In the Black Window: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

by Michael Van Walleghen

Overview

The title of Michael Van Walleghen's new collection evokes thematic preoccupations that have shadowed him throughout his long career. Appearing as a phrase in the poems themselves, In the Black Window more generally points to Van Walleghen's enduring interest in the intersection between inner and outer worlds of experience—those liminal moments in other worlds where we become aware of ourselves. We live at once in a strictly personal, material dimension but also in a distinctly spiritual one. Yet, when looking from a lighted kitchen into a night-black window on a winter evening, we might perhaps become suddenly aware not only of our own reflection, but also of our complicity in some deeper mystery altogether.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252071782
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	05/12/2004
Series:	Illinois Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Michael Van Walleghen is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He won the Lamont Award for More Trouble with the Obvious, a Pushcart Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships. His previous books include The Wichita Poems, Blue Tango, Tall Birds Stalking, and The Last Neanderthal. His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and other highly respected journals.
 

Read an Excerpt

in the black window

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

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By Michael Van Walleghen

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Michael Van Walleghen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07178-2

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Chapter One

    FIDELITY

    When they open the door
    of their new Dodge Caravan
    and the dog gets loose

    it's 3:30 and 33 degrees
    in yellow, foot-high numerals

    on the digital clock
    just inside the Fidelity
    Savings and Loan parking lot.

    It's also snowing a little ...
    not much, but enough apparently

    to undo some woman in a BMW
    who, as she hits the dog, screams
    then puts her hand to her mouth

    in horror—but doesn't stop.
    It's 3:31. A flagpole

    rattles in the wind somewhere
    while the child whose pet it was

    a girl about twelve or so
    limps around the parking lot
    in squeaking, wordless circles—

    a tiny, intricate cog right now
    whose turning turns the earth
    as it circumnavigates the sun

    until the great, clockwork wheel
    of the synchronous galaxy itself

    ticks forward on its axis
    making it 3:32, and suddenly
    her mother can touch her again.

    I'm the man across the street
    buying a newspaper at the 7-Eleven.

    And there's someone else, a clerk
    or teller from the loan company
    who's come out in his shirtsleeves

    like an angel of The Repossession
    to cover the dog with a rug ...

    Meanwhile, cars and trucks
    are speeding by, a few
    stray flakes of snow

    fall down melting in my hair
    and life goes on, as they say

    whether we pay attention or not.
    Prince? Ralph? I'm almost sure
    she yelled his name out once

    but I've forgotten it already.
    As if I should remember it ...

    as if, at 3:33 by the bedside clock
    I'd just woke up again, haunted
    by a name that won't come back—

    some long-dead classmate maybe
    or a lost girlfriend. Right now

    it's a German shepherd I think—
    gray for the most part, but darker
    at the muzzle, ears, and feet.


    TAPS

    The sun is almost down
    and except for the woman
    dressed in white,
    shading

    her eyes
    with one hand
    waving with the other,
    the far shore
    of Whitefish Lake
    has turned an otherworldly
    deep autumnal yellow ...

    I am in a boat
    with my best friend
    who is learning
    how to play the trumpet—

    a cracked
    and off-key "Taps"
    the only piece he knows ...

    But just wait.

    Beyond the trees somewhere
    and beyond
    their bright reflections
    in the Lethean
    leaf-strewn water
    one can almost hear
    those same
    few notes returning ...

    but clear
    and bell-like now
    as if perfected
    in childhood's dark
    unechoing wood
    by such desire
    even the distant
    cold iron clang
    of drunken
    loudmouth horseshoes
    becomes
    a kind of metronome

    and my best friend's name
    called out
    to call him in
    for supper
    seems at once
    no more
    than who he is
    and a cry
    that's wholly other—
    foreign
    as Chinese somehow

    yet in a key
    that's still
    familiar,
    one of those
    two-note
    descant replies
    I've unaccountably remembered
    from some Gregorian
    choir-boy
    chant for the dead ...

    but now,
    right now
    we don't know
    what happens next—

    the cancer
    just beginning
    in his mother's breast
    is only as big
    this fall
    as the head of a pin
    on which the wincing
    listening angels
    are carefully
    carefully dancing.


    THE EX

    In trailer parks
    in Laundromats

    in the smoke and mirrors
    of trying to raise a kid

    and dance her topless way
    through business school

    at Don Juan's, Pop-a-Tops,
    the Houston Inn, the years

    like disremembered years
    she might indeed have spent

    in prison, blur by outlived
    until she somehow graduates

    finds a decent job for once
    then buys the run-down house

    across the street—where now
    shuffling back and forth

    or stumbling, in her moonlit
    gravel driveway, a tall

    bare-chested skinny guy
    scribbled hieroglyphically

    over with homemade hearts
    daggers, drops of blood

    is shouting, beer in hand
    that all he wants goddamnit

    is to see his kid again ...
    but here come the cops

    just like in the old days
    with their blinding lights

    and handcuffs instead. Now
    they'll want to talk to her

    too, they'll want to know
    everything, the whole story

    and then, God help us Jesus
    the kid will want to know ...

    But first, there's the next
    few minutes to get through

    and her old name to remember
    while they try their level best

    to beat his idiot brains out
    for kicking in a headlight.

    Of course. What else is new?
    Nothing in this life certainly

    and nothing in that squawk
    and static hissing either

    from the police car radio
    that couldn't just as well

    be noise from some dim star
    beyond the far Crab Nebula

    where she got married once.
    She understands that much.

    And as anyone watching
    from their lawn or porch

    can see, the rest of it
    is slowly coming back—

    along with that funny name ...
    oh, right there, on the tip

    of her tongue! It sounds
    like a club clubbing meat

    and rhymes with something
    close to death I think.


    COYOTE

    I could tell
    from the briskness
    of her stride
    and the level
    steadfast focus
    of her gaze
    that she was on a mission
    of some importance ...

    but so was I
    that 4:00 a.m.
    and towing a boat besides—
    speeding on my dim,
    lost way
    to some unpronounceable lake
    in southern Illinois
    I'd never fished before.

    Otherwise,
    because her numinous
    and fleeting disregard
    seemed almost
    apparitional,
    I think I might
    have turned the car around

    and tried to follow her
    with my headlights
    for a while
    just to see
    if she was real.

    And then,
    as birds start up
    and formless night,
    beyond
    the car's black windows,
    gives way
    to light again,
    I find the turnoff
    I thought
    I'd missed somehow ...

    a road
    that turns past fields
    of milkweed,
    ruined orchards
    and collapsing barns—
    beside which,
    constellations
    of entropic
    farm machinery
    rust half-visible
    through their nebular fog.

    And no one anywhere.
    No cars.
    No signs along the road.
    As if
    whoever lived here once
    had vanished
    unaccountably—

    like one of those flawed
    and mythic civilizations
    lost
    in blear antiquity,
    wiped out
    by plague
    or put to the sword
    by some barbarian army ...

    But even as the catastrophe
    is upon them,
    the goddess Artemis
    sets off
    at the speed of light
    to petition Zeus,
    who lives
    far from here,
    far from here
    at the end of the universe ...

    or in the next county
    where she appears,
    in her dawn-gray
    numinous guise,
    as coyote—
    and quite as real
    as you
    or I—
    slamming on the brakes
    for wild-eyed,
    well-antlered
    Actaeon,
    chased by dogs
    and leaping out of nowhere
    three feet
    in front of the car.


    ORCHIDS

    By the time
    we'd transferred
    from subway to bus

    on the way to the zoo
    and botanical gardens
    in the unfamiliar city

    the sun was out again—
    March-bright,
    glittering
    in the just-stopped rain ...

    to the point of blinding us
    almost,
    especially as it caught
    and dazzled
    here and there
    on the broken glass
    of weedy storefronts

    and in the tiny
    trash-filled yards
    of the ghetto poor.

    I remember
    there was no one
    on the bus but us—
    my wife
    and me,
    our teenage daughter—
    and no one either
    on the street ...

    a street
    that suddenly
    a glimmering
    rag-stuffed window
    or a chair-propped door
    opening on a dark hallway
    made eerily familiar ...

    images
    I recognized somehow
    from my childhood
    in Detroit
    nearly fifty years ago.

    I was with my mother
    and we were going
    to the aquarium
    and botanical gardens
    on Belle Isle.

    And this
    would be the neighborhood
    near the river
    off Jefferson Avenue
    where she grew up—
    but different now,
    run down,
    the old house
    by this time
    gone completely.

    I must have been
    six or seven
    and had never seen houses
    like that before,
    houses
    that looked
    as if they'd been
    on fire—
    and weed-choked yards
    with mattresses in them,
    old stoves,
    couches ...

    Meanwhile,
    we've turned a corner
    and abruptly
    there are trees again
    and the houses
    all get bigger—
    some of them with stone
    or wrought-iron fences.

    And then
    a high stone wall
    that opens finally
    on the botanical gardens—
    where there are people
    everywhere
    studying their maps,
    deciding
    what to see,
    where to go exactly.

    We're here
    to see the orchid show—
    to walk with the crowds
    through the wet,
    glittering
    arboretum,
    admiring the exotic
    three-petaled bloom
    of flowers

    I can first remember seeing
    with my mother
    all that long
    long time ago—
    their intricate
    labiate mouths still whispering
    of that first garden
    I'd learned about
    at school,
    along with the angel
    and his fiery sword.


    ONCE MORE WITH MOTHER
    ON THE BEACH

    Florida, 1997

    Is that seagull limping?
    my mother asks,
    handing me
    the binoculars.
    Listen ...
    I think it's crying for help.

    Sciatic,
    all but deaf
    these days
    and bothered now
    with cataracts,
    she thinks
    it has a mate out there—

    male
    of course
    and entirely
    impervious,
    a feckless dot
    she can't quite focus
    just beyond the breakers.

    But his erstwhile wife
    looks fine to me,
    healthy
    in her zoom-close proximity
    to the point of corpulence
    almost,
    and in glad possession
    of a large,
    dead fish—

    a narrative turn
    at once
    so dissonant,
    so thoroughly
    familiar,
    it makes us stop
    and laugh out loud ...

    before we start again
    on living wills,
    my brother's
    suicide,
    and why it is
    I see her
    only once a year.

    Meanwhile,
    a puttering flag
    on the lifeguard tower
    accelerates
    like some kind
    of puny,
    relic biplane
    taking off
    in fifty knots of wind—
    and all around us,
    above
    each ebb-tide wave,
    sandpipers
    tack
    and hover,
    tack
    and hover

    but still can't land,
    blowing
    leeward past us finally
    like little,
    peeping scraps
    of torn-loose seafoam ...

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from in the black window by Michael Van Walleghen Copyright © 2004 by Michael Van Walleghen. 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.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Fidelity....................3
Taps....................6
The Ex....................9
Coyote....................12
Orchids....................16
Once More with Mother on the Beach....................20
Three-Ring Circus....................24
When ....................27
Ego....................30
Coelacanth....................33
The Other Shoe....................35
Light Takes the Tree....................37
The Franz Kafka Fellowship Hotel....................40
The Former Life....................43
Transformer....................46
Fixer-Upper....................49
Persimmon Fjord....................51
The Man in the Diving Suit....................53
Happiness....................56
The Light....................61
A Good Excuse....................62
The Permanence of Witches....................63
The Alligators....................65
Frankenstein's 4:00 a.m. Lament; or, The Man Who Lives Downstairs....................67
More Trouble with the Obvious....................71
Crabapples....................73
The Sibyl at Snug Harbor....................75
The Fisherman....................77
The Honeymoon of the Muse....................79
Walking the Baby to the Liquor Store....................81
Fun at Crystal Lake....................83
Driving into Enid....................85
Arizona Movies....................87
The Age of Reason....................95
The Spoiled Child....................98
The Afterlife....................101
Meat....................103
Lake Limbo....................105
Blue Tango....................107
Bowling Alley....................110
Hold It....................112
Hanging On like Death....................116
Fishing with Children....................118
Creative Writing....................120
Hamburger Heaven....................122
Atlantis....................124
Adios Zarathustra....................129
The Awards Banquet....................132
In the Chariot Drawn by Dragons....................137
Crawlspace....................139
Late....................141
Tall Birds Stalking....................143
Uncomfortable Procedures....................149
Clarity....................155
The Elephant in Winter....................158
Periscope....................161
Beauty....................164
Twilight of the Neanderthals....................167
Ghost....................173
Shangri-La....................175
In the Company of Manatees....................178
The Last Neanderthal....................181