In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant.
In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant.
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Overview
In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496221445 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 132 |
| File size: | 790 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
How I Became an Apostle
After Edward Hirsch
Now that I have my thorn in the flesh,
I can write epistles, holy writs. It's winter.
I limp out just after the delicate chaos of flurries covers the driveway and I shovel.
This is a ritual of sin: after clearing a long path, behind me the pox of snow returns.
The angel, remember, stopped fighting when I broke his hip, tore his ligaments, as we say.
Now mine throbs deep inside muscle, bone, and fat,
and in this cold the pain purifies me.
By dusk I can barely walk, my foot drags across the frozen driveway as the snow falls heavily.
My first epistle to the saints is a prayer pleading that this, too, will pass. The snow covers multitudes.
Advent
Christmas falls on a Friday — the long week of labor and waiting is gray with dull light,
and gradually the gloom fills my bones —
I have declared myself a fat man once too often.
Here in Nebraska I have learned the art of restraint — hoarding lamentations and complaints;
how to hold my tongue until it is clear that those around me have unlearned the rituals of compassion; they cannot see the despair in my eyes. Remember when we knew that simply speaking out, our bile would release it from our bodies,
that leeching chemistry of confession or hoping?
Not here. Here the body creates a membrane of such leathery resilience that it may keep in all the wounds we have collected.
And here in the slow march to Christmas,
I grow bloated with decency; and I have decided to grow my beard again — the uniform of a man pioneering the wilderness. At church,
the choir did not sing a Christmas song —
it is as if someone forgot the season —
but the pastors and elders all wore suits and ties; while we clapped our hands to the radio songs — good, clean Jesus of Chick-fil-A and Texas charm. Look at my eyes. Pay attention. Clouds, slow moving,
across the prairie sky — so slow it is as if nothing is moving across the bigness of things.
The Barking Geese of Edenton
At four o'clock the heavy swoop of night is coming,
we walk, man and dog though our pedigrees suggest nothing of the archetypal companionship,
we would be strained companions in the wilderness,
company, yes, but death would mean only the loss of habit. Though at the top of the street,
the geese begin this barking through the air —
it is winter, and there they are, as if their migration was delayed — they fill the sky with the sharp angles of triangular formation;
and in this instant, we stop, look upward trying to follow the pattern of their flight —
this, we share. Upstairs in my home, our guest, the celebrated novelist, weeps at night,
between his genius is the darkness of loss;
he has lost a lover, she will not answer him,
and he is making bargains with God;
he grows thin, can't sleep. We meet in the plush light of our dining room and talk of the barking geese, the snow on the ground,
and the calculations of fame. This is the tail end of a year. All the world is waiting for some calamity; some bomb to explode.
Sure, we will die, each of us, this is the truth. I study our faces like one studies the dead.
The Immigrant Contemplates Death
The man who carries his yoga mat rolled up under his arm walking through his city is the man I have longed to be. It is as if he will live forever. This is what I can say of exile;
a body like me has lost track of the narrative of mortality.
It is the brittle dry air of these prairies, the wide-open fields, the soil that has grown too hard for burial,
it is easy to mistake the longevity of farm people,
of white Lutheran stock,
for kindred souls. I was born in a city that turned into a village within hearing distance, and the deep red soil of Accra knows it is always prepared for the deep warmth of cankering bodies,
for the spirits that treat the trees and roads as temporary dwellings before the teeming underneath of performance. In Kingston,
I considered death each day,
its friendship with the living;
and we die as if the body was made for this. It is true that among these midwestern people I can forget myself —
I can forget that the deep funk in my skin is my brokenness steaming in these late days of my life. Even my doctor thinks I will live longer; but I know that the back end of this year, when Lincoln's earth grows stony with hoarfrost, I will land in St. Mary, walk out into the morning barefooted, un-shirted and stand in the soft dark soil, my weight pressing me into its familiar give and embrace.
And this warm circling of air is the comfort of all saints to gain, and gain and gain.
Fledge
On long walks across the calming whiteness of deep winter — the arctic air has walked in and settled over everything — I dress in dark colors, and venture out, breathing what feels like a cleansing but is the grim ritual of a man, constantly on edge as if waiting for tomorrow's ill winds to shatter the brittle calm. But to fledge is all I want; to take flight off this icy edge.
Longing for the Hall of the Deaf
At the end of it there is this thing — words;
we collect them as people moving through crowds collect germs; their bodies speaking to each other, the scent, the leaping insects,
the flow of blood — an old woman reminds you that the menstrual regimes of women whisper their monthly rendezvous —
"the scientists have not done this, but I have —
and I have calculated that twelve feet or the distance for eyes to make contact,
or for the sweat emanating from a woman's thighs, for this to happen. And women,
who live countries away, if they talk each day, somehow the cadence of their voices finds a strange chemical echo,
and this too is magic, but is science;
and these are the miracles we know —
what of those we don't." It was her way of saying her death is not cause for mourning, though she said she would hate for the ritual of black,
the commitment to memory in the act of black for a year to be ignored. Death is ordinary except when it is caused by the calculations of vengeance and willful neglect. Then it is extraordinary.
These lines across the page are not songs — such music belongs to the magician.
No, these are mere conjuring,
they are spells, in the way that remembering can be an incantation for light. Outside the temperature has dropped to minus two,
and everything is static in the air,
such a dry prairie cruelty, the cold that has killed and will kill again.
What we make of the silences of the epoch is what we make of art. This is my dream: that my words may be a grand infection turning and turning in a bare studio, our bodies electrified to passions each time we walk across a ribbon of imagination;
a kind of holy beauty consuming body.
The Midwestern Sky
Not all skies are readable. I am an alien in this wide-open country, and the sky's inscrutable dialect leaves me bewildered,
lost in what we must call a pastiche of cliché. I can see in the squint of old farmers moving along the market lanes, husband holding the hand of wife,
both unsteadily stepping with the determination of people who were trained to kneel and pray each night — the ritual is the truth — in their faces one knows that the wisdom is there — the knowledge of the sky's language — they have read it with only a hint of spirit —
certain that it is not the sky that is the mystery, but those who worship it. These Lutherans will never worship the sky — but treat its constancy with the acceptance of faith, devotion,
duty. In time, I fear, I, too,
will turn this questioning into silence,
and I will welcome death as one welcomes the winds from the west,
deep in winter — with resignation,
and with nothing of the pulsing delight that fear can fill our hearts with.
First Winter
In Nebraska the promise of blizzards, the gruff edge of prairie storms the kind the frozen farmers and German pioneers huddled against in barns, praying for the mercy of Indian arrowheads, the cold of the miserable,
the thing that explains what is called stoic Lutheran resolve;
the language of sordid gratitude for the gasp of spring, they promised me all this would make me strong, better, a man —
the winter stayed away, left me to be fat, and southern as I always have been,
nursing gout.
Loneliness
I have taken to talking to trees in midwinter; never those at the edges the safe ones gazing at the highway;
I go deep inside where the snow is powdery, crystal under light.
We talk, the branches rub together like insects hissing
the cold calms even my jittery heart;
the silence is absolute here.
Each step I am startled by the hollow echo of leather on brittle snow.
Dark Season
It is the dark time, my dear,
so hard now to wake, my body
is battered with aches, as if this stone sensible bed has
vowed to punish my sins. It is the dark season, the air wet
with mist, and the sun, reluctant to come before the rituals
of the day are almost over, this is the season of intrigue
and betrayal, and not far from the center of the world
the incumbent loses his ability to count his votes
his stutter grows into a full affectation in his panic. I know
this, and a greasy challenger,
high forehead and plastic
hair is soaring — these are dark times, my love,
and I am trying for calm,
but the fears come in the silent
time, the knocks and groans of a house still seething
into the ground, startles me;
as if shouts are visiting
again; I have fallen down,
the fat colonel looms over
me, he carries the effigy of the executed in his hands
while the soldiers work on.
This is my dream
in the early morning —,
such a dark, dark time, my love.
Plain-Speaking
After Seamus Heaney
Against the crumpled sheet of white paper, a glaring carrot, distorted,
it looks like the naked arm of a man,
fingerless, shoulder-less, just the arm resting on a rumpled bed, bloodless.
"Although spontaneous in appearance
— [his] work is methodically preplanned."
From here you see the inside of a burnt-out barn, the broken canvas, the useless wagons, parked here a century ago —
the sand consuming everything.
Novela
This low-bellied cloud cover over Lincoln surprises me —
the air is muggy, and a strange foreboding comfort settles.
In the novel I will never write it is the last day of their meeting though they do not know it,
but this is the opening scene of the book,
and after this the deaths begin.
The couple arrives in the tree-full courtyard,
a ritual repeated each weekday for a decade, though for festival season,
and the feast days, they've stayed away.
They wait for the teasing accidents of the unseen pianist — always an open chord not in the same key; and then a quick wayward arpeggio in the higher notes.
Then the full composition, full-bodied,
a nameless air, though they never speak, so all they offer are smiles.
Who knows what the other knows?
The couple dances — in the novel, they have danced for ten years, a man and a woman,
nameless, voiceless, just two bodies seeking assurance in the ritual.
Here in this moment of the book,
the piano is silent. They stare at the balcony — the curtain flaps as usual, but no sound, no music.
Then a portly woman with a bandana carrying a heavy rug, steps out, looks down,
and smiles. She never existed before.
She drapes the rug over the railing.
It is Persian, curlicues of blue and red,
epics unfolding in the soft light.
The couple looks away, embarrassed,
she leaves first, he follows.
The rest is the world collapsing in,
a city regulated by guns,
leaders betraying leaders,
money changing hands,
wars, and rumors of wars,
snowfall in the summer,
a veritable feast for the poets who have mastered the jeremiads of doom. It was always this way
for them, the man and the woman,
and the courtyard was their shelter of deep secrets — the kind that accumulates
over years and years to become a monument of betrayals,
though nothing happens,
everything happens,
for in a time of calamity
while a nation folds in and starts to feast on its own innards,
so much blood, so little peace,
every instant of peace, every escape into music is an act of abandonment,
every poem, a deep sin, every brushstroke,
a betrayal, every silence, a wounding.
On a day as gray as this, the end of things seems imminent, Lincoln's skies are wide as the prairie, the naked eye cannot see the limits of this gloom.
I think of this novel of deep silence,
as a way not to think of those waking to bury their violently dead,
those heavy searching for a narrative
of anger to allow them to face the day. When my father died suddenly,
I sought out the villains quickly,
they kept me company for years,
they gave me anger for sorrow,
they gave me the stoic seething a son of a dead old campaigner should bear,
they gave me reason to replace
the incomprehensible. Tomorrow I will protest the infestation of guns,
but today, I sit in the shelter of this city's darkening morning
and contemplate the choices of fiction,
as in who returns the next day,
the man or the woman? I know one will not. I still can't tell which.
The Scent of the Cankerworm
Someone has promised snow — outside in the half light I can tell from the heavy sky that the air knows when the silence will come over us again, and white will blanket everything. I was not born to snowfall,
still, I have understood the metaphor of shelter and how a man, walking out into the evening after a day in shadow, can be filled with something like hope at the transformation that snow enacts — a painter abandoning color for the shades of gray and light;
the simplicity of it all, and the grand silence.
Yesterday, a man asked me what are we to do,
for something must be done. I told him to do the things he has always done, and he said it is not enough to do what he has always done, and I said I would do what I have always done, which did not please him for he wanted to change his ways,
and I thought to say, "See, there is a small pond by the roadside, what is stopping you from being dunked into a new holiness?" but what I said was nothing, I had nothing to say to him because I dared not imagine what sins he wanted to set aside, what inaction he may have regretted.
I continue to do what I have always done, knowing the old equation of our days — I cast my stones as one who may be stoned, and each day I shed the burden of regret, stand on the upturned bucket and say, "I am the least, and so I can say that beneath the muting of snow, the worms are simply waiting for the thaw." This is what I do, I keep the scent of the cankerworm's efforts in my nostrils, it is what I must do in the epoch of the mute and the deaf.
Dawn
If in the blue gloom of early morning,
the sky heavy with portents of snowfall,
the air crisp with the cold that will gather about us for the long season ahead,
you see the slick blackness of my car humming in the empty A lot; and if you see the light of the dash against my face, and notice my mouth moving like a sputtering madman's might,
and if you see me wave a hand toward my head and pull away the knit tam I wear close to the skull,
and if you see me rocking, eyes closed — then do not second guess yourself — it is true, I have been transported into the net of naked trees, above it all, and my soul is crying out the deep confusion of gospel — the wet swelling in my chest is the longing in me, and these tears are the language of the unspeakable,
"I don't believe he brought me this far, to leave me."
Chadron
There is here, the vague light of frontier — flat, even land,
no mountain in sight and all that sky; and the wind is cold here on the left edge of the state.
Next are the cowboy states —
Wyoming, Montana, Utah and those myths adored by that half-deaf tree trimmer, the motor of the chainsaw has made him incapable of applause,
as if he will collapse like a shell-shocked soldier at the shattering noise. He speaks in crusty iambics, he wants to wear boots and stomp into the blue fields to eat beef and live the gnarly life of an old hero. This land produces linebackers,
they can't catch a ball due to the wind but know how to hold onto bodies, tightly,
and crush them. I am a strange statue in the wind.
My skin darker than the earth.
My gray beard a warning against familiarity.
We leave in a light drizzle,
the pool cleaner says, "fifty em-pee-aich winds, bud,
drive careful."
Sandoz Revisited
Layered, she stands against the biting wet wind; the reservation to her back.
She is not used to the sound of drums; still, the wind has carried away from her —
the edge of blood lost to the sky. She will write her grand fictions, of tiny,
hard-boiled women, beaten leathery by the cold discipline of the patriarch father;
he of seven wives, three dying in midwinter, two disappearing in high summer, headed east, they said, preferring some Pittsburgh tenement to the cellar punishments of this big-headed Swiss autocrat. The daughter will outgrow his will,
outgrow his power to hold,
outgrow his capacity for blood;
and so, without fanfare,
with the calculation of a prospector; she leaves at the end of harvest,
for the city at the eastern edge of the state; and from there,
she enacts her vengeance with stories, blustery as the wind hurtling over the prairie, loaded with the echo of chanting,
the stick and leather of drums;
the hint of bloodletting,
the language of a lamenting tribe;
and the old man dies alone in February, the house covered in snow; the body preserved for a spring burial; in the everlasting light of a new season.
Excerpted from "Nebraska"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA 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
Acknowledgments,
I,
How I Became an Apostle,
Advent,
The Barking Geese of Edenton,
The Immigrant Contemplates Death,
Fledge,
Longing for the Hall of the Deaf,
The Midwestern Sky,
First Winter,
Loneliness,
Dark Season,
Plain-Speaking,
Novela,
The Scent of the Cankerworm,
Dawn,
Chadron,
Sandoz Revisited,
The Enemy of Memory,
The Poor Man's Sacrifice,
Bones,
Sponge,
On History,
II,
The Epoch of Lies,
Sea and Rain,
Purple,
Forgetting,
The Quality of Light,
In These Times,
Sugar,
"All Teeth and Smile",
Sniper,
Long Distance,
Prairie,
Pleasure,
The Chronicler of Sorrows,
July Fourth,
III,
On Blindness,
Insomniac,
Bed Time,
Transplant,
Surviving, Again,
Sancho Panza,
The Messiness of Place,
Ambulation,
Falling Away,
On Picking Battles,
The Exile Remembers His Sisters,
Before Winter,