POETRY MONDAY: September 7, 2009

 POETRY MONDAY: September 7, 2009

 

JAY UDALL

Jay Udall’s poems and short-stories have appeared in many literary journals, magazines, newspapers and anthologies.  He is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Welcome Table, published this year by the University of New Mexico Press. Born in Washington, D.C., the sixth child of parents he describes as “an environmentalist politician and an arts activist,” he taught at community colleges and worked as a legal aide on behalf of Navajo uranium miners pursuing compensation from the United States Justice Department before completing an M.F.A. at New England College.  He is now a
Visiting Lecturer in writing at the University of Nevada.

Here, for your pleasure, are three new poems by Jay Udall.

                                              
                                                                                 Irene Willis
                                                                                 Poetry Editor
                                    

  

   Company

   The dying man sat among us
   as we talked of politics, the weather, ourselves,
   waiting for the turkey and the ham,
   the blueberry muffins and scrambled eggs,
   though sometimes we remembered
   to draw him in, a near stranger
   invited to share Easter,
   no one else to have him.
   He smiled and asked for red wine,
   filled his plate, ate better
    than he had in weeks, he said,
   then fell asleep in the passenger’s seat,
   his head leaning on my shoulder as I drove him
    to his empty house.
 
   Three nights before my mother died
   she made us carry her out to the living room
   to visit with those who had gathered.
   Exhausted from pain, dreaming on morphine,
   she kept falling asleep, we kept pleading,
   Don’t you want to go back to bed and rest?
   Her eyes, voice went knife-clear:
   “No. Not with such good company.”
   The Hostess, the way she’d always lived
   for other people, through other people.
   But the next day, shedding her
    self like a worn-out dress, she said,
   “Maybe next time we’ll have our own galaxies.
   All of you are a little much.”

                       
   Timed Dive

  I can’t remember where we are,
  but my big brother Scott keeps diving
   down through blue
  to crouch on the bottom
   in a corner of the deep end
  and hold his breath as long as he can,
  timing himself with the diver’s watch he got
   one summer of steel bands, coral reefs, painted fish–
  the best summer he will ever have.
  He stays down there longer and longer.
  I swim and swim till I tire of it,
  then sit in a sunny chair, watching him
  through the wavering surface
  as he studies his watch with the same stiff face
  he’s worn since coming back from basic training,
  black sunglasses still hiding his eyes,
  his near silence now complete inside the water.
  Eight years old, I want to go home.
  He’s here to say goodbye
   before leaving for the war.
    He’s leaving, crossing the border
  into Canada, sinking
  alone where he can’t say, mouth filling
  with black, breathing it
  as he falls
  through, watching
  his mirrored eyes spin.
  With a borrowed name
  he’s returning
  to our distances,
  trying to kill himself
  by driving off a bridge, surviving
  to hear the court martial judge pronounce
  him a disgrace to family and nation.
  He’s shattering our windows
  with his boots and fists, screaming
  in a locked bathroom he wants to cut
  off his cock, taking the pills
  they say will help him, but he will
  never come up, we will never get home.
  I rise from my chair, turn and leave.
   Diving where I can’t see, I reach and reach.
  

    What Remains

   To the keeper of tenantless lots,
   shadows and lost names–the one who stays
   through every going, returning
   in what is left–I give this papery light
   at winter’s far margin,
   I’m given blurred and lucid faces flickering
   on an intermittent screen.
   Uncle John, Aunt Charlotte–eternally gone!
   Yet again.  Four, six years?  Tricks of mind–
   these feet sleepwalking over vacancies
   toward some vestigial heaven projected
   from the private, third eye of the past.
   “Don’t look back,” says Satchel Paige, laughing
   as he leaves with Orpheus and Lot’s wife.
   But then the tenderness–like someone reaching
   through me–when I touch the shoulder of the man
   whose dog in sheer spring exuberance on her way
   to the park flew from the car window,
   catching her leg on the door, twisting
   to somehow land under his own back tire
   that crushed her skull, spilled her brain on the road.
   Forever highway.  Where do the dead go 
   but in?  I follow the stains slowly
   fading through asphalt skin, transparent
    pages, and find a carnival starting
   up in the trees, the company
   of shuddering wings, dandelions
   spangling dirt below an eye-searing sun.