Copyright 2019, Chad Abushanab

The Last Visit: Poems

by

Chad Abushanab, MFA

A Dissertation

In

English/Creative Writing

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty

of Texas Tech University in

Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for

the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY

Dr. John Poch

Chair of Committee

Dr. William Wenthe

Dr. Curtis Bauer

Mark Sheridan

Dean of the Graduate School

May, 2019

Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the editors of the publications in which the following

poems, sometimes in slightly different versions, first appeared:

32 Poems, “Halloween”

The Believer, “Silva’s Quarry”

Best New Poets, “On the Dred Ranch Road Just Off 283”

Birmingham Poetry Review, “Poem Begun in a West Texas Corn Maze”

Ecotone, “Boys”

The Hopkins Review, “Dead Town,” “Cheating in a Small Town,” “Drinking All Night

in Tennessee,” and “Plastic Men”

Literary Matters, “The Dive” and “Missing”

Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, “Girl Found Dead in the Sequatchie Valley”

The New Criterion, “Visiting My Own Grave”

The Raintown Review, “Restless”

Rockhurst Review, “Toward Your Understanding”

Shenandoah, “Small Funeral”

Southeast Review, “The Future of the Past”

Southern Poetry Review, “A Voice from the Wreck”

The Stirring, “Love Poem with Five Lines Stolen from VHS Tapes”

Unsplendid, “Necessary Rituals”

Wildness, “Negatives Under Microscope”

Acknowledgment is also due to Texas Tech University and the TTU English

Department for the following recognitions and support:

Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Texas Tech University 2018-2019

Graduate Student Research Assistance Grant, Texas Tech University 2017

William Bryan Gates Graduate Award in English, Texas Tech University 2017

Mary Sue Carlock/Joyce Thompson Scholarship, Texas Tech University 2016

Benjamin Rude Memorial Scholarship, Texas Tech University 2015

Helen Devitt Jones Scholarship in Creative Writing, Texas Tech University 2014-

2016


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................ ii

ABSTRACT..................................................................................................... v v

I. INTRODUCTION......................................................................................... 1

1. Poetry as Fiction....................................................................................... 3

2. The Idiom of Human Spontaneity............................................................... 11

3. Contemporary Formalism: Modality of Verse and Narrative Cohesion........... 19

4. A Poetry of the American South................................................................. 30

II. THE LAST VISIT....................................................................................... 38

Negatives Under Microscope......................................................................... 39

The Factory.................................................................................................. 40

Plastic Men.................................................................................................. 41

The Way...................................................................................................... 42

Dead Town.................................................................................................. 43

Ghazal......................................................................................................... 44

Toward Your Understanding.......................................................................... 45

Missing........................................................................................................ 46

Confession: Silva’s Quarry............................................................................ 47

Boys............................................................................................................ 48

Found Dead in the Sequatchie Valley............................................................. 49

The Dive...................................................................................................... 50

The Future of the Past................................................................................... 51

To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage............................................................. 52

Cheating in a Small Town............................................................................. 53

Ghazal......................................................................................................... 54

Again.......................................................................................................... 55

Layover After Visiting My Father.................................................................. 56

Poem Begun in a West Texas Corn Maze....................................................... 57

Ghazal......................................................................................................... 58

A Haunted House......................................................................................... 59

Restless....................................................................................................... 60

Custody Denied............................................................................................ 61

Ghazal......................................................................................................... 62

Roadkill Ode................................................................................................ 63

Visiting My Own Grave................................................................................ 64

Halloween.................................................................................................... 65

Love Poem with Five Lines Stolen from VHS Boxes....................................... 66

Drive-In....................................................................................................... 67


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Ghazal......................................................................................................... 68

Drinking All Night in Tennessee.................................................................... 69

Small Funeral............................................................................................... 70

Desert Elegy................................................................................................. 71

A Voice from the Wreck................................................................................ 72

Ghazal......................................................................................................... 73

Rubáiyát for My Father................................................................................. 74

Necessary Rituals......................................................................................... 75

The Landlocked Lighthouse........................................................................... 77

Love Poem with Desert and Stars................................................................... 78

On the Dred Ranch Road Just Off 283............................................................ 79

Hometown Knowledge.................................................................................. 80

The Phone.................................................................................................... 81

The Last Visit............................................................................................... 82

WORKS CITED............................................................................................... 83


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ABSTRACT

The Last Visit is a book of poems that primarily explores the breaking down of

families: fathers struggling with violent tendencies and addictions, mothers who stand

strong in the face of enduring abuse, and children who want to escape all this only to

find themselves forever haunted by the habits and memories of home. Set in and

around the rural South, these poems place the characters against the background of

small town life, paying particular attention to how these relationships and

communities erode over time.

The speakers in this book range from fed-up wives to suicidal fathers, from

confessing murderers to lovelorn werewolves, and from children suffering abuses to

the complicated and questioning adults they ultimately become. Yet along the way,

there are moments of undeniable tenderness and compassion as even the darkest

characters find space for redemption and a desire to capture something beautiful in the

most harrowing of moments.

Additionally, the poems in The Last Visit are very much interested in poetic

form, often times manifesting in traditional received verseforms like the sonnet,

Ghazal, or ballad, among others. The chosen form for each poem speaks, in some way,

to the world of that poem, and ideally augments the reading experience by inviting the

reader to consider the specifics of its arrangement, and to read it against the language

and meaning of the piece as it unfolds.


1

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


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For many, somewhere along the line, poetry became inseparable from non-fiction

and autobiography. Readers came to expect, or even demand, that a poet’s work be a

mirror held up to his or her own life and experience. It may have started with the

Confessional poets, but they understood that to write a poem means crafting a kind of

fiction, and that the details that make art interesting quite often diverge from the details of

biography. For me, the goal is convincing the reader of a poem’s “truth,” though it

remains for all intents and purposes fiction. This means striking a balance between life

lived and life imagined—harvesting what details one can from one’s own experiences

and then using these details to populate a poem that moves beyond experience. In the

world of my poems, I recognize many places, figures, behaviors—but the narrative

consciousness that emerges in the book is not meant to be a reflection of my own “story.”

Rather, it feels more like the work of some Doppelganger. I see much of myself in these

poems, but chasing down those thoughts and impulses that seemed beyond myself kept

me writing; I began to simultaneously learn and create the speakers of the poems. All this

in an effort to build voices that compel the reader to believe them, to take them at their

word.

In order to craft such a book, I relied on four key concepts—ideas that will be

explored individually in each subsequent section of this introduction. They are:

1) Considering the relationship between poetry and fiction, and how the latter

might inform the former.

2) Cultivating the idiom of human spontaneity—a technique devised to recreate

something closer to actual thought and speech reflected in verse.


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3) Utilizing traditional poetic formal techniques to create narrative cohesion.

4) Putting emphasis on place—in this case, the American South.

Section 1. Poetry as a Fiction

I spend a considerable amount of time writing and thinking about fiction, both

short and long form. This is not unusual, of course. Some of our finest poets have also

shown an interest in producing prose fiction, and some of my most loved fiction writers

have a penchant for writing poetry here and there. Learning the craft of one genre helps

to further understand another. Studying fiction can teach a lot about writing effective

poetry—things that often times get left out, or at least not explicitly discussed, in poetry

craft books (especially those designed for students of the art). One such idea comes from

what Tom Bailey calls in his guide to short fiction, A Short Story Writer’s Companion,

“fictional truth” (Bailey 4). Seemingly paradoxical, Bailey defines “fictional truth” as the

act of convincing a reader that what he or she reads is real. Of course, each reader goes

into the act of reading fiction knowing, as Eudora Welty put it, “Fiction is a lie.” And yet,

if the story or book has enough strength, the reader may find herself having an emotional

response much akin to those reserved for so-called “true stories.” Intellectually, the

reader knows the events of fiction remain confined to the page, the product of the

author’s and reader’s imagination. And yet, the mind and body can still respond as if it is

real.


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I argue that poems can, and often do, operate in the same way. While the

pressurized nature of poetic language certainly does not allow for the level of “fictional

truth” building afforded to writers of fiction, I believe it should still be the goal of the

poet to work towards it. A great poem often feels like a pipette plunged through a novel

cover to cover. The extracted material maintains the depth of the novel while taking on

the laser-focus of a poem. It not only exists in its own narrative or lyrical moment, but

also implies a past and a future. Meaning: I believe that things came before this moment

in the world of the poem, and I am left speculating as to what comes after. This

mechanism keeps me returning to the start of my favorite poems just after finishing them,

much the way a great novel makes me want to turn to the beginning immediately after

reaching the end.

A striking example of such technique is Donald Justice’s early poem “In

Bertram’s Garden.” The poem begins with Jane, getting dressed after a tryst with

Bertram:

Jane looks down at her organdy skirt

As if it somehow were the thing disgraced,

For being there, on the floor, in the dirt,

And she catches it up about her waist,

Smooths it out along one hip,

And pulls it over the crumpled slip.

On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,

Asleep is Bertram, that bronze boy,

Who, having wound her around a spool,

Sends her spinning like a toy

Out to the garden, all alone,

To sit and weep on a bench of stone.

Soon the purple dark must bruise

Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,


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And the little cupid lose

Eyes and ears and chin and nose,

And Jane lie down with others soon,

Naked to the naked moon.

In 18 short lines, Justice gives us a peak into the dark relationship between Jane and

Bertram. The situation—sex comingling with shame and a difference in perspective on

the importance of the act itself—is both familiar and complex. This certainly helps to

build “fictional truth.” As do the specificity of the details: the “organdy skirt,” the dirty

floor of the Bertram’s home, the stone bench, the cupid statue losing features in the dark.

But what truly cements the “fictional truth” of the poem is the language that points us

elsewhere—the implication of things that have passed, and of what is to follow. Here, we

open on Jane getting dressed, feeling “disgraced” by the sexual encounter that occurred

before the poem began. The reader imagines this unshown tryst, and considers what

about it made her feel this way. When we learn of Bertram’s callousness—retreating to

the porch for a post-coital nap instead of comforting Jane—it helps us to imagine their

encounter and what it must have been like to leave her in such a state of distress. The

final stanza does an immensely effective job of pulling us out of the moment of the poem

and thrusting us into the future. From the introduction of the coming night—“Soon the

purple dark must bruise…”—the poem pulls utilizes the word “and” to pull us along.

First we watch the Cupid’s face grow indistinguishable in the failing light, with each

feature given its own “and” until the conjunction pulls us away from Cupid and back to

Jane. In this moment, we are told not what’s happening, but what will happen: “And Jane

lie down with others soon,/ Naked to the naked moon.”


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While the poem’s title clearly positions us “In Bertram’s Garden,” it is something

like a sleight of hand trick. The poet deftly directs our attention to accomplish this—to

make us believe that a present exists because it has a past and future. This technique

works in this case largely because the poet leans on a narrative mode of delivering the

poem. Stories—in the general sense of the word—depend on beginnings, middles, and

ends. The reader, positioned in what seems to be the middle of a story, finds it easier to

believe the beginning and ending must exist somewhere. So what about more lyrically

minded poetry? Can this technique be seen in poems that rely far less on narrative? I

believe so, yes. In considering this question, I often look back to A.E. Stallings’ sonnet

“Explaining an Affinity for Bats”:

That they are only glimpsed in silhouette,

And seem something else at first—a swallow—

And move like new tunes, difficult to follow,

Staggering towards an obstacle they yet

Avoid in a last-minute pirouette,

Somehow telling solid things from hollow,

Sounding out how high a space, or shallow,

Revising into deepening violet.

That they sing—not the way the songbird sings

(Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)—

But travel by a sort of song that rings

True not in utterance, but harkenings,

Who find their way by calling into darkness

To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.

It is a much different poem from “In Bertram’s Garden.” We see no specific setting (such

as the garden), nor do we see anything “happen,” per se. No one leaves the house and

cries on a bench. No one takes a nap on the porch. Instead, we have the lyric voice of the


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speaker drawing ghostly connections between bats, poetry, and song in a didactic though

tender manner. Still, we see movements pushing the reader beyond the edge of the

poem’s utterance, albeit in a more abstract way.

In this case, consider the title “Explaining an Affinity for Bats.” The very act of

explanation implies that some information vacuum exists, and that the speaker explains

for a reason. Something occurred that moved the speaker to not just pronounce, but

expound on the affinity. Whether this is because the speaker stands outside, watching the

bats and following the associations they bring, or because someone simply asked her to

clarify why she feels a sympathetic relationship with the flying mammals, we can only

speculate. Of course, the motivation or situation is much more open to interpretation than

“In Bertram’s Garden,” but there is the subtle and powerful notion that this poem did not

spring from nothingness. Rather, we can imagine it as situational, and as such can believe

this speaker exists in her own “fictionally true” timeline that extends beyond the confines

of the page. It is a subtle consideration, for sure, and yet I feel it lends an urgency to the

speaker’s argument (tying poets to bats, echolocation to poems)—as though triggered by

something, and necessary rather than incidental. When we reach the second stanza,

repeating the syntax of the poem’s opening “That they…” it lends purpose to the

repetition. The speaker tries to convince the reader/listener of this mystic affinity, and

stylizes the rhetorical approach to suit this purpose.

I utilize this technique a good deal in The Last Visit, and I will bring in a couple

of examples where I am doing so narratively, as in Justice’s poem, or more implicitly like

the Stallings sonnet. First, let us look at my short poem, “Drive-In”:


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Footsteps stop outside the door.

His heavy boots divide the light

that creeps across her bedroom floor,

and the knob turns slowly to the right.

Forever, she’ll replay this scene.

The killer grins down from the screen.

Inside a desperate, foggy car,

her pleated skirt is pushed too far.

This poem owes a lot to the impression “In Bertram’s Garden” made on me when I first

read it almost 10 years ago. The dramatic situation of “Drive-In” is certainly similar to

Justice’s poem, each with their own problematic physical encounters. My poem is written

in a semi-obscure Italian form called the Rispetto, which feels like a tiny sonnet with its

opportunities for voltas and final stanza of couplets. Likewise, “Bertram” is written in

sestets with concluding couplets. Even the skirt makes an appearance in my poem,

though pleated rather than organdy. What I find most significant—and am frankly most

proud of—is the way this poem puts the reader at the drive-in theater during an explicitly

specific moment in time, and yet propels the reader forward in the life of the unnamed

character, imagining the “forever” for which she will be forced to play this scene (both on

the screen and in the car) out in her mind.

I believe there is more to this poem, of course. I could discuss the way in which

the first stanza becomes fantasy while the second becomes the reality, mirroring the

image of a drive-in. Or how the “she” gets lost somewhere between the screen and car.

But I feel that even getting far enough for such an analysis to feel productive depends

upon my ability to make the dramatic situation mirror the reader’s own perception of

reality. I am reminded of Kenneth Koch, who in a poem said, “We are not inside a bottle,


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thank goodness!” (Koch 80). Indeed, we are rarely static creatures, and so we respond to

poems who present themselves as non-static as well.

In terms of being more implicitly in the style of “Explaining an Affinity for Bats,”

I point to my poem “Confession: Silva’s Quarry.” While this poem lacks the purer lyrical

quality of Stallings’s poem, I feel the title goes a long way towards setting up the

dramatic situation of the piece. “Confession: Silva’s Quarry” finds its shape as a kind of

dramatic monologue wherein the speaker details hiding the body of a murder victim in a

flooded rock quarry:

“It seemed we were doing some good

by dumping the body in the quarry;…

The title, however, implies a story being told in form of a confession to someone else—

perhaps in a church or the interrogation room of a police station. These implications

change the way we hear the tone of the speaker’s voice. It also suggests a past—the

“confession” commences in medias res, much after the actual murder—as well as a future

beyond the final line. What are the consequences of this confession? What happens to

this speaker and to the family of the victim? What of the other men or boys involved in

the crime? These things go unspoken. And perhaps that is what much of this technique

seems to boil down to: providing details that suggest, but do not entirely address, what

lies beyond the poem. It is important for there to be spaces left open to the reader’s

imagination. However, we need to suggest an emotional shape for empty space so the

reader can create the missing piece and allow it to become a part of their experience of

the poem.


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I should point out, too, the technique of enclosing the entire poem in quotation

marks. It is not terribly unusual to see quotation marks in poems—you will find much

dialogue and dramatic staging in Frost, for example—but the practice of placing an entire

poem inside of these marks seems to accomplish something different. It suddenly feels

like captured speech—like something overheard and then recorded. I borrow this from

Robert Lowell’s poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage.” Lowell’s poem is a

monologue from the perspective of a wife whose husband is constantly getting drunk,

visiting prostitutes, and generally being terrible. That it is a monologue already creates a

certain kind of kinship with fictional truth, as we are compelled to more implicitly

imagine a “character” for the voice. Containing the entire thing within quotation marks

then creates another layer fictional truth, making the reader consider more carefully the

origin of the language on the page. Of course, our suspension of disbelief will only take

us so far—the Lowell poem is written in rhyming couplets, after all—but there is

nonetheless an important dynamic between fiction and truth being manipulated by this

seemingly simple choice of punctuation. I believe that my attempt to capture this

dynamic in “Confession: Silva’s Quarry” is perhaps made all the more “believable,” so to

speak, by rendering the poem in a loose blank verse with far more reliance on plain style

speech, hopefully making this poem all the more realistic and affecting.


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Section 2. The Idiom of Human Spontaneity

In this section, I explore the idiom of human spontaneity— a technique devised to

recreate something closer to actual thought and speech reflected in verse. In Poetry as

Persuasion, Carl Dennis spends a chapter titled “Midcourse Corrections” describing a

particular effect cultivated in poetry wherein the speaker seems to be finding his or her

way towards the ultimate topic of the poem. Dennis gives us as an example Robert

Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” and demonstrates how Lowell spends the first five

stanzas of the poem making observations of private concern before finally moving on to

the public concern of America’s relationship to its past (Dennis 123). To a degree, a

move like this trades some authority for a sense of genuine humanity in the voice of the

speaker. While we do not get the feeling of a pristinely structured argument being

unfolded in verse, we do get a sense that a uniquely human consciousness is using

association and memory to reach something important beyond the scope assumed early in

the poem.

Dennis goes on to describe how a similar move occurs in Elizabeth Bishop’s

poem “At the Fishhouses.” He takes particular interest in her shift from purely imagistic

observations about her surroundings to lines that “boldly generalize on the human

experience,” noting that this radical shift in tone is highlighted by the speaker’s inability

to face her description of the sea, falling back twice on the description “cold dark deep

and absolutely clear” (133-134). However, more so than demonstrating the speaker’s

inability to face a particular description, I believe it shows a willingness of the poet to

revise herself, re-using a line in order to see it function in the context of new lines, as


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though testing the waters to find the best usage. To me, this creates the illusion of a mind

at work with less concern for how traditionally “poetic” the process of thinking may be.

We see this happen repeatedly in Bishop’s poems, though one particular example

occurs in “Poem,” wherein the speaker describes what is first thought to be an unfamiliar

painting:

It must be Nova Scotia; only there

does one see gabled wooden houses

painted that awful shade of brown.

The object itself—that is, the painting and the frame—are known to the speaker. She

appears to know its lineage of ownership, as evidenced in the opening lines of the poem,

but the example above clearly shows that, in her mind, the painting remains the rendering

of an unfamiliar place whose location she can only determine by using clues within the

image itself. Suddenly, in the third stanza, the speaker has a moment of epiphany, which

essentially un-does the investigating in much of the previous stanzas:

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!

It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name.

Of course, it is uncertain—as the poem ultimately concludes itself—if this is memory

projected onto the painting, or the painting triggering memory. It seems unlikely that the

speaker can really see the farmer’s “barn backed on that meadow…” in the “one dab” of

“Titanium white.” But nonetheless, we feel convinced of this revelation, in large part due

to the sudden exclamation in the middle of the poem. Too, we see a shift in language as

thoughts come more quickly and become disordered. “It’s behind—I can almost

remember the farmer’s name” shows the speaker shifting suddenly from one association

to the next, from a place to a name, cutting the idea short syntactically without stopping


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to clarify for the reader. It is genuine in that it feels like a mind in the act of having a

great revelation, one that is so important the occasion of the poem cannot prevent it from

suddenly changing the direction of things.

Too, this sudden shift acts as an occasion for Bishop to move from observation

(or, in this case, memory) to grander commentary about existence, as Dennis pointed out

earlier in “At the Fishhouses.” In “Poem,” the speaker’s memories become increasingly

specific, allowing her recollection to move far beyond the frame of the painting. She

imagines instead the man who painted it, and how it found its way into her hands:

A sketch done in an hour, “in one breath,”

once taken from a trunk and handed over.

Would you like this? I’ll probably never

have room to hang these things again.

Your Uncle George, no mine, my Uncle George,

he’d be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother

when he went back to England.

In this passage, the speaker clearly quotes another’s speech, which reflects in the

revisionary nature of the language: “Your Uncle George, no mine, my Uncle George.”

And yet, interestingly, this kind of speech mirrors the language used just a few lines later

by the speaker when she starts to make her larger point about the nature of memory:

How strange. And it’s still loved,

or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).

Our visions coincided—“visions” is

too serious a word—our looks, two looks…

The speaker first goes with the more romanticized choice of “visions,” only to revise

herself, with the em dash practically standing in for the word “no,” and choosing the

more colloquial “looks” instead. This creates a beautiful meeting of the grandiose and the


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human, as the utterance struggles to articulate large, impactful truths, and the language

works to actively de-romanticize and humanize the way in which that truth is told.

If Bishop’s poems resemble a human voice in the act of struggling with grand

things, then John Berryman’s poems in The Dream Songs may in some ways be seen as

their converse, a poetic voice attempting to articulate human flaws and failures in

grandiose poetic fashion. As such, I believe Berryman’s poems draw more attention to

their “poem-ness” than Bishop’s. In terms of the metrical frame, while Bishop’s poems

are unmistakably poems, Berryman’s Dream Songs, by virtue of their compact and

repetitive metrical arrangement, appear to announce themselves more fully as poetic

endeavors. This is apparent, too, in Berryman’s syntax, which often arranges itself in

strange ways, or blends archaic syntactical arrangements with contemporary idioms. It is

all very attention-getting—partly by virtue of the attention required to decode the

speaker’s utterances—and seems closer to poetry as a kind of language machine than the

snapshot of a mind in the process of finding its direction.

And yet, we get an overwhelming sense of humanity—albeit haunted and

disordered—in Berryman’s Henry, the primary speaker of The Dream Songs—which is

captured in the shifting modes of Berryman’s syntax. Most of The Dream Songs show

Henry capturing the day to day dramas of his life in the tightly controlled space of the

poem. Syntactically, these renderings can move from confusing inversions to almost

plain speech. Take, for example, the openings lines of the very first Dream Song:

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,—a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.


15

But he should have come out and talked.

By speaking about himself in the third-person, Henry gains a critical distance from his

character, a distance he uses both to aestheticize the experience with the irregular, run-on

syntax of “Huffy Henry hid the day,/ unappeasable Henry sulked,” and to comment

critically on behaviors: “But he should have come out and talked.” There is a deliberate

simplification of syntax between the first and last sentences excerpted above. And in the

following lines, there is another sharp return to complex (although this time more

pointedly archaic) sentence structure: “All the world like a woolen lover/ once did seem

on Henry’s side.”

Gregory Orr, in his essay “Order and Disorder in Lyric Poetry,” discusses at

length the spectrum on which syntax operates in poetry, concluding that

…syntax can function along the entire continuum from order to disorder,

starting from the straightforward simplicity of the transitive sentence and

extending to the passionate expressiveness of Yeats, and further toward

the vitalizing or bewildering disorder of Hart Crane’s work. (Orr 33)

What is interesting in Berryman’s Dream Songs is the way in which we see the far ends

of that continuum so deliberately colliding. It demonstrates the very human tendency to

second guess one’s approach. In a sense, this is similar to what we see in Bishop, only

Berryman doesn’t change the course of his topic, but the syntactical medium through

which the topic is explored, bouncing back and forth between complex and simple

arrangements. Orr argues that disorderly syntax can create a sense of disorder, or can

reflect a poem’s thematic elements of disorder (he uses Crane’s “Voyages” as an

example). In Berryman, I feel we rather have a speaker hyper-aware of the destabilizing


16

effects of disordered syntax, and who uses such disruptions as a way to access new

approaches to complicated ideas.

Depending on the ratio of complex to simple sentences, the weight either choice

carries is affected. Take for example Dream Song 29, which begins with this iconic and

complexly phrased sentence:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

so heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

The sentence begins fairly simply—“There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart”—

but then snowballs into complexity, ultimately introducing grammatical irregularities (“in

all them time”) to further destabilize the meaning. The poem continues in this manner,

with its sentences becoming increasingly complex, as though the speaker intentionally

tries to obscure the ideas each sentence contains by scrambling the language. The

poem—which seems to be about the weight of guilt and the ways in which one processes

it—ultimately breaks down in its attempt to obfuscate its meanings when we land on the

simple, declarative sentence, “Nobody is ever missing.” We feel a cryptic power in the

straightforward nature of this sentence after so many winding syntactical puzzles, as

though the human voice behind all of the poeticism has finally revealed itself.

The same is true of the ratio in reverse, wherein a series of simple sentences can

lead up to a destabilizing shift in tone resulting from a sudden complexity of syntax.

Specifically, I am thinking of Dream Song 22, “Of 1826.” In this poem, the speaker uses

a repeating syntactical arrangement over 12 of the poem’s 18 lines, each beginning with

“I am..”:


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I am the little man who smokes & smokes.

I am the girl who does know better but.

I am the king of pool.

I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.

This pattern continues, each time reaching a new state or identity. It is not until the third

stanza that we see one of Berryman’s trademarked complex sentences:

Collect: while the dying man,

forgone by you creator, who forgives,

is gasping ‘Thomas Jefferson still lives’

in vain, in vain, in vain.

This is the moment where the speaker moves away from the “I” and instead attempts to

address a “you,” the creator. Except, unlike when Elizabeth Bishop moves to her grand

statements, the sentence becomes deliberately complex and disordered, again obscuring

the true meaning of the utterance. It is as though the speaker, when faced with powers

outside himself, is unable to clearly articulate his positions, and this sense of disorder is

reflected syntactically.

I try to deploy the sense of human spontaneity often in my poetry. Sometimes, I

will be more conscious of this technique at key dramatic moments in a poem. A good

example of this appears in my piece “Necessary Rituals.” The poem is written in the

second person, but is meant to feel more like the speaker taking directions from a mirror

version of himself. In the poem, the “you” has lost his wife and children. He spends each

night performing an intricate, macabre ritual wherein he salts the barrel rim of an

unloaded revolver and places it in his mouth:

Guide its wet snub nose

into the dish of salt, listening—

a crunch like bits of glass,

when steel is pressed into the grains,


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cracks in the quiet kitchen…

Throughout the poem, though, he finds his mind slipping towards his absent family—

something not only disrupts the ritual, but causes him distress:

This is your cue to think of Jean,

your kids, and how you miss them,

and how they walked away, left

the house a vigil

of silence.

Because he keeps slipping into this mode of thought, the voice must constantly interrupt

itself and revise its direction. It is much like Bishop’s speaker correcting itself in “Poem,”

though given a sort of remove through the use of second person and the way that allows

for commands:

Lower the oil-slick barrel

into your mouth and taste

the salt, and think of all that’s salt.

Your once-wife’s tears, the martinis

you consume without

limit. The salty largeness

of the sea, where Jean might be,

hiding away with your sons—

Stop. The next steps must be taken.

The salt will stand

static until tomorrow night’s

ritual.

When the speaker commands himself to “stop,” we experience an illusion of spontaneity,

of self-editing, and revision. It gives the reader the sense of improvisation. Not only do

we read the poem, we see a mind in the process of making the poem—or so it seems. I

feel this goes a long way toward humanizing the speaker of this poem who engages in


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such an extreme ritual. Just like us, his mind wanders—perhaps in an unconscious effort

to pull himself out of the cycle of the ritual. However, he seems unable to stop himself.

This revelation becomes important once we reach the end of the poem, and realize

the speaker is struggling with addiction. Much like he must tell himself not to break the

ritual—perhaps as form of self-punishment—he must break into his own thoughts and

remind himself, constantly, not to drink:

When the house is dark, sleep.

Fall through the inky milk

of dreams. Think of hours

passing swiftly waiting for night.

You will not drink.

Repeat:

You will not drink.

Again, the speaker commands himself to repeat his mantra—as though it might not

happen otherwise. I think in this poem we see a mind moving in many directions and a

conscious effort to rein in his thoughts. Furthermore, this idea reflects in the verseform of

the poem—a kind of “broken ballad” wherein the lines struggle to make their rhymes and

sometimes stumble over the rhythms. This poem—like its speaker—wants to maintain

control, and must often correct its course.

Section 3. Contemporary Formalism: Modality of Verse and Narrative Cohesion

Two contemporary formal poets whom I greatly admire, and whose poems and

books I referred to often while writing The Last Visit are Carrie Jerrell and Michael


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Shewmaker. There is much to admire in these poets, but I want to focus my time here

specifically on two qualities of their work that speak most directly my own poetics—the

modality of verse, and the cultivation of multiple voices as well as narrative cohesion

throughout their collections. In the following pages, I will look closely at poems from

Penumbra and Jerrell’s After the Revival to demonstrate how they interact with and

complicate the histories and expectations of their verseforms, in particular the sonnet. In

addition, I will examine the methods by which the poets modulate voice within their

poems, and still manage to create a strong sense of narrative arc throughout their

collections.

Modality of Verse

While I stated earlier my belief that all poetry inevitably exists in or through form,

this does not mean that all poets—especially contemporary poets—exercise the same

control of form as craft. After the Revival by Carrie Jerrell and Penumbra by Michael

Shewmaker, in terms of versification, displays their own eccentricities and senses of

inventiveness. But there is much to be said, too, of the appearance of recognizable,

traditionally received verseforms. Rather than just filling out these forms by meeting the

traditional requirements of rhyme and meter, they engage dynamically with the received

histories of these forms—the expectations of how they work based on previous and

current examples. John Hollander explains this idea in the chapter “The Metrical Frame”

in Vision and Resonance when he talks about the dual functions of the sonnet form. On


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the one hand, the sonnet has certain expectations, such as rhyme scheme and line length.

Hollander continues:

On the other hand, the sonnet form itself is like a title, in that it serves to

set up a literary context around the utterance, directing the reader to give

to it a certain kind of attention just as the frame around a picture can urge

a viewer to look at the picture in a particular way. (163)

Shewmaker and Jarrell, when engaged with traditional verseforms, have the impressive

ability to utilize not just the metrical components of the forms, but to engage with the

implications and suggestions of the frame in such a way that augments or expands on the

semantic sense of the poem itself. In order to make an example of this technique, I will

examine a sonnet from each of these poets (sonnets being a noticeable touchstone in both

collections): Jerrell’s “The Getaway, and Shewmaker’s “The Pastor.” For each poem, I

will describe how the poet recognizes and subverts expectations created by the sonnet-

frame, and how these subversions work in dramatic conjunction with the poem’s

narrative and thematic elements. Afterward, I’ll look at a sonnet of my own, “To Speak

of Woe That Is in Marriage,” and briefly discuss how I see the same happening in my

poetry.

Each of the poems I will look at plays with the expectations of a volta in the

sonnet form. The volta is a crucial element of the sonnet that has no set metrical

realization. That is to say, the expectations that come along with a volta are entirely

semantic and rhetorical. There are certain expectations as to where in a sonnet the volta

may occur—whether it is the final couplet of the Shakespearean model or the sestet of the

Petrarchan sonnet. But even this—the position of the turn from one mode of thought to

another—affects the semantic outcome of a poem bound to the sonnet’s terminal form.


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In some ways, Carrie Jerrell’s “The Getaway” falls in line with the non-metrical

expectations of the sonnet form: it is a kind of love poem, and there is presented a

dilemma which requires thinking-through. In other ways, though, this poem subtly

subverts the expectations of the form by only half playing into them. The love—fresh and

newly unionized as it may be—is already presented as problematic. And the dilemma is

never truly answered, at least not in the neat, Shakespearean way one might desire:

The poem’s narrative begins after a wedding, as the bride and groom get into the

groom’s truck. It is revealed that the groom has to sell the truck to pay for the wedding

ring. The details surrounding this scene—the imbalanced description of the truck as

opposed to the bride, the messages written on the cab in soap, and the tonal syntactic shift

in line 8 once the ring is brought up—all point to a character who has acted despite

obvious lingering hesitance. The ending offers no resolution, only a veiled sense of

danger ahead.

Understanding this, we can go back and think about how these moments play out

in the frame of the sonnet. Let us start by looking at the non-metrical element of the

volta. I see the turn occurring in the eighth line, beginning with the words “Now she’s for

sale,” as this sets up a typical rhetorical dichotomy (that was then, this is now). It’s also

the moment where the speaker moves from fetishizing the truck on behalf of the groom to

speaking about selling the truck to pay for the ring. What is most interesting here is the

position of this turn in relation to the typical sonnet scheme. Typically, we expect the turn

either in the form of a final couplet or sestet. Here, Jerrell turns the poem one line earlier

than would be expected. This may go all but unnoticed, except for the way in which

Jerrell also divides the poem on the page: in equal units of seven lines. This draws even


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further attention to the volta, as it also begins a new stanza. These deliberate decisions

reveal themselves in their significance when viewed within the context of the sonnet

frame.

We can make meaning by considering the significance of the early volta in

context of the language comprising it. The line begins: “Now she’s for sale (you bought a

ring.),” which implies a couple of things. First of all, the groom is not a rich man—he

can’t afford to have both the ring and the truck. Secondly, even though he can’t afford

both, he has purchased the ring ahead of selling the truck. The implication here is that he

will make payments on the ring, but has to sell his truck in order to do so. In an alternate

figuring of this same scenario, he might be compelled to sell the truck first in order to

procure the ring—but this is not the case. There is a certain sense of putting the horse

before the carriage here, so to speak. Or, to put it in the context of the observation made

about the position of the volta, acting too soon.

This reading is reinforced by examining other, metrical expectations of the sonnet

form in relation to those found in “The Getaway.” The rhyme scheme combines elements

of both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet tradition, beginning with eight lines of

alternating rhymes and ending with the standard Italian sestet. The stanza division then

separates the last line of the first octave from the rest of its group, placing it instead with

the lines that make up the rhyming sestet. In a sense, the early volta, as made more

concrete by the decision to also divide the stanzas at this moment, has a destabilizing

effect on the rhyme. All of this additional meaning becomes possible through the poem’s

communication with historical examples of the sonnet form through the sonnet frame.


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Michael Shewmaker’s “The Pastor” does something else entirely when engaging

with the expectations of the sonnet frame. In this poem, we encounter the eponymous

pastor in a conversation with God, wherein he questions why there hasn’t yet been

Judgment Day, and hopes for it to come soon. In the process of doing so, the pastor also

reveals that his wife has been unfaithful, and implies a more personal motivation for

judgment and absolution. Shewmaker’s poem is a single stanza, Petrarchan sonnet, which

I read as having two voltas, both of which come in unpredictable places.

The first turn occurs in line seven (mirroring Jerrell’s “The Getaway,” but as you

can see, to a much different effect), wherein the mode of discourse moves from

observation and questioning to commanding with “Sound your trumpet. Raise your

flaming sword.” At this moment, the poem shifts from a man observing “the sins of idle

men,” and asking, “Why must you tarry, Lord?” to actively wishing for the end of time,

for a reminder of “what it means to fear a death/ and a return.”

Because of this semantic and rhetorical shift, and our expectation to find only one

such turn in a poem, it comes as a great surprise when the sonnet shifts yet again in the

final line. While there are implications throughout that the pastor’s wish for fiery sword

may be borne out of a personal crisis, it is not until this moment that he makes it clear

that it is his will to see the prophecy fulfilled: “And not because it’s my will, Lord, but

yours.” For me, this has a destabilizing effect on the poem’s “sonnetness” overall, as I

have some difficulty (much like the Stallings poem) recognizing the machinery of the

sonnet outside of its metrical components. However, it is Shewmaker’s strict adherence

to the traditional metrical arrangement of the form that allows for this move to succeed

without compromising the reader’s ability to look at this poem and recognize it as a


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sonnet. Instead, we are inclined to read the confusion created by the double volta as an

additional tool to make meaning out of the poem. Here, one imagines the poem’s

uncertainty about its volta as the pastor’s uncertain position in speaking with the Lord.

While he is praising, he is also saying he has “seen enough of your creation.” And while

he is clearly a pastor—a servant to the Lord—the first turn sees him giving orders rather

than receiving them.

In my own poem, “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” I utilize the double-

volta technique in a different way. Here is the poem in its entirety:

When he’s on a binge, he will not meet her eye.

He stays out late. Out where? She doesn't know.

He sweats Manhattans, answers slurred and slow,

and staggers while he conjures up a lie.

She hides his keys—the wreck wasn’t long ago—

then holds him shaking in the upstairs hall

as he begs her for just one more drink, that's all.

She always bargains, always lets him go.

And so, tonight she waits for his breath to fall

into a raspy sleep. When the powder glow

of not-quite-dawn falls on her naked woe,

she writes a note (I’ve gone—PLEASE DO NOT CALL)

then tears it up, resigned to quantify

the countless nights it takes for him to die.

To begin with, I think this poem strongly announces its intention to be viewed in the

sonnet frame. The shape on the page, of course, gives one a clue. The title, too, has been

used by two other sonneteers—Robert Lowell and A.E. Stallings—both of whose poems

centered around toxic marriages. As such, the reader is primed to look for a volta in the

usual positions. Unlike Jerrell, I turn my poem (for the first time) at the start of the sestet,

as expected, beginning with, “And so…” I chose this language very deliberately, as it


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harkens very closely to the kind of language a sonnet typically turns on. It is meant to

lure the reader into a sense of knowingness, thinking that this poem will end with the

wife leaving the husband a Dear John letter and making good her escape.

The poem turns again, however, in line 13, “then tears it [the note] up, resigned to

quantify/ the countless nights it takes for him to die,” confounding those expectations. I

chose to place these turns in their typical positions in order wring a kind of

unexpectedness out of something more or less ordinary.

Multiple Voices & Narrative Cohesion

In A History of Modern Poetry, David Perkins describes the ways in which the

rise of the novel as a serious and sophisticated literary form affected the course of

Modern poetry. On the level of the poem, Perkins notes the introduction of novelistic

tendencies to verse—story, plot, character, and a more evolved sense of setting, among

others (243). It is Robert Frost, in particular, to whom Perkins associates these

observations. Which is fitting, since I see a direct link between Frost’s design of character

and plot (especially in his shorter narrative poems, like “Home Burial”) and the design of

characters and narrative arcs that reveal themselves over the course of Penumbra and

After the Revival. Though these poets do not necessarily aim for the full-on dramatic

approach of Frost (“Home Burial” could practically be staged), they nonetheless avoid

the trapping of many contemporary books of poetry, wherein the only voice that emerges

is the voice of the “poet.” There is much vocal variety to be found in these three

collections, and each collection creates that variety of voice in its unique way.


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Michael Shewmaker’s poems cultivate this vocal variety in the most traditional

way of the three. From the very onset, many of his titles announce the presence of a new

persona: “The Pastor,” “The Baptist,” “The Pastor’s Wife,” “The Somnambulist.” As

such, these poems typically function in the mode of dramatic monologues, wherein a

character and a conflict is introduced and realized in the short space of the poem. “The

Baptist” is easily the most dynamic of these monologues, as it features a character

speaking in a particular Southern dialect, and is rife with rhetorical questions, implicating

the reader, herself, as part of the scene. Take, for example, these lines:

This all while sitting next you, while talking

freely as we have been. Relax. There’s nothing

doing.

Here we see a combination of colloquial language (“There’s nothing/ doing”), a

placement of the reader in the scene (“This all while sitting next to you”), and reaction

and command based on an action not pictured, but implied to be on the part of the

reader/listener (“Relax”).

The poems in After the Revival, which largely revolve around the themes of

marriage and spurned love, present a different stage on which the collection’s voices

might gather. Because of the thematic similarities in the poems, especially in the book’s

second section, wherein a series of sonnets examine from many angles the steps involved

in a modern wedding, Jerrell takes a subtler approach to the cultivation of vocal variety.

The poet utilizes a shifting distance in perspective, in the sense Carl Dennis describes in

the chapter “Point of View” in his book Poetry as Persuasion. In this chapter, Dennis

describes the spectrum of reader distance achieved by the shifting use of personal

pronouns—first person, second, and third, singular and plural (42). Of course, Dennis


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specifically refers to the careful modulation of these persons in the space of a single

poem in order to alter the distance between reader and speaker. But I believe that we can

see this same affect working on a macro level in After the Revival in a bid to create a

more textured sense of voice throughout.

We see this kind of modulation spread across the book’s various sections. The

book’s first section is exclusively written in the first person, cultivating a particular kind

of voice—one who reports on lived experience, minimizing the risk of overgeneralization

by keeping observations and larger statements, like “Nobody belts a torch song like the

dirt-/ poor girl of ten” in “Tennessee Snapshot,” entirely tied to the individual perceptions

of the speaker. In the second section, the speaker shifts from the voice of the first-person

reporter to the second-person reporter. In this section, the speaker watches as events

unfold—all surrounding a “you.” The speaker in this section is distinctly different from

the speaker in the first section. There is a kind of prophecy implied by the speaking to the

“you” here—as though the speaker in this section already knows every move you will

make, and how it all turns out.

My own poems strive for this type of texture, as well, and often utilize different

points of view in order to create varying levels of distance between the reader and the

speaker. “Toward Your Understanding,” for example, uses the second-person to create a

similar kind of prophetic tone found in the second section of After the Revival. The

speaker of “Toward Your Understanding” begins with a direct appeal to the psyche of the

“you” with, “You believe your father is made of stone…” This immediately establishes a

strange kind of wisdom in the speaker. Here is someone who not only can recall the color

of the sky or the day of the week, but is also able to look into the mind of the “you” and


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judge the emotional climate there. In this poem, I believe the speaker using the second

person acts as a way to tell the “you” things he may not want to remember, or may have a

desire to misremember. It acts as a kind of outside auditor who is able to tell it like it was,

or at least not obfuscate the emotions within the memory.

“Necessary Rituals,” on the other hand, utilizes the speaker and second person

approach to a different end. Here, instead of acting as the bringer of memories, the

speaker is a force that urges the “you” along, insisting he take part in a bizarre nightly

ritual. While the speaker here clearly knows the history of the “you” in the poem, it does

not focus on revealing forgotten memories and truths. It is rather something of a

companion to the “you.” The speaker becomes something closer to a literal voice in

conversation with the “you.” When the speaker commands the “you” put the gun in his

mouth, he does. When it commands him to “Stop,” saying “The next steps must be

taken,” the “you” follows suit. And there are rhetorical motions that imply the “you” is

cooperative with these commands. For example, in stanza nine when the speaker says,

“Now, set the gun/ down,” the “Now” implies the previous step has been completed, and

the speaker may move on with the sequence.

This technique of creating texture through reader/speaker distance via point-of-

view appears many times throughout The Last Visit. The second-person is used again in

“Hometown Knowledge” and “The Phone,” both to different effect. Likewise, I believe

that the variations on point-of-view I use for each poem performs a function in the way

the poem itself unfolds. Whether it is the first, second, or third-persons, the decision to

cast the speaker’s voice has been with careful regards to how it will affect the way the


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poem is read, and how the mixture of such distances will alter the experience of reading

the book.

Section 4: A Poetry of the American South

I never felt particularly Southern, despite growing up in a small Southern town.

Perhaps it was the color of my skin and the length of my last name that kept me feeling

like an outsider looking in. Or maybe it was an innate mistrust of what had always been

billed to me as “Southern,” like a ready made identity of willow trees and lowland

swamps and rebel flags; as though it could mean the same thing to me that it does to

anyone else. Looking back, I see the South I grew up in just as much as a complex

political landscape as it is a geographic region. As such, my own poetry—in the tradition

of so many other poets from this beautiful yet problematic place—seeks to explore these

complexities and form my own particular kind of Southern identity.

The tradition of 20th

century Southern poets taking on the political begins in the

1920’s, often times taking on subjects such as the destruction caused by the Civil War

and the various deficiencies of the South (Bryant 48). Poets like John Crowe Ransom

and, perhaps more recognizably in this regard, Allen Tate with his “Ode to the

Confederate Dead,” approached the political in poetry by presenting political situations in

personal contexts. The quarrel always seemed to be with oneself in facing the political

issue, rather than the politics themselves, using poeticisms and metrical inventiveness to

keep an appropriate critical distance from the subject (Bryant 56). And while the poetry

that ultimately emerges after the First and Second World Wars dispenses with some of


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this distance, allowing Southern poets like Dickey and Komunyakaa to get closer to their

political subjects, they still maintain a necessary distance from any overt political

statements.

James Dickey’s experience as a combat pilot during the Second World War

presents itself throughout his body of work, beginning with the National Book Award

winning Buckdancer’s Choice. From this point on, Dickey’s war poems would be

scattered throughout all of his volumes of poetry (Bryant 187). “Scattered” is a key word

here, as Dickey’s collections tend to have a slightly schizophrenic nature to them in terms

of how his war poems appear in relation to poems of more personal or private concerns.

Take, for example, the great war poem of Buckdancer’s Choice, “The Firebombing.” In

the space of the collection, it is set apart as a single section, literally separated from the

rest of the poems in the book. In terms of subject matter, “The Firebombing” resembles

little of the other poems in Buckdancer’s Choice. It is as though this poem is not meant to

co-mingle with the more domestic trappings of poems like “Fathers and Sons” or “Dust.”

Likewise, the final poem in the book—also highly political—“The Slave Quarters,”

occupies its own space in a single section, essentially sandwiching the poems in the rest

of the collection between political book-ends.

Other than the practical decision to isolate the two longer poems, what are the

implications of such a move? Based on evidence in the poems themselves, as well as their

positioning in the collection, one might conclude that these poems demonstrate a speaker

who feels compelled to engage with these public matters—war, racial injustice—but also

feels a need to separate himself from the experience described within. Take, for example,

these lines in “The Firebombing:”


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Snap, a bulb is tricked on in the cockpit

And some technical-minded stranger with my hands

Is sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light,

Having a potential fire under the undeodorized arms

Of his wings, on thin bomb-shackles,

The “tear-drop-shaped” 300-gallon drop-tanks

Filled with napalm and gasoline.

The imagery here is intense and specific—the “glass treasure-hole of blue light,” the

“undeodorized arms,” the exact capacity of the drop tanks, the relaying of overheard

language to describe their appearance (“’tear-drop-shaped’”). There is little doubt that the

speaker has firsthand knowledge of this particular cockpit scene. But there is a deliberate

distancing between the speaker and the image. The cockpit contains not the self, but a

“technical-minded stranger.” And this is complicated even further by the stranger also

having the speaker’s hands. The speaker does not want to implicate himself here, despite

his need to delve into the necessary details. Perhaps because this poem demonstrates a

speaker who is both repelled by and attracted to the violence that’s present, unable to

fully commit to a stance.

A similar move is made in “The Slave Quarters.” Here, the speaker wavers

between the condemnation of such a practice as slavery, and an indulgence in a kind of

domination fantasy. Despite the obvious negative associations throughout the poem, the

speaker cannot help but be drawn back to this fantasy, as in these early lines:

I look across at low walls

Of slave quarters, and feel my imagining loins

Rise with the madness of Owners

Despite the “low walls” and the clear knowledge of the “madness” of slave owners, the

speaker nonetheless feels his imagination rising to taste the experience of that madness.


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He recognizes, with dawning horror, that he is drawn helplessly to this desire—the desire

to own, to master, to dominate—theorizing that this is an effect of whiteness, an effect on

which the sun will never set:

What happens when the sun goes down

And the white man’s loins still stir

In a house of air still draw him toward

Slave Quarters?

The speaker is implicated here, but so is the whole of the race. Still, this commentary

becomes compartmentalized in the space of the collection, and rings strangely out of

place compared to those poems which make up the book’s second and third sections.

Conversely, the idea of compartmentalizing the overtly political does not appear

in the war poems of Yousef Komunyakaa, especially not in his collection Dien Cai Dau.

Each and every poem in the collection centers around imagery of the Vietnam War. In

contrast to Dickey’s wandering lyricism in “The Firebombing,” the poems in Dien Cai

Dau root themselves in a clear time and place, exchanging high poeticisms for raw

narrative detail, crisp images, and an unflinching point of view. In these poems, the role

of the speaker as a poet and the role of the speaker as an implicated actor become

inextricably intertwined. While it often feels as if Dickey is speaking from a perspective

above the war, Komunyakaa always seems mired in physicality of the moment. As such,

it’s impossible to let himself off the hook for the acts of violence he’s committed.

One of the best examples of this at work is his poem “Starlight Scope Myopia.”

Like many of the poems in the collection, it is set during a combat operation. It is night

and the speaker spies on Vietcong soldiers as they load ammunition and rice onto oxcarts.

He watches them through an infrared scope. The purpose is to kill these men.


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Making night work for us

the starlight scope brings

men into killing range.

As direct as these lines are, there is an interesting sense of ambiguity. “Making night

work for us” could either mean the night is working in favor of the speaker, or that the

starlight scope itself is making more killing work throughout the night. Each

interpretation implicates the speaker in the violence, though the second implies more

hesitancy than the the first. This sense of hesitancy, and of the guilt that follows the

actual act, is further developed:

Smoke-colored

Viet Cong

move under our eyelids…

years after this scene ends.

This memory will linger, then, after the scene ends, the shots fired. But that is later.

Now, we remain trapped in the moment, forced to watch the scene unfold as it always

will. In this sense, the speaker, no matter how much guilt he may feel, does not allow

himself to be absolved, but instead allows the memory to unfurl as it will. We feel forced

to watch as the speaker humanizes what began as shadows, only to finally take aim with

the rifle:

One of them is laughing.

You want to place a finger

to his lips and say “shhh….”

This one, old, bowlegged,

you feel you could reach out

& take him into your arms. You


35

peer down the sights of your M-16,

seeing the full moon

loaded on an oxcart.

The speaker wants to stop what is about to happen—he even wants to quiet the VC who

is drawing attention to himself—and yet he is incapable of doing so; the memory must

play on. Perhaps the only slack he cuts himself is ending the poem before the shots are

fired.

Both Komunyakaa and Dickey—though their approaches in these particular

collections are very different—realize what Carl Dennis describes in his essay “Political

Poetry” as methods to garner authority in the setting in politically-minded poems. Dennis

suggests that a shared quality of good political poetry is the speaker’s tendency to be

“honest about the the limits of their positions,” “recognize that the best political choices

are not ideal,” and “that the good they bring is often accompanied by some harm”

(Dennis 94). In the case of Dickey, the distance he creates between his speaker and the

subject in both “The Firebombing” and “The Slave Quarters” allows him a kind of aloof

perspective, wherein he can talk about something as ghastly as the white race’s innate

desire to dominate over others with a certain level of critical detachment. His position is

not clear, in any sense, and so neither side is truly lauded or demonized. In

Komunyakaa’s “Starlight Scope Myopia,” the speaker admits the limits of his position by

demonstrating his inability to change anything about the past. Plus, as an active

participant in the very war he is criticizing, any critical position he may take is

complicated. As such, the speaker is distanced from making any kind of clear, direct

political statement.


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The Last Visit is very clearly set throughout Southern states—we see mentions of

Tennessee, Texas, and the Carolinas. But I feel that my book moves beyond simple

referents, and instead attempts to render a vision of the American South on its own terms.

The Last Visit tends to see the South filtered through the eyes of the speakers, who in turn

feel trapped, or even claustrophobic, despite the rural landscapes and open spaces. Often

times, we catch speakers escaping, or contemplating escape. In “A Haunted House,” we

see catch a speaker “on my way out of town,” in the middle of the night, running away

from his home and himself. In “Dead Town,” we see the converse—a speaker who feels

trapped in a small Southern town fading away. In this case, the absence of people and

sounds becomes the oppressive force: the “deafening sound of silence at its peak” as the

“old mill [is] making nothing.” Elsewhere, we see imagery from the edge of towns: the

crash site in “A Voice from the Wreck,” the endless dark where the speaker’s bottle sings

at the close of “On the Dred Ranch Road Just off 283.”

The notion of “escaping” the South is not a new one for Southerners, particularly

members of marginalized groups. In fact, as was explored in remarks made by John Poch

during the 2018 AWP panel “Intersectional South: New Perspectives in Southern

Poetry,” we see a kind of drifting away from the South, especially in poets of color. But

this raises the question of what it means to “leave” the South, and further questions

whether or not a clean break is even possible. I take this notion up in one of the last

poems in the book, “Hometown Knowledge.” It begins with a speaker who has learned of

(another) tragedy in his hometown:

And back home, someone else has killed herself—

dropped her kids at school, then killed herself.


37

We immediately know that the speaker is somewhere else—that “back home” is a place

in the past. And so we move through the poem with the assumption that all of this

knowledge is second-hand, sent across the wire so to speak. When we reach the final

stanza, however, the notion of ever really leaving such a place is called into question:

That’s the way the stories tend to go—

They catch up with you everywhere you go.

Though you’ve escaped, you cannot help but know.

To me, the final line shows the futility of leaving the past behind. The speaker may not be

in the hometown anymore—he may not even be in the South anymore—and yet, he

cannot help but feel that place in his bones.

Like the speaker of that poem, the South clings to me, too. And like any long-term

relationship, it is vastly complicated. There are moments where I am unequivocally in

love with the region—when all I want is to live among the Spanish moss and palmetto

trees, get lost in the foothills of the Appalachians, and eat collard greens until I burst. But

it of course has its dark side. Hatred and violence are no strangers to the South, and to

ignore these things would be to cast a pallid, hollow version of what the region truly is.

Reconciling these two—the beauty and the darkness—is something that never quite

leaves my mind. I imagine it lingers in the imaginations of so many poets from the South.

Beginning with The Last Visit, I am adding my voice to this endless and necessary

conversation.


38

CHAPTER II

THE LAST VISIT


39

Negatives Under Microscope

I’m focused on the space inside your eyes—

first pupil, then iris, now cellular disruption—

in search of some clear catalyst, some reason

for these scars, for this crooked helix on my chest.

I want the DNA for empty bottles.

I need to know what made your cruelties grow

unwieldy, like cancers let loose upon a body.

I’ve scoured the entire frame, pushed past

the edge of every family negative

believing the secret’s hidden, like a code

between the plastic and the acetate.

I stare for hours at a single portrait,

deducing from a smile the hell behind your face.

At times I think I smell the whisky sweet

perfume of you, as though each image captured

something of how you lived, how you breathed.

But then each clue turns out a part of me:

a hair, a thumbprint left while leafing through

the pile of specimens, a flake of skin,

a barely visible scratch I made in haste—

more me than you, more you than science,

naked and pinned down beneath the lens,

as though our cause is finally in the frame,

begging for exposure, for the light.


40

The Factory

Hulks in shadows just outside of town:

a rusted mess, a post-industrial tomb.

Poorwills roost in smokestacks falling down

and cry out something awful in the gloom.

Elsewhere, men with bloody lungs keep

coughing up clots like overripe berries.

Their wives beside them pretend to be asleep,

imagine different endings to their stories.


41

Plastic Men

After each fight, Mom took us both

to Wilson's Five & Dime to pick

some cheap toys. Our father's slurred voice

became a ghost of breath beneath

the long tin ventilation shafts.

Mom waited by the counter,

spoke to the clerk about discontinued

spools of thread, buttons she'd meant

to sew on weeks ago. She wore

green bruises below her eyes.

Her split lip kept her dabbing blood

with Kleenex—a poppy flowered rag.

Digging through crates of army men,

we looked for figures of tragedy:

missing arms, hands broken at the wrist,

the grenadier who'd gripped the bomb

too long. Back home, we’d line up the men

on our bedroom windowsill. We smiled

at our army of maimed green soldiers.

They could not raise their voices despite

their mortal wounds, their missing limbs.


42

The Way

The day I found him doesn’t stand apart

from any other, save for how a rain

cooled the afternoon and left the hills

smelling of steam and creeping amber rosin.

The afternoons were hot, and beneath the shade

of spruce and pine I followed narrow creeks

until their quiet, strangled ends. I searched

for caves and the remains of ancient arrowheads.

The woods were deep and took me far from home.

Failing light made shapes look soft, unclear,

and at first it seemed he might be drunk or sleeping—

he slouched against a sweetgum tree, and maybe,

I thought, I saw him move, or twitch, or flinch.

The sudden stench of rot said otherwise.

His eyes were open, clouded over, blank

much like the sky now hidden by the trees.

He sat surrounded by fallen ochre leaves,

legs splayed out into wide, facing angles.

A film of something green touched his lips,

swollen from the heavy August heat.

He gripped a small revolver in his hand.

Behind his head: the splintered trunk, a ring

of blackened blood, glittering fragments of bone.

I froze, afraid the slightest move might bring

him back, might rouse him from his bleeding rest.

I watched until the red sun died away,

and darkness dimmed that shining in his eyes.

It seemed this scene had been set up for me.

He walked into the woods to die, while the sun

drew out the long shadows of the forest.

And when the gun went off, there was no shudder

among the trees, no importance felt

by the birds, just violence and the body, waiting

for me, the pupil, who wanders in the woods,

already on a path toward knowing death.


43

Dead Town

A dead town full of ghosts—it left behind

its brick and mortar bones, the pharmacy

windows dark with dust. Each day we find

the Bijoux Movie House's bleached marquee

unchanged, and no one really seems to mind.

7:00—The Day The Earth Stood Still.

The seats stay empty since they closed the mill.

Instead, we haunt the Late-Nite A & P,

the last place left to shop for Wonder Bread,

Del Monte peaches, and Chef Boyardee.

We eat our dinners sitting up in bed.

For company, the rabbit-eared TV.

Infomercials fill the anxious quiet,

the midnight mantra, “Don’t believe us? Try it!”

echoes through our rooms paid by the week.

It drowns the sound of industry collapsing,

the deafening crash of silence at its peak—

no cars, no crowds, the old mill making nothing—

the sound of losing purpose, so to speak.

Our part-time days, like stories stretched too thin,

cannot escape the were, and was, and when.


44

Ghazal

When my father left for good, we were living in the desert.

I wouldn’t cry for him. My eyes became a desert.


45

Toward Your Understanding

You believe your father is made of stone,

a tower whose strength is silence.

Neither of you speak. This is not unusual.

Today he walks ahead, leads you

down Cranberry Lane, to White Horse,

where you are outside the dead man’s house.

Your father says, "He shot himself in there,"

a white house with a browning lawn

and a single twisted-up crepe myrtle.

And maybe because it looks so familiar—

like your own home—this does not frighten you.

Your father says, "He shot himself in the head."

He leads you to the window, grips your waist

and lifts you to the darkened glass.

Your reflection fades into the room,

sparsely furnished, gray carpet, white walls.

You see it there above the sofa: a blossom

of blood, a ring fanning out to nothing.

In the center of the plaster: a small black hole.

It seems, somehow, impossibly empty.

When you’re lowered back to the ground,

you feel the neighborhood beneath your feet.

Even the bone-white sun is fading faster

than it should. You know it will be dark soon.


46

Missing

When Bea McConnell disappeared,

she was only eight years old,

and because of what our parents feared

the neighborhood went cold.

We saw the posters everywhere,

the broken nose, the curls.

The frightened words above her hair

said Have You Seen This Girl?

We started locking doors at night

though we never did before.

No matter the hour, we burned the light

that hung above our door.

Police put corpse-dogs on the trail

and dragged the quarry lake.

They looked in every open well

in hopes the case would break.

It never did. The posters faded.

In time, so did the search.

Her parents, pale as plaster, waited.

They often cried in church.

Like the nights I’d hear my mother weep

and open my bedroom door,

and I’d pretend I was asleep

as she slowly crossed the floor.

She’d place her hand upon my head,

her fingers light as air,

and whisper in a voice like lead

a single, shaken prayer:

“Dear God, please let my child stay.

I know that you are just.

I need him to survive the day.

Take others if you must.”


47

Confession: Silva’s Quarry

“It seemed we were doing some good

by dumping the body in the quarry;

that each ballast we stuffed down her throat

to pull her toward the bottom

was a good intention approaching salvation

not for ourselves but for others, say,

her family, or friends, who might be haunted

by the sight of her for lifetimes to follow.

We brushed her nails clean and never

undressed her. We wrapped her in a sheet.

When Vaughn rolled her down the hill toward

the mossy rocks, with Sid out in front,

walking backwards, stepping over roots

to control her descent, her arm lolled out,

got spotted with leaves, and we stopped

to wrap her up again. We picked debris

from her forearms, hair, thighs, and wrists.

It was a wasted effort, we all knew that,

and so no one had to say it as we stood

by the quarry's edge. Out on the black water

a small snake swam, made ripples

as it approached our shadows, which were long.

The water lapped at the granite, and an owl,

or something, moved beyond the branches of a tree,

prompting me to stand. I’m the one who nudged her

over the edge, and we watched as she sank,

the water bubbled, and her shadow disappeared

as though ink had spread about the pool.”


48

Boys

The fall of ’93. Red leaves

drift, spinning toward the ground,

and pile beneath the schoolyard eaves.

Once struck, he just stays down,

swallows back his shock and tears.

It’s me who picked the fight,

and I’ll carry on this way for years.

I pack a solid right

left bloodied by his broken lips.

I lift my arms to play

the victor, satisfy the script.

But before I walk away,

back home where my dad swills gin,

curses game-show hosts,

and trucks of smuggled Mexicans,

I know I’ve made the most

of fear. Today I am a man.

My dad will sure be proud.

The rest, stunned silent when this began,

are cheering, wild and loud.


49

Found Dead in the Sequatchie Valley

They found her body lying here

between the skeletons of pine.

Like by some design

she died in fall, the time of year

when shadows kissed her thin wrists,

and the sun, at last, turned cold and white,

a ball of frozen light.

The talk is vague, but most insist

her boyfriend led her to the hollow

at night, they had a fight, she

was newly pregnant, and he

was mad, and madness is what followed.

The stories try to get at reason,

but the local papers let it go,

leaving these woods to know

or to forget. Now’s the season

when the dead wind mimics desperate cries,

the purple clover turns to brown,

and all the lights in town

look far away, like listless eyes.

And I wonder what’s out here to learn

besides the silence of these hills

once final sunlight fills

the valley like a broken urn?

It cannot hold. The light escapes

as though it’s liquid through a sieve,

and I want to believe—

as all gets tangled in the drapes

of night—in wholeness, if not peace.

The girl is dead. Her voice is lost

in all the stories tossed

like leaves when autumn strips the trees.

What happened here, we’ll never know.

These secrets make the kudzu grow.


50

The Dive

A busted exit sign above the door

invites no one to leave. The windows are barred,

and the panes themselves are painted over with tar.

No question as to what this place is for.

The regulars all stare into their drinks,

lamenting futures, forgetting pasts. Bar stools

are split at every seam. The TAVERN RULES

say No Cussing, though mostly no one speaks.

They’re married to their grief, you think. But here

you are: Jack Daniel’s and your worries. The same

as any drunk who will not lay the blame

on himself, drowning instead in whisky and beer.

A man with roadmap eyes searches his pockets

for jukebox change and comes up short. Instead,

the ceiling fan keeps rhythm while each dead

minute tumbles off the Highlife clock. “It’s

closing time!” Time for another drink.

The barkeep brings it over, snatches the cash,

flicks his cigarette and drops the ash

into the rusted pit of a clogged-up sink.

This dive, this glass, these greasy fingerprints,

they’re each a part of something very old:

a need to slow the way a story’s told

to keep it all from making too much sense.


51

The Future of the Past

We thought we would, by now, retire the wheel;

that we could lay to rest that early invention.

Instead, the sidewalks just became more cracked,

more broken apart by wild vegetation

pushing through fissures in worn-out roads.

The movies lied. They promised us new modes

of transportation, but science fiction lacked

the science frame by frame and reel by reel.

Our stories rarely end in slow dissolve,

a fleur of music, credits, special thanks

to all of those that made this possible.

There are no squibs, no CGI, no blanks.

Our futures stall, our cars will never fly,

and when our loves begin to die, they die.

We always want what’s most improbable.

Our hearts, like the first machines, do not evolve.


52

To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage

When his drinking gets bad, she cannot meet his eye.

He stays out late. Out where? She does not know.

He sweats Manhattans, answers slurred and slow,

and staggers while he’s conjuring a lie.

She hides his keys—the wreck wasn’t long ago—

then holds him shaking in the upstairs hall

as he talks her into “one more drink, that's all.”

The years of bargains wore her down, and so

tonight she listens for his breath to fall

into a raspy sleep. When the powder glow

of not-quite-dawn falls on her naked woe,

she writes a note (I’ve gone—PLEASE DO NOT CALL)

then tears it up, resigned to quantify

the endless nights it takes for him to die.


53

Cheating in a Small Town

It was dim enough to call it dark,

an amber bulb the only light.

The Jameson had done its work

to complicate the wrong and right.

Her wedding photo on the shelf

looked down on us. We didn’t quit.

We got undressed in spite of it,

as though we couldn’t stop ourselves.

I wanted this. I wanted to know

the harm we’d cause, the damage done

by giving in, by letting go.

I knew her daughter slept just down

the hall, her husband was on a job

in Memphis. I had so much less

to lose, my life already a mess.

After, when she began to sob,

I left. The light was creeping in

to expose our nakedness, our sin.

On my way out the door, I said

that I’d come back. I never did.


54

Ghazal

We packed our clothes in garbage bags, rented filthy rooms.

How many cheap motels line the highways of the desert?


55

Again

She’s bleeding from the mouth again.

Each drop that slips between her fingers,

spatters the countertop, and blooms

like tiny poppies on the tile.

He’s split her lip with the back-hand

I’ve feared as long as I can remember.

But she is not afraid. My mother

provokes him. Spits his name like poison.

She smiles wide, the words swelling

to cancer, toxic, eating her guts.

Tomorrow, she’ll drive ten miles out

of town to shop where no one knows

her face. She’ll laugh when the pretty cashier

asks if she got into a fight.

When loading up the car she’ll save

the frozen peas to press against

the cut that weeps beneath her cheek.


56

Layover After Visiting My Father

A woman dressed in black pajamas

waiting to fly to Houston grips

her cell phone like a bludgeon,

speaks in silent wisps of teeth

and tongue, and stumbles when she shuts

her eyes. She’s telling him, the one

who isn’t worth forgiveness,

he is forgiven once again.

She’s holding back what’s left of love.

When we meet eyes across the gate,

I know what keeps her up at night

like splintered ribs that will not mend.


57

Poem Begun in a West Texas Corn Maze

I listen for children shouting through the dried-

up stalks, but all I hear are whispers and crows,

what few remain. For over an hour I’ve tried

to solve the maze, navigate its rows,

and now the comforting smell of funnel cake

has faded. In the crisp, October cold,

the families have started home; their brake

lights burn beyond the field. I shiver and fold

my arms. A cool, translucent moon rises,

and I quicken my pace to reach some final gate.

Is it left? Or right? The sudden dark disguises

the way, and I half-remember another late

autumn, when I was nine and playing here.

The sun fell soft behind the stalks and I ran

further into the dark while closing time grew near.

I recall it still, but no longer understand

the thrill of bolting, blind and breathless, deep

into the maze. I know those days have run

their course, since now I cannot help but keep

the end in mind, the setting of the sun,

the fallen ears of corn gone soft and rotten.

It works against these paths and how they’re crossed

to spark in us, again, the long forgotten

joy of the deliberately lost.


58

Ghazal

I wrote him a letter once but left it in a motel drawer.

To where could I address it? The envelope said Desert.


59

A Haunted House

Just like me, it fell apart:

the doorway left a toothless mouth

that couldn’t hold back its history.

More rotten, less recognizable

each day. Strangled by weeds until

it looked more like kudzu vine than house.

The paint gone sick and flaking off.

The garden rushed by wild grass,

until the fall, when everything dies,

except the henbits and dead nettles.

They sprout with superstitions, and spread

about the same: everywhere.

Leaving town tonight, I see it

parched like a skull just off the road.

Ten years ago, I made love

among its graveyard of empty cans,

the moonlight shining through the holes

punched in the rusted-out tin roof.

I remember mice and rotten cloth,

the feeling of October’s fingers

sliding along our nakedness;

being stripped of all my flesh,

a pile of bones that couldn’t make a body

despite what she was whispering.


60

Restless

What comes, then, of the man who crept

into his study late at night

and typed by dull green banker’s light

while others slept?

His wife would toss and turn in bed,

and lay her arm across his chest.

He loved her but he couldn't rest.

He wrote instead

some lines about his childhood,

a girl whose hand he used to grip.

He wished he could kiss her bottom lip

but never would.

The loves that sleep inside the mind

are steeped in restless mystery.

Not bound by time or history,

they rather find

a quiet nook to turn and toss

and wake a husband in the dark—

a warm and wanton question mark

to hang his loss.


61

Custody Denied

The subject, A, is hereby deemed unfit

to care for his two sons, B and C.

His love, no matter how they want for it,

is problematic. Subject says he quit

abusing alcohol, but smelled of whisky.

The subject, A, is hereby deemed unfit

for visitation rights, unless observed and split

between locations found clean and hazard-free.

His love, even though they want for it,

cannot excuse his sudden, violent fits.

I recommend a psych exam. See:

when subject was told he’s hereby deemed unfit,

he threatened to beat the social worker, hit

the table with his fists. She agrees

his love is toxic. Still, they want for it.

The boys will be removed, pending this writ,

and cared for by the state of Tennessee.

The father, A, is hereby deemed unfit

to love, no matter how they want for it.


62

Ghazal

When I drink my head fills up with sand.

I cut myself but do not bleed. I’m empty as a desert.


63

Roadkill Ode

I find you broken—

a mottled possum dead beside the road,

mouth regal, painted red,

teeth still sharp and proud.

Your eye protrudes miraculously

from the weeping socket,

looks back on a life made fat

by what was discarded.

How many empty cans of beans

turned into your goblets,

adorned with rust, collecting

a thick sweet drink of rain?

At night you shook the brush,

guided by the scent of rotten apple cores.

The flies respected your desires

and kept their distance while you ate.

You were king and court.

Your reign was one of tousled dust

and dark, a headlong plunge

toward betrayal by two headlights and a tire.

Did the crack of your spine

strike you as undignified?

From the way your nose points to the curb

it looks like you almost made it back.

Or were you crawling, inching

to the fallen leaves,

to dig yourself a grave?

Oh, I know that I’m not whole,

and sometimes feel the flies swarming,

like much of me is rotten.


64

Visiting My Own Grave

The plot next door has complex etchings, flowers,

crawling vines that intertwine like figures

on an ancient urn, while mine is squat and square:

a simple granite marker, my name, the dates.

It feels like something brought me here, but I,

not knowing what to do, just steal some flowers

from the nicer, neighboring plot to praise my memory

(my thanks to Daniel Johns, d. 1990).

I say a dead prayer. For whom? I’m not quite sure.

I’m not—or wasn’t—a man who went to church.

I never believed in the way believers do.

But here I am the same, though shadow, though shade.

I stand unseen, unheard, above the spot

where my body rots in a very plain box.

When I came back, I wandered the earth for a while.

My spirit did, I should say. And when I say

“the earth,” I really mean my neighborhood.

You know—the street I lived on, the grocery store.

I walked the aisles touching things I bought

back then and noticed how the bright clear light

of hanging halogens made each tomato

burst with a red more vibrant than anything

I’d seen before—back when I was alive.

That’s the only beauty when you’re dead:

the things you knew, ignored, and now have lost.

Tomatoes, bottles gleaming in piles of garbage,

the shades of pearl in a pool of motor oil.

The wind picks up and cuts between the graves.

A figure stands a hundred yards away

framed in the dark between two concrete angels.

There is no moon, no stars. It’s impossible

to tell a mourner from a ghost—


65

Halloween

For Halloween this year I'll be a man.

I'll work my hands to bloody rags and use

my fists to prove which truths I understand.

I'll paint my face into a mask of bruise

like coming home after a barroom fight.

A man should fight, my father said, and lose

sometimes—no matter if he’s wrong or right.

I’ll swallow up a pint of Cutty Sark.

I'll stumble home and fumble with the light.

He said if you drink, you won’t feel the marks,

you’ll never know the places where you’ve bled.

For Halloween, I drink the autumn dark.

I'll be a man the way my father said.

On Halloween, we're closer to the dead.

His teeth were crooked. His hands were red.


66

Love Poem with Five Lines Stolen from VHS Boxes

My clothes became too tight, and crescent claws

broke through my fingertips. “It’s beautiful,”

you said, while floating down the spiral stairs.

I wallowed in your want for me and tore

your powder evening gown to ribbons. You fit

me with a studded leash, a mongrel beast

who writhed beside your feet and lapped the pools

of moonlight from the street. I loved the way

you made me less than a man. I loved the way

you fed me from your hand, said “Good boy,”

when I was being bad. I drank the blood

of alley cats I snared between my teeth.

From what I can recall, the lust for meat

was terrible and sweet. I swallowed all I could,

then you sent me out for more. When neighbor kids

began to disappear, you stroked my head.

You watched old horror tapes for strategies

to keep me wild, hidden, yours. For weeks,

I stayed inside. I fed on bones and rot.

You sat in the window and wished away the sun.

You asked of me just who is more depraved,

the monster or the one who made him so?

Your love’s like blood. It coats my hungry tongue.

For reasons such as these, I still don’t know.


67

Drive-In

Footsteps stop outside the door.

His heavy boots divide the light

that creeps across her bedroom floor,

and the knob turns slowly to the right.

Forever, she’ll replay this scene.

The killer grins down from the screen.

Inside a desperate, foggy car,

her pleated skirt is pushed too far.


68

Ghazal

Ten years later: I step barefoot on broken glass.

I search for leftover Jack like water in the desert.


69

Drinking All Night in Tennessee

The night is long, and whisky kills the minutes.

It makes the hour cry. There’s nothing in it.

But you’re too drunk to listen. It’s the sound

a hostage makes when hope of being found

is lost. He sees the end, knows he will die

as sure as there is blackness in the sky.

It’s the sound you make when everyone’s asleep

and the sun has yet to ribbon on the steep

array of mountains just beyond the hills.

You have your coffee cup of Jack, your pills.

And, because you can’t take one more second

of slow, deliberate suicide, you reckon

to scream but only sigh, and pop the top

from off the plastic amber bottle, then stop.

The sun, at last, has crested on the ridge,

its crooked spine on fire like a page

that’s torn and burned for what it might reveal.

Soon, the sun will light the room. You’ll heal,

and sleep, and steel yourself to have the wounds

torn open again, forever, until you’ve found

an antidote for grief, a lasting relief,

something stronger than liquor, like belief.


70

Small Funeral

I find him curled up on the lawn,

a silver tom turned stiff with frost.

A portion of his skull is gone.

A frozen ring of blood’s been tossed

in jagged splashes. Now here he lies,

where first November ice preserves

the violence for my morning eyes.

Its monument goes undisturbed.

I think about my brother, dead

at twenty, the broken window glass,

the stench of burning flesh, his head

cracked open in the moonlit grass,

and I know a tombstone is less real

than records of post-mortem harms.

Or bodies twisted up in steel.

Or bones that sprout from broken arms.

Some are left as misshapen vessels

mangled beyond the point of prayer

when morning mist dissolves like angels

and night escapes the fuel-soaked air.

I kneel beside the cat and tear

his body from the greedy earth.

The ground is hard this time of year.

I’ll dig a grave for what it’s worth.


71

Desert Elegy

Mike Schiffler said, “I’m banking on the end,”

this winter while we occupied the long

oak bar at Seely’s Tavern, raising defenses

one bourbon at a time. He died that May,

after the dirty piles of snow had melted

away for good. We all went to his house,

paid our respects over finger sandwiches,

the clinking of ice in tumblers like a chorus

of angels for one who dies with his hand on the bottle.

Tonight I walk out past the edge of town,

the place where streetlights barely nudge the shadows

falling from the mountain. I need a drink, and here,

this rancher’s road just off of 61,

allows a man to swallow up his darkness,

disappearing—for a moment—from the world.

I drink to giving in. I drink to Mike

and to the stars, which comfort in their coldness.

A pickup crests the ridge where road meets sky.


72

A Voice from the Wreck

I’m an accident on the south side of the town,

on the outskirts, where the desert holds its ground

against the streetlights’ last defenses. I’m the fire

leaping from the Chevy’s frame to smite the sky

and drain the cool out of the night. I’m the cell phone

in someone’s shaking hand, woken up

by the explosion in the street, the calls for help.

I’m an ambulance, a siren in the dark.

I’m the stoplight. I’m the kid out driving drunk,

vodka on his breath and bile in his throat.

I’m the headlights slamming final recognition.

And when you whisper names like curses

in your room, I’m the smell of gasoline in bloom,

the bloodstained moon behind the clouds.

I guzzle broken bones and busted radiators,

coolant running thick in thirsty gutters.

And if you ever manage to shut your eyes, to sleep,

I’ll wander from the wreckage as you dream.


73

Ghazal

My father’s voice like wind on dunes—I hear it from the bottle.

“Remember who you are,” it says. “You’ll never leave this desert.”


74

Rubáiyát for My Father

This is how the cycle starts.

It binds together both our hearts

and leaves the tender skin of my back

a document of jagged marks.

I’m beaten first, then made to strip

and show you where I’ve met the whip.

You sterilize the harm you’ve done

with steady-handed craftsmanship.

But after the swabs and alcohol,

it’s like you’ve never seen, at all,

the fresh wounds on my shoulder blades

or all these bloody cotton balls.

The scars get tangled on my skin

despite the cool of lanolin.

You say you love me, yes, you do,

but love has worn me ribbon-thin.

You are my father, but you are a fiend—

the one who cut and the one who cleaned,

who turned that taste of suffering

into a casual routine.

Forgive me now. This ghost I hold

is often angry, often cold,

and longs to rip the stitches out

before the wounds can go untold.


75

Necessary Rituals

Dip the pistol’s rim in water

taking care to treat

the barrel like a damaged lover’s

lacerated heart.

You should be firm but understanding.

Guide its wet snub nose

into the dish of salt, listening—

a crunch like bits of glass,

when steel is pressed into the grains,

cracks in the quiet kitchen.

This is your cue to think of Jean,

your kids, and how you miss them,

and how they walked away, left

the house a vigil

of silence. Next, you lift

the pistol by its handle,

taking a moment to gaze into

its black and absolute

mouth, knowing you were sure not to

load it with any bullets

this time—this is the ritual

and not the act.

Lower the oil-slick barrel

into your mouth and taste

the salt, and think of all that’s salt.

Your once-wife’s tears, the martinis

you consume without

limit. The salty largeness

of the sea, where Jean might be,

hiding away with your sons—

Stop. The next steps must be taken.

The salt will stand

static until tomorrow night’s


76

ritual. Now set the gun

down. As you rise to turn the lights

out, dip your finger in

the bowl of ink. Make a mark

on the white refrigerator.

A family of tallies, dark

and dripping toward the floor.

Thirty-five nights. A season changed—

summer to fall—the lawns

graying, and autumn wreathes

mark every door in the neighborhood

but yours.

When the house is dark, sleep.

Fall through the inky milk

of dreams. Think of hours

passing swiftly waiting for night.

You will not drink.

Repeat:

You will not drink.


77

The Landlocked Lighthouse

I see its signal swing above the trees,

while driving through a storm in Tennessee.

It slices sideways, turning in the night,

and lends to someone, somewhere sense of sight.

Where does it lead? I doubt I’ll ever know.

But I suspect it's where lost people go.

I would not follow if I knew the source.

I've marked my map and shouldn't change my course.

Though, I'll admit I find a certain charm

in parking the car and putting on my warm

blue coat, then drifting off into the green,

like a fisherman for fish he's never seen—

who finds himself adrift, alone; his chart

wet from the rain, the only thing apart

from all the dark: the swinging of a lamp.

Though here there is no sea, just leaves and damp

soil, musky, smelling of mushrooms and mold,

like something living, fresh, but very old.

And out there, calling, is the tower's swinging

light, calling clearly as a siren’s singing.

I'd like to climb those tightly spiraled stairs

and find the one who tends to the affairs

of wanderers turned searchers in the dark,

present my map, and have him make the mark.


78

Love Poem with Desert and Stars

We are discovering new constellations,

naming, re-naming, the shape of the stars.

Sitting by firelight, watching the clouds drift—

wraiths on the breath of a long Texas night.

This one’s the Boy who Jumped Over the Nebulae.

See where the seat of his pants are on fire?

Here is the Snickers bar (south of the Milky Way)

melting as though it were left in the sun.

Shadows stretched over an ocean of desert

flicker with every lick of the wind.

Hungry and cool, coyotes are howling

filling the air with immutable song.

What if our love were as lasting as star shine,

rather than coals on a lone desert fire?

Somewhere between this blue smoke of the sky

loves such as ours get born and die.


79

On the Dred Ranch Road Just Off 283

Stars are fired up like scattershot.

The howls of wolves that saunter near extinction

echo across the plains until they’re not.

All of them are headed one direction.

My father was a drinker. So am I—

an echo of a tune in drunken time.

The bottle is an instrument, and rye

the amber music spilling over. I’m

thinking about the rhythm of decline:

he measured his in knuckles, hookers, drinks.

I start to wonder how I’ll measure mine,

the ballad of the triple-whisky jinx,

but the wind begins to sigh of tired things.

I pull the bottle from the bag. It sings.


80

Hometown Knowledge

And back home, someone else has killed herself—

dropped her kids at school, then killed herself.

She took her husband’s war gun off the shelf

but put it back. Upstairs, she had some pills

(It’ll probably be cleaner with the pills).

She smiled at how they used to soothe her ills,

and swallowed down a handful with apple juice.

She finished off the glass (I forgot to buy juice)

then ran a bath. Her limbs already loose,

she crept out of her clothes like shedding skin

(It feels so nice to shed this heavy skin)

and let the steaming water pull her in.

She settled against the marble, into sleep—

that’s the word they always say, “sleep,”

as if this one word manages to keep

the panicked, thrashing body calm and still,

the sputtering and choking calm and still,

as if it happened, somehow, beyond her will.

The whispers claim she was bound to go that way.

Her daddy and little brother went that way.

She probably waited on the day.

That’s the way the stories tend to go—

They catch up with you everywhere you go.

Though you’ve escaped, you cannot help but know.


81

The Phone

There are things you can’t learn over the phone,

like how each day your mother’s losing weight.

Her hug has turned to a burlap sack of bones.

You imagine it sharp and cold. Her heart beats

jaggedly. There’s dark beneath her eyes.

You know she cooks herself three meals a day,

but over the phone you cannot see what lies

behind her silence: she throws the food away.

She yawns and says she is a little tired,

while exhaustion settles ashen on her face.

You can’t see how the neatness you admired—

the dishes clean, everything in its place—

has disappeared. The kitchen’s out of order.

She doesn’t make her bed. Her clothes smell bad.

And you keep moving further, moving forward

(after dad left, you thought she’d drive you mad):

first Tennessee, then Arkansas, now Texas.

She’s back home in the Carolina foothills

while the tumor near her cardiac plexus

grows. You can’t see her refuse the pills,

but you hear it in each hesitation, in every

sick quiet hanging on the line.

So when she says she’s “feeling better, very,”

it sends the worry ringing up your spine.

After the dial tone dies away,

you stand in the sunlight of your own kitchen.

You know she’s dying, that she’ll never say.

You know you will never be forgiven.


82

The Last Visit

I see his face as through a frosted glass,

or tears—a smearing of his present self.

I shut my eyes and wait for it to pass.

It does. These days I’m drinking less by half,

but he’s stopped taking water with his rye.

He asks for something stiff from the shelf

and I begrudgingly oblige. His eyes

are red like Southern skies on August nights,

and Mother says he’s started his goodbyes.

He slouches on the couch, then says outright:

“The world has gone as flat as day old beers.

So how about we drink instead of fight?”

“As father and son?” I hurl those words like spears,

and if they break the skin, he shows no pain.

“As men,” he says. Then the whisky disappears.


83

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Copyright 2019, Chad Abushanab

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