Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781884800955 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Four Way Books |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2009 |
| Series: | Stahlecker Selections |
| Pages: | 72 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
WHAT THE RIGHT HAND KNOWS
By Tom Healy
Four Way Books
Copyright © 2009 Tom HealyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-884800-95-5
Chapter One
A LABOR OF MOLESMy tongue remembers when I first tasted dirt and knew the thing was no longer to see myself digging, but furiously to dig. CHORUS OF ANIMALS And on that farm, the pitch and fever of pigs singing cut by the crack and thud of a .22 pistol when we shot and slit them, boiled them in barrels. Here a warble, there a hiss of geese davening in the yard, chasing dogs, pinching children until we snapped their necks and stacked them in a freezer. Here a whimper, there a wailing of cats begging milk, coiled, wild and frightened, stuffed in feedbags and drowned in the pond. Here a bellow, there a moan of arthritic yellow cows, dry, too old, pushed and dragged to a truck to the dog food factory. And on that farm, an auctioneer comes chanting Ee-i-ee-i-o. Here, there, a story abandoned- tractors, all the animals, the sofa, the car. And on that farm, a family broken in empty June, here, there, no one singing Ee-i-ee-i-o. THE ANESTHESIOLOGIST'S KISS He was the first man I knew with hair on his face. I remember his beard almost covering his lips, then mine. I remember white cotton. He held my chin and pressed gently. I tasted tobacco and rain trickling past the soft fears of a five-year old into the sturdy home secrets become. Oh, little rose. Drift away. ALARM Excuse me, I said. My room is on fire. I'd been watching the flame a long time. A nervous little dog sniffing the wall until it found a spot where it dug and grew. The spark turned mean and I turned cold. I went down in slippers to a table of trouble, the family dinner I wasn't having. This time I smiled while they ignored me. Excuse me, I said, and bit hard into the rage of no one listening then took my slippers out into the snow. DEAD RECKONING With the day still dark and unbegun, full of readiness to bleed, I stood here every morning and commandeered this small hill just out of shouting distance from the house to call cows home for milking. And every morning a solitary heron panicked and rattled up and out of fog at the pond's edge into that stand of trees past the border fence where thunderclouds of lilac were bulldozed one summer for the neighbor's new, metal-sided barn, where one Sunday I walked in on him standing in a wheelbarrow fucking one of his heifers. I was a boy and I claimed this small hill, calling cows, failing as her child. MILK-TRUCK DRIVER He looked like a dwarf and walked like a goat. He pissed in the gutter and was hung like a horse. He pranced then stood and shook his mule, handling himself like a winning ticket. Hunger was wired tight to his eyes. His teeth flickered- blue-starting flames. His face danced red. I was twelve and yellow. We were standing close to the end of time. He spoke and I answered I'd be back in a minute. His eyes turned glassy with doubt. But his hand still rocked, calmly and glad, while I fetched my brother who came with a shovel. He spat at the man-who screamed-and he beat him. So much blood. But, oh, don't cry. OH, HI DAD I thought I had killed him. But here he is, come to life so quickly, despite the scarce crop of talk, how long words went hungry, the distance I'd driven to dump his memory. But here he is, the fruit of famine, an alphabet emptied of ice or apology. Look where it comes! Here he is. Taste and eat. Smile and wave. LOCAL OR STRANGE They took the journey they'd talked about, a Sunday drive on Tuesday. They took lunch, took pictures, took pleasure shaking their heads when either lifted to light the moth-flutter of a neighbor's forgotten name, wondering whatever happened to her, to him, the stories they'd fled. Their past looked small, almost comical and frail, needing them more than they were willing. But they left it there, both mother and son surprised to settle for making it ordinary, going back at safe speed to a landscape invented before safety-but now too safe-maneuvering along edges, the simplest geometry of return, only tracing circumferences, marking the boundaries of field and shelter. And they left watching their remembered selves waving, as farmers do, whether cars are local or strange. MURMURATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS I find you in places I haven't attempted, places where I hold a stranger's hand. I am a stranger. No one has hands. How things should be- foolish, impossible, workable enough. As our mothers' sons and almost mothers to each other, we've learned to nest the twig, wattle, binding of words, into safety- as if some small wound has healed. We almost taste the scar.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WHAT THE RIGHT HAND KNOWS by Tom Healy Copyright © 2009 by Tom Healy. Excerpted by permission.
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
A Labor of Moles....................3Chorus of Animals....................4
The Anesthesiologist's Kiss....................6
Alarm....................7
Dead Reckoning....................8
Milk-Truck Driver....................10
Oh, Hi Dad....................11
Local or Strange....................12
Murmurations in the Wilderness....................14
What the Right Hand Knows....................17
My Orbit....................20
Laments and Riddles....................21
Living on Someone Else's Money....................23
You Two?....................24
An Act of Forbearance....................26
The Green Street Mortuary Band....................29
Mirror, Mirror....................31
Phocion's Wife....................35
Zoo Story....................37
Doors Should Always Swing Into a Room....................38
Gioconda on Seventh Avenue....................39
Among the Missing....................40
The Peacocks of Cuernavaca....................44
The Only Fruit....................45
Learning to Land....................47
The View from Here....................51
The Metaphysics of Being Well-Mannered....................52
Body Electric....................53
No Fear of Fire....................56
Table of Spiders....................58
Voodoo....................60
For Rent....................61
Beekeeper....................64
Here and Now....................65
A Possum Entering the Argument....................67
What People are Saying About This
“The electric immediacy of these poems is an assault on silence, a gunshot fired across the bow of genteel decorous well-mannered lying and silence. At times, but seldom, they give us something sharp-edged but more comfortable (e.g., a portrait of Lauren Bacall choosing fruit). I love how everything here ‘haunts us with choice.’ This is a superb book.”
"A wave of spontaneous greeting and implacable fluid motion breaks over these remarkable poems. Stirring up the ironic riptides of Stevie Smith, Vergilian /Georgics /and Catullus, the wave is revelation: 'the necessities of rescue and surrender.' If 'Pindar said there'd be horses in heaven,' Tom Healy imagines a flawed paradise here on earth--each poem an earthy lyrical miracle-- 'our salt and work--/ the stubborn questions/ we endlessly/ give names to.' /What the Right Hand Knows/ is, like Giotto's, a perfect circle, 'the shape of astonishment.' This is an utterly brilliant and uncommon first book, a voice like no other."