Read an Excerpt
Standoff
Poems
By David Rivard Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2016 David Rivard
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-941-6
CHAPTER 1
GREENWOOD NIGHTFALL
I miss myself most
these days with friends
I feel a distance from
when talking to;
but for the moment
I get to stand here
clear-eyed & cold
inside the murderous
machinery of our birthright —
I get to breathe the thin air
all have had to breathe
these past two hundred years,
not the oxygen
we dreamed of, that
hothouse air. In the telenovella
based on my life
tall prairie grasses bent
by an Alberta wind
would sprawl snugly
I've been told
behind a woman vaulting
in blue pajama bottoms.
Does any of this have
anything to do with me
at all? Nightfall,
nightfall without giggles
or binary code —
greenwood nightfall —
that's what calls me now?
LESS THAN, MORE THAN
Where am I going today
if I'm going anywhere at all
without my soul,
that bird with its unreadable, unheard name
having wandered off again,
convinced that it is more than just a word —
do we travel far from each other today? —
me in my pre-owned Mazda
with my radio full of wasps' nest news,
my Peshawar & my Rupert Murdoch,
all my guilty Murdochs —
my destination
like a homestead made of
fallen maple leaves,
the three leaves that form a tipi
tipped together
by a 5-year-old's hands,
a dwelling place,
where if I wanted to
I could rest my human rights
while my soul
travels far from its base, lost for a while
on its own highly privatized trip,
the idea of living forever
an idea that is not an eternity at all
for my wanderer
but a wish the bird has
to fly brocaded by herself
within the borders of a tapestry,
far from some witch queen's cackle,
far from that witch
who has disguised herself as a sparhawk
woven out of dark thread
by a Flemish peasant's hands —
how far is too far, you ask? —
a little foolishness
goes a long, long way, I'd say;
a lot drops dead
in its tracks.
SAID
I fed my father what
as it turned out the future
would call his last meal
(tho at the time neither
he nor I was required to
think of it that way exactly) —
ground chourico & chopped
green pepper open-faced
on a burger bun, french fries,
a cupcake with icing almost
chocolate in flavor — alarming,
a departure from his diet
of low-sodium, zeroed-out
trans fats & sugar-free
vegetables with high fiber-
scores, suffering as he had
been for years from barbarian
cholesterol & geriatric
diabetes (the nurse shrugged
simply & said "why not?" —
meaning of course that
we should get it, all of us,
he was going to die,
and soon). A few loose
chitters of ground sausage
fell onto his johnnie
from the fork I lifted
to his mouth — they left
tiny, paprika-red dots
of oil on the sheer cotton,
prussic red, corpuscle red
like the small scabs my sister
and I had left on his face
while helping him shave
the day before. A week earlier
I had visited him at home;
the day an unusually warm
day in a March unusually
cold. He was telling me how
he'd gone out into the yard
to get some sun only to return
minutes later to the house,
the wind far too strong —
he said he'd worried that
if the wind took his hat
from his head, he might
die while chasing it.
I made a joke — forced to,
I thought — chasing a hat,
I said, that might be
a better death than most,
I said maybe the death
certificate would read "killed
by the wind." He laughed
all right. You know, he said,
you've really got a lousy
sense of humor. Better than
nothing, I guess — (did he
say that, or did I think
it?). Later he said ... he'd said
earlier ... then I said ... he
said ... I said ... I said ...
I said. ... Say now that
this might be all that's left
for consolation, this
might be love at the end,
the confidences exchanged —
all these pratfalls, & this
skin chapped by a blade,
and your willing servant's
shaky hands, then a short
trip to be washed a last,
finally blameless time
(so the scriptures say)
in the blood of the lamb:
a smell like the smell of
sweetgrass burning crosswise
the length of a dry plain
and sent by a wind whose
swiftness has in it the bright
voices of kindergarteners, children
born of a hardship town.
BIRTH CHART
to Simone
Wandering off under those astrological signs
charted just for you, my quiet trekker — all
those houses & planets so perfectly straight-faced
but still baffling at birth — don't think badly
of me when I'm dead & you've gone deep
into the distance of love tangles, moneyed
interests, & old-fashioned commutes — into life
in other words — I did what I could for you, knowing
it might not be enough — I see now that I can't
save you from suffering, & that trying to hurts
if I'm not kind. Tho I still want your life to be
untroubled, & am afraid for you, a fear made
out of my own fear of a future I can't control —
the world so often a human heart that eats itself —
places like New Orleans the Swat Valley Fukushima —
the names of those remote destinations for film crews
and symposium panels are places people die
native to those regions & out to kill or defend
life from itself — there is so much misery there
that refuses to call itself misery & that sees itself
instead as the unimpeachable power of a righteous day.
And there are criminals & dunces elsewhere —
hideous partyline whips, Saxon in outlook
and proud of it — there are the bodysnatched
and the inane candy-stripers & the greedy
and the martini narcissists high on the rising year —
but let's take the long view: these are not
your true companions, & out of my reach your
life will make itself in struggle & love perhaps
dependent on the strength that will come
if I only let go when you step out the door
as hazel-eyed now as always & maybe more so
this morning in slate-gray Gore-Tex.
SWERVER
She was born for
the pleasures of swerving
and with a courage
as impractical as it was
necessary
beneath a harsh lightbulb
in some Alberta hotel,
not to play the fool
or push a hangman's cart.
She remembers
how summers there
had the excitable, slipshod languor
of strip poker,
but that winter snapped
like a brown rat trapped & frantic
in a wooden cage, a cage
she'd last seen flying through dark smoke,
her father having flipped it
with one furious hand onto a bonfire.
So it goes with
the impossible —
at 16 you think yourself
a connoisseur
of the inner-life for sure,
tho you're allowed
an occasional glimpse of the world
and how it looks
to others — 10,000 colors
in the skin of an apple,
and not one of them red or green —
name one
and the future might
open for a moment in spite of all
your evil speculations.
She remembers her mother
drowned the ticks in a mason jar
after they'd been pulled
from the garrison dogs,
the jar half-full of machine oil.
The first boy she kissed
spoke of superhumans & died later
of a brain hemorrhage.
She remembers all of this later.
Later —
after much statecraft had taken place,
and days that passed
like the sound of swan's wings in the fog
whenever she sat
by herself at a foreign picnic table.
RYE WHISKEY, RYE WHISKEY
A switchyard walk at twilight —
waiting for the freight cars
to rattle past & the wheels to melt a penny
I've placed on the rail — an experiment in transformation
widely available to homeschoolers —
study of the thousand & more hurts that need
to be endured, an unspooling infinity of such, in support
of so many changes.
You can't explain transience
to a child otherwise,
or the purpose of our momentums —
i.e., friction:
even in water
a rubbing away occurs
during the wanderings of a jellyfish,
swirling & round, tendrilled
for filtering, & highly capable
in currents swept along long miles
of Norse beachhead —
on every beach
the iodine tang of red seaweed,
and cormorants
spreading their wings to dry, putting the squeeze on,
pompous, but getting lighter & more nubile.
Once you've learnt in childhood
that the world is built
out of shiftings & abrasions
you see how
you'll have to make allowances —
so I can't forget
the smell of my grandfather's freshly perked
Maxwell House just after
he'd poured a jigger of rye
into his mug,
and how it kindled the morning air,
pleasantly,
but with consequences.
PLAY SAFE
Thinking of
Dean in Austin,
new heart in his chest —
old heart beached on some larkspurred Viking coastline —
in seclusion
2-3 months so
his immune system can get
corrected & reset —
if I write him maybe
I should put the sheets of paper & envelope
in an oven prior to mailing the letter,
all the pathogens & microbes
stunned, baked sterile at something just below
Fahrenheit 451 —
what else, rub sheets readable with Purell? —
"play safe" says
the graffiti tagged
on the mailbox
nearest my house, under
a magic-markered & defanged mouse drawn
with translucent condom pulled
over his head all the way down to ankles,
wide punchline smile
on his face,
put there by the minx-
cast spell of some no-nonsense
jeune fille —
Dean is no mouse tho:
dear retrofit friend
on a street
where 2 mismatched shoes got left
at the entrance
of some dark quayside alley,
right-sized
just so a live man twice
as alive
with a dead man's
heart
can walk on now.
TAKE IT ON THE HEEL
Whatever else might make itself
available, some nightlife
takes place solely within the nutshell
space of the mind —
March 6th, it's a beer garden
for worriers
desperate for peace,
where street sweeper & bounty hunter alike
take a hike for company
and brewed bat's piss —
the Manchurians know nothing of Munich,
neither do Manicheans,
but plenty of them know waking at 3 a.m.
with unleashed thoughts,
a pack of hounds on your heels
until you tire out the dogs,
fall back asleep —
what's it all for?
Honestly, do I really think it makes
me a better person
to lie there dope-slapped by past mistakes
or anxious for getting
right with some future I imagine
looming? —
no, I gave up on that long ago —
it's the quarrelsome
blind man inside
my feelings,
gone out for a stroll, obsessively needy,
taking it on the heel.
DON'T
Don't doubt it when the core samples prove
how pleasing it would be to be woken by a baster's
rain at dawn, cool grass wet with the benign.
Your tormentors are yet to be born, or fell asleep
a millennium ago. Your beauty is the beauty
that does not dispense with struggles — it wears
loafers the color of gun-metal, a face full of
second thoughts, eyes you'd like to believe
are supernatural. Agreed: aspiring to eyes of a color
not found in nature is very lace-curtain Irish,
and you do resemble one of Yeats's twilight boys,
the walk cold from counting house to pub,
the Easter Rising over — but the purpose of your days
isn't simply to meet cute, it's to be changed.
We inherit a marshalling yard full of dark freight,
but the track switches work. How much of whomever
you are after all is who you were when you
were the stony theologian of Westport Harbor?
Maybe in a quiet moment in the backyard today
you'll look at a spray of tea roses leafing out
and hear the rain inside them whenever a breeze
blows. Don't let possibility go away in pain.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Standoff by David Rivard. Copyright © 2016 David Rivard. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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