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The following poems, read by Stephen Dobyns, are
taken from
the
Interview with Stephen Dobyns, Part II: Dobyns on Dobyns,
in this issue.
Can Poetry Matter?
Heart feels the time has come to compose lyric
poetry.
No more storytelling for him. Oh, Moon, Heart
writes,
sad wafer of the heart's distress. And then: Oh,
Moon,
bright cracker of the heart's pleasure. Which is
it,
is the moon happy or sad, cracker or wafer? He
looks
from the window but the night is overcast. Oh,
Cloud,
he writes, moody veil of the Moon's distress. And
then,
Oh, Cloud, sweet scarf of the Moon's repose. Once
more
Heart asks, Are clouds kindly or a bother, is the
moon sad
or at rest? He calls scientists who tell him that
the moon
is a dead piece of rock. He calls astrologers.
One says
the moon means water. Another that it signifies
oblivion.
The girl next door says the Moon means love. The
nut
up the block says it proves that Satan has us
under his thumb.
Heart goes back to his notebooks. Oh, Moon, he
writes,
confusing orb meaning one thing or another. Heart
feels
that his words lack conviction. Then he hits on a
solution.
Oh, Moon, immense hyena of introverted motorboat.
Oh, Moon, upside down lamp post of barbershop
quartet.
Heart takes his lines to a critic who tells him
that the poet
is recounting a time as a toddler when he saw his
father
kissing the baby-sitter at the family's cottage
on a lake.
Obviously, the poem explains the poet's fear of
water.
Heart is ecstatic. He rushes home to continue
writing.
Oh, Cloud, raccoon cadaver of colored crayon,
angel spittle
recast as foggy euphoria. Heart is swept up by
the passion
of composition. Freed from the responsibility of
content,
no nuance of nonsense can be denied him. Soon his
poems
appear everywhere, while the critic writes essays
elucidating
Heart's meaning. Jointly they form a sausage
factory of poetry:
Heart supplying the pig snouts and rectal tissue
of language
which the critic encloses in a thin membrane of
explication.
Lyric poetry means teamwork, thinks Heart: a hog
farm,
corn field, and two old dobbins pulling a buckboard of song.
Lullaby
The zero of a yawn eclipses your face,
feeling drowsy, eyelids heavy:
goodnight, goodnight, blow out the light,
the century is going to sleep.
Goodnight, Adolf, you almost prevailed�
your dreams, little fellow, rose to fact
like a swamp beast from the muck, then
they settled back again: good luck for us,
bad luck for you, the century is going
to sleep. And Uncle Joe, your musings
tried to duplicate the density of concrete.
Should we add up the dead millions squeezed
like dry leaves to make your diamond?
But then, oh happy day, you passed away.
Dead brutes, dead bullies, the tyrants
totter past to forgottenhood, the century
is going to sleep. But also the heroes:
Babe Ruth, General MacArthur, Gypsy Rose Lee.
The stages you danced upon are compost now,
the newspapers headlining your exploits
pack the landfill. You imitate your shadows.
All the radio broadcasts have been silenced.
Hush! The century is going to sleep.
Ezra Pound, are you still grinding your teeth?
Robert Frost, is your bricklike heart
the only solid chunk left in your coffin?
Thelonious Monk, are you still bopping
someplace down below? Lady Day hums the tune:
lullabies, lullabies, the century
is going to sleep. And all the objects:
the Model T Fords, the 45-rpm records,
eight-track tape players�see them drowsing
in cobwebbed warehouses. Even the rats put a paw
to their lips. The century is going to sleep.
Maybe in another world John Kennedy was never shot,
maybe John Berryman lived a few years longer,
wrote a villanelle before downing Seconal.
And John Lennon, maybe in another world
the madman missed and more songs got made.
All the Johns, all the Janices, all the Sylvias�
blow out the light, the century is going to sleep.
Dead best-sellers, dead Nobel winners,
dead Academy Award winners, dead football
heroes, World Series champions, Kentucky
Derby winners: all tucked between warm sheets,
sweet dreams carouse across their brains.
My father, my grandparents, my cousins,
your faces slide away in the vapor. How
difficult to see you in memory anymore. You
are the frames from which a photo was stolen.
Or my friends, I have left behind too many�
their stories stopped before mine, their
straight lines banked up at black conclusions:
goodnight Ray, goodnight Betty, goodnight Dick,
the century is going to sleep. And those ideas,
the glad ones, the young ones�integration,
human rights. Goodnight, goodnight. The twelve-
tone scale, abstract expressionism. Sweet dreams,
sweet dreams. A chicken in every pot, two cars
in every garage, three TV's in every house.
Sleep tight, sleep tight. We are retreating
to books, electronic texts, some get paragraphs,
some sentences, some footnotes, most get silence.
Shouldn't we walk on tiptoe, shouldn't we whisper?
Do you have sand in your eyes, little fellow?
Let's take a breather. A baby's about to be born.
I won't see much of this one. Maybe a morsel,
if I'm lucky, of its infancy. This next one
belongs to my children and their children. What
Auschwitzes and Hiroshimas are already being
prepared? What will be the carnage of tomorrow?
What dumb ideas will be used to erase human breath?
But also the good stuff: what jokes, what
laughter, what kisses, will there still
be kisses? Better not know, better let it come,
like always, as a surprise. Feeling frightened?
Are you scared? Blow out the light, goodnight,
goodnight, the century is going to sleep.
How to Like It
These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept�
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.
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