritually, and her poems reflect this health. She is, though, a woman, a very feminine one at that, despite a childhood that included tomboy fishing trips with her father.

I like manly poetry, the kind that W.B. Yeats, Roy Campbell and Dylan Thomas wrote, broad-chested, brooding and loud. Many female poets chatter to their pillows, repeat politically correct clichés and have a feminist cultural marxist axe to grind. (Granted, many male poets today do the same and grind like the most pathetic of catamites.) In their verses heterosexual white men are evil and patriarchal Western civilization must be destroyed inasmuch as it oppresses females, gays, the underclasses, and minorities. Although Stallings may hold those appalling views too, which I doubt, she never allows them to infiltrate her verses. She writes of her dead father, of her new son, of Athens, of arrowheads, of antiquity, and does so with great formal skill, precision and charm. Always a lady, she avoids conflict, politics, and religious disputes. She broods over no historical events, solves no great philosophical conundrums, and asks no significant metaphysical questions. That is, after all, the job of the historian, the philosopher, and the metaphysician. The poet’s job, first and foremost, is to entertain and this she does extraordinarily well.

In 2001, “No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000” was published with an introduction by Dana Gioia, and with praise on its back cover from, among lesser names, two of the most generous and prolific blurbers:  Richard Wilbur and X.J. Kennedy. Beyond the formalist ghetto, the book has gone mostly unnoticed, but that is the case with 99.99% of all volumes of metrical verse.

Gwynn writes, by and large, satirical verse, and invariably his irony and wit are from a politically correct point of view.  He is a southerner, a good ol’ boy, but not a bad one like George Wallace, who, if we remember, too, eventually buckled under the weight of his own ambition.  In this regard, he reminds me of those Confederate deserters, who, in the  final days of the Civil War, were hunted down by General Lee’s last remaining soldiers.  (Usually they were shot on the spot, and rightfully so, when we consider the atrocities committed by the Yankees—the rapes, the murders, and the burning of Atlanta.)  Sam is one of “them yeller-bellies” who escaped by hiding in the bushes (the academic world).

Somewhat related to this is a little known story concerning Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) during the tragic Warsaw Uprising (August-September 1944).  Even as poet-soldiers were dying (among them the great Krzystof Kamil Baczynski) in a heroic struggle to free Poland’s capitol from the Germans, Czeslaw hid in the cellar of his wife’s brownstone flat. Soldiers from the Polish underground “Home Army” came for him, demanding to know why he refused to fight.  “He is too great a poet to die in battle,” his wife answered.

In his three-part sonnet sequence “Body Bags” Gwynn tells the sad tales of three, more or less, losers drafted into military service during the Vietnam War.

In the first, he deals with Dwayne, a high school petty thief, who, in exchange for a prison sentence, is sent to ‘Nam, where he dies.  

In the second, he deals, ostensibly, with Dwayne Coburn, a lumbering offensive guard who: “said he’d swap his Harley and his dope/And both balls for a 4-F knee like mine.” The poem is really about alleged star running back Sam Gwynn, the guy Dwayne once blocked for. Gwynn would have us believe that had he not injured his knee he might have been the next Larry Csonka or John Riggens.  (Most likely Sam injured his knee carrying water from the bench.) The self-reference, the use of confabulation, self-myth, is a trope often used by his Brokeback Mountain camping and hunting buddy, Tim Murphy (whom he has included in his latest anthology). At the end of the poem, we learn that Dwayne has hanged himself, rather than die in Vietnam, fighting against communism, a system responsible for the death of 90 million people in the 20th century.

In the third, we learn about a Roy Orbison impersonator named Jay Swinney, who on dates with girls, often shows them a wallet picture of his older brother, a marine. Of course, Jay, too, is eventually drafted and dies, while Gwynn stands at the blackboard, with chalk in his hands, in the safety of some university, waiting for tenure, instead of using his considerable poetic talent to write about something that might hurt his career, say about the mass murder committed by the Khmer Rouge, (as Jerry H. Jenkins does so masterfully in his poem “Resurrection”).

Gwynn is a superb versifier and possesses a flawless ear.  This is manifest in the exquisite “Release,” an imitation after Longfellow.

Though she bears an Irish surname through marriage, she is an Italian American.  My mentioning this is important inasmuch as she is a mercurial poet. At her best, she is reasonably tender-hearted and respectful, as in “Old School,” a poem dealing with her mentor-pupil relationship with an elder “old school formalist.” 

At her worst she can be mawkishly sentimental.    In her sonnet “Neanderthal Bone Flute,” she expresses sympathy for an outsider, a red-haired flute-playing Neanderthal, who might have been rejected by a jut-chinned girl and eventually weeded out of the humanoid gene pool, or perhaps not, perhaps his genes still survive and are expressed in shy boys.  Here I quote the closing sestet:

“Ignore the new genetic tests that say
the girl rejected him, that winter came
and spear could not compete with bow and arrow;
that want, or slaughter, whittled him away
because his ways and ours were not the same.
Let bone be flute, the music in our marrow.”

In truth, there is a reason the red-haired Neanderthal might have been rejected.  He had a freckled mutant horse-pig face, was stupid and smelly.  His flute playing couldn’t attract a healthy female of any subspecies.  His genetic demise was best for all.  The result is healthy attractive, intelligent people capable of reaching the stars.

Parenthetically, I might add that I often write of outsiders in my own poems: Heraclitus, John Clare, Georg Trakl, Nikola Tesla, Rudolf Hess, Ezra Pound, etc.  They are, however, usually Nietzschean supermen, geniuses struggling against insanity, striving for greatness while at odds with their peers and society.  Without such people, we would still be tossing spears and eating entrails from our cupped and bloody hands.

I caution Mrs Kelleher against sentimentality in poetry and in life.

“I shun the man-made world and stay at home.
This suits the world, since I am very queer.”

No, this is not a station in the metro,
this is an open cage outside of Pisa. 
Ezra Pound now sits inside of it, 
his beard a burning bush of grief made new.
Gazing at the moon, and looking retro,
the better craftsman grins to bars, and sees a
night of stars implode, his touched eyes lit
and posed for labour. If not he, then who
will scribble truth into a timeless croon?
Twenty-five days will pass before the good
guys offer him a tent, his face now wood,
his psyche worn by rain and sun and moon.
He leaves the cage, and is assisted in,
his mouth ajar, his grin not quite a grin.

first appeared in Contemporary Sonnet

 

After the Old Masters

The father looks up to the sky or ceiling
(beyond the grey scale of the photograph)
with his son wrapped inside his cradling arms.
An orderly obscures the boy’s midsection,
with silence says he is beyond all healing.
Outside the frame in colour copter strafe
restokes the ire of Taliban gendarmes
who soothe the mother twisted in dejection.
We do not catch a whiff of her pained retching,
catch sight of their clenched fists or hear their words.
We see the father’s sorrow-stricken eyes
in what could almost be a Rembrandt etching,
his pitch black pupils focused heavenwards
to where God’s justice or His mercy lies. 

first appeared in Chronicles

 

The Condemned House

After a Black & White Photograph by Jared Carter

Who alive remembers who lived there
seventy years ago? A family
of WASPS set in their ways? The leafless tree
in front was just a sapling then. Despair
did not weigh heavy on the owner’s brow,
a man who paid his taxes, loved his wife,
and who in ‘44 gave up his life
for freedom. Who today cares or knows how?
And now the house is boarded up, its last
tenants peddlers of cheap crack cocaine,
its naked boards exposed to elements,
its roof’s tar-paper caught in the grey blast,
around it dirty snow, above it rain.
The photo knows itself what it laments. 

first appeared in Chronicles

 

The Cat

I’d pass it on the mission trail—
          half-decomposed, green burr-like eyes
beyond my thoughts or pity, tail
          curled into questions only flies
would answer, as they staked their claim
          to rotting tissue. Food for worms,
and mocked by summer’s honey flame,
          it had no choice but come to terms
with piecemeal dissolution. Those
          loud buzzes echoed in my ears
until it circled and then rose,
          converting me—some thirty years
since—into the lone passerby
          and witness, ever on my way
from daily service, like the sky
          itself on resurrection day. 

first appeared in Washington Literary Review

 

Passenger Pigeons

I’d lift my forehead from the book and see
a flock consisting of a billion birds,
like a river in the heavens, three
miles wide, and forty miles in length. My words
never pierced the shadow they cast down.
Born more than eighty years too late, I could
not warn them of the threat of each new town,
of hunters waiting in the underwood.
For hours they were sovereigns to my eyes,
passing over Mercer County. The sun
gilded their feathers in the bloody twilight,
and when they vanished over the horizon
towards Ohio, Michigan, and the night,
what I heard were not coos, only cries. 

first appeared in Iambs & Trochees