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Overview
David Wagoner’s wide-ranging poetry buzzes and swells with life. Woods, streams, and fields fascinate him--he happily admits his devotion to Thoreau--but so do people and their habits, dear friends and family, the odd poet, and strangers who become even stranger when looked at closely. In this new collection, Wagoner catches the mixed feelings of a long drive, the sensations of walking against a current, the difficulty of writing poetry with noisily amorous neighbors, and many more uniquely familiar experiences.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252092756 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Series: | Illinois Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 236 KB |
About the Author
David Wagoner is the author of eighteen collections of poems, including The House of Song, Good Morning and Good Night, and Traveling Light, as well as ten novels. He has received numerous honors and awards, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Read an Excerpt
A Map of the Night
PoemsBy David Wagoner
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2008 David WagonerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07567-4
Chapter One
My Mother's PoemRedwing blackbird, sitting on a stalk,
What would you say if you could talk?
She showed it to me shyly
after I'd been away for a long time.
She said this was the only one
she'd ever tried to write, and of course
it was only the beginning.
She'd written it on her own stationery
with an anonymous pastel flower
in the upper right-hand corner.
I'd seen it often before. My father
had never needed his own.
She said she couldn't quite decide
what to say next. She wasn't sure
how it should go on or maybe
it shouldn't, and she was showing me
because I was supposed to know about poems.
We stood there together
by the kitchen sink, looking out the window
at the swamp for a moment, both of us
wondering how to be inspired
in spite of feeling maybe it didn't matter
to anyone except ourselves
who could both see those birds hanging on
sideways to cattail stalks and singing
the one song they seemed to be sure of,
already knowing the end and the answer.
The First Movie
I walked with Jessamine, the tall black lady
who did our dishes, all the way downhill
to my first movie because my mother and father
were playing cards with Presbyterians.
We bought two tickets and ate our popcorn balls
while Tom Mix wore a hat and jumped off a horse
and shot white smoke at the bad men who shot back.
He was so important and huge, I believed in him.
I explained to Jessamine all the way uphill
what he'd been doing and why, and she said, Yes,
yes, that's right, while I explained his boots
and where the white horse slept and why he was wearing
a badge and those funny pants, and up the steps
and into the living room, I started explaining
to people sitting at tables what had happened
in the dark, how wonderful it had been
to see horses and ropes. So many words
came out of my mouth, they bumped into each other
and wouldn't fit the pictures I still saw
across the back of my mind. The people stared.
They sat across from each other, holding their cards
close to their chests like little fans and trying
not to laugh, but laughing anyway
and eating peanuts and winking and taking tricks.
I tried to tell the story no one had told me
or turned the pages for, but was telling itself
all by itself if you just looked and listened
and could sit still and remember what was before.
And then my mouth went shut. And Jessamine
led me up the stairs and put me to bed
and touched my lips in the dark with one dark finger,
saying, Hush, hush, but I'd hushed myself already.
The Other House
As a boy, I haunted an abandoned house
whose basement was always full of dark-green water
or dark-green ice in winter,
where frogs came back to life and sang each spring.
On broken concrete under the skeleton
of a roof, inside ribbed walls, I listened alone
where the basement stairs went down
under the water, down into that music.
During storms, our proper house would be flooded too.
The water would spout from drains, through the foundation
and climb the basement stairs
but silently, and would go away silently,
as silent as my father and mother were
all day and during dinner and after
and after the radio
without a murmur all the way into sleep.
All winter, the frogs slept in an icy bed,
remembering how to sing when it melted.
If I made a sound, they stopped
and listened to me sing nothing, singing nothing.
But gradually, finally April would come pouring
out of their green throats in a green chorus
to chorus me home toward silence.
Theirs was the only house that sang all night.
My Snake
By the railroad tracks, on cinders,
at the feet of brown cattails,
I found a snake stretched out in curves on its back.
Its belly was the color of clear water,
a green I could see through
to a place on fire.
The cross-hatched bruises near the tail
and the broken head meant a boy like me
had killed it. That was how
everyone I knew
told snakes to go away. I don't know why
I ran home then, found an empty jar, and ran
all the way back to it,
but for the first time in eight years,
I held a snake in the air with my own fingers.
It was almost as tall as I was and beautiful.
It swayed with me, then coiled
tail-first down into that mouth
and around the inside of the glass as evenly
and easily as if it was meant to be there
all along. I wanted to keep it
from more harm and from grown-up men
who killed them too. I wanted it to be mine
and still alive. I carried it home slowly
to a shelf on our back porch
where no one could quite see it
unless they looked on purpose. It sat there
coiled tight around itself and melting
for three whole days. For three nights
it coiled and melted in my dreams and half sleep.
I walked to school and came back. I ate my food.
I felt afraid. I couldn't look at it again.
I slept. I dreamed
I shivered out of bed
barefoot, carried the jar along our alley
in the night through patches of sandburs,
and poured the limp, uncoiling body
and all its rusty matter
into the rustier water of the swamp.
Maybe I really did. It was gone in the morning.
Or maybe my mother did it or my father.
None of us ever said a word about it.
The Fan Dance
I was seven and Sally Rand wasn't wearing
anything. She was up there
dancing with two quivery pink fans
like ostrich wings, and she was holding one
around in back of her and the other
in front of some of her, but was taking turns
switching them back and forth as she peeked out
like a bird who'd lost her feathers but had found some
others and wasn't quite sure where
or how to put them on—did they belong here
or there?—but they wouldn't stay there
or here while she was turning in slow circles
to violins, and if you were quick, you could see
through the rosy light something
like one breast from halfway
behind and half a rose-pink behind before
another side of another breast
and the other half behind had come around
to disappear at the rosier pink ends
of feathers. And then she was gone
offstage, and my small mother was leading me
and my big rosy-faced father up the aisle
and out together onto the Midway
of the Century of Progress and saying,
I don't think David should have seen that,
and my father with his head down saying, It was
rather suggestive, and I, who hadn't suggested
anything, ate Jack Armstrong candy
in the back seat, with my Buck Rogers Ray Gun
going Zap! and Zap! Zap! Zap! all the way home.
Whistler's Mother
My father said his mother bought it for him.
In each of the seven houses where I grew up
she hung in a hallway. She was sitting sideways,
looking like she'd been told to please get ready
to have her picture painted on Sunday
and had put on Sunday clothes as colorless
as the wallpaper and been told she should sit
still, and she wasn't used to being told.
She looked like she had pork and sauerkraut
in the oven and could smell it starting to burn.
She looked like she was listening for the doorbell
or the telephone to ring any minute now.
She looked like she didn't feel very much like being
anybody's mother today, thank you.
It was the only art my father owned.
The Red Hat
The lady had come right through the front door
to visit Grandma without being asked in.
They sat in the living room and talked and talked
about false neighbors and how sad it was
that nobody told the truth to anybody.
In the next room, I sank deep in my chair,
trying to read the Bible which would be good
for learning how to think and my education
and growing up and being morally upright
and better than comic books and private eyes.
Gradually Grandma had fallen silent.
The lady was telling her about bad things
years ago that were happening again.
Then slowly she backed out onto the porch
and let in flies and scurried away still talking.
Grandma touched my hand. She apologized.
She said the lady was old and had turned older
sooner than her friends and felt afraid
they'd forgotten who she was and were making up
bad stories about her and telling them to each other.
They thought she wasn't all there, though she was, she was.
They were all false witnesses and Pharisees.
A half hour later, in Deuteronomy 20,
I found false witnesses paid eyes for eyes
and teeth for teeth back then. I went to ask Grandma
why, but she only said, "She forgot her hat"
and held up a red felt thing with a red feather
and a black veil, like a bird caught in a net.
"Take it to her," she said, "or she'll come back.
Her house is right over there," she said and pointed.
This is too long a story. Here in the middle
I'm worried I'm telling it like an old lady
or an old man who can't remember exactly
what to say or which part to explain,
who should spend a lot more time just keeping quiet.
So here's the rest in a hurry. I went to the house
I thought Grandma had pointed at. I knocked
on the screen door. When nobody answered,
I opened it, threw the hat inside, and ran.
Almost a block away, Grandma was yelling,
"Wrong house!" I went back. An angry black man
came out of the door and threw the hat at me
like something dirty. I grabbed it and trespassed
through his garden to next door. The lady was standing
smiling behind her screen with her clothes off.
The First Touch
You sat in the two-seat wooden swing in the park
under the latticework of the moonlight
side by side with Sarah Downey your lips
a part of hers your good right arm gone numb
around her shoulders your good left hand at its first
touch of a breast becoming no longer hers
but yours in the heady distillates of the night
suspended in misty air by Lever Brothers
and the Union Carbide and Carbon Company
around you in and out of every breath
you took from each other you had only one
close encounter like this you lived too far
apart the storage tanks and the cat-crackers
of the largest oil refinery in the world
were fenced and barbed between you two forever
beyond the reach of your arms and bicycles.
Elegy for a Safety Man
In memoriam Richard Bell (1925–45)
He was our safety man, our last defense,
but off the field, he didn't believe in safety.
He was the first to sleep all night with a girl
and get caught, the only one who could stand
on the edge of a building roof at night in the wind,
who could siphon gasoline and not throw up.
He could drink a 12-ounce Pepsi in eight seconds,
the time it took to pour one out on the ground.
At the swimming pool, he'd stay under water so long,
we'd panic before he did and haul him out.
We had to hold him back one night when, drunk
on a single beer, he tried to tackle a car.
He was lanky and raw-boned and curly-haired
and smiled about as often as Gary Cooper.
He didn't worship heroes or act like one.
He didn't quite flunk any subject in school.
He joined the Marines, was shipped to the South Pacific
where no one close could be afraid for him.
He jogged with a tank across a broken field
and was the first of us to disappear.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Map of the Night by David Wagoner Copyright © 2008 by David Wagoner. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents 1 My Mother's Poem The First Movie The Other House My Snake Fan Dance Whistler's Mother The Red Hat The First Touch Elegy for a Safety Man How Johnny Nolan Rescued Me Passing the Road Gang Curtsy Talk Crane Fly Homework in Social Studies Castle My Father's Dance 2 The Invitation What Do I Know? A Lesson from a Student An Assignment for Student Playwrights In the Green Room The Heaven of Actors A Visitor Calls on Joseph Conrad Catfish Mr. Bones On Being Asked by an Assistant to the Governor of the State of the State of Washington for an Appropriate Quotation from a Native American to Conclude an Inaugural Speech An Assignment for Senior Citizens Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love The Moth 3 In Youngs Creek Stopping Along the Way Blind Instinct That Bird Meadowlark A Pastoral Elegy for a Pasture Watching a Boa Constrictor Yawn The Escaped Gorilla Judging a Hog Thoreau and the Mud Turtle The Elephant's Graveyard Falling Behind The Hunters For the Man Who Taught Tricks to Owls On a Glass of Ale Under a Reading Lamp 4 5 Owning a Creek Up Against the Sea The Right Way On an Island Rescue Upstream Letting the Grass Grow Under Your Feet Cemetery Grass The Heart of the Forest 5 Free Fall The Presumption of Death For an Old Woman at the Gate Being Taken for a Ride The Driver The Follower At the Scene of Another Crime Stakeout Changing Rooms In the Dark Room 6 What the Houses Were Like Then Man Overboard Moving Through Smoke Unarmed Combat Attention At Ease Under Fire Night Reconnaissance The Stand-up Cell What the Stones Say On First Looking Through the Wrong End of a Telescope The Center of Gravity An Old Man Sitting Down (Contents-3) An Old Man Stacking Firewood The Old Men The Hero 7 The Eve of the Festival of Venus 8 Between Neighbors On Deck Fighting the Blizzard What Billy Graham Said to Me at the Fair In the Emergency Room Weeds An Informal Elegy for Neckties Looking Respectable Doing Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast What to Do All Day Thoreau and the Quagmire At the Deep End of the Public Pool In the Graveyard of Major Appliances 6 The Solution to Yesterday's Puzzle Knots Cell Division A Snap Quiz in Body Language For a Man Who Wrote Cunt on a Motel Bathroom Mirror Night Song from the Apartment Below Desire The Spider's Eye The Day I Believed in God A Congo FuneralFrom the B&N Reads Blog
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