Michael Harty
This month’s poet has a background that should be of considerable interest to our readers. Michael Harty grew up in Texas, where he attended a small rural school through the twelfth grade and published his first poem when he was about nine years old. Humbly, he admits that it was in an outdoor magazine published by a friend of his father’s; nevertheless, his early interest in poetry was genuine. In the past decade he has published upwards of thirty poems in print in various publications, and now has a chapbook manuscript in preparation.
During the intervening years he was busy studying psychology at Trinity University and the University of Michigan, where he obtained a Ph.D. ; he then spent eleven years as a staff member of the Menninger Clinic and trained in psychoanalysis at the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis. Soon afterward he began the private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that he has continued to the present. In Kansas City he has been active in establishing a new psychoanalytic training program, the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute, of which he was Director for seven years and where he now serves as a Training and Supervising Analyst and teaches seminars.
How, readers may wonder, does poetry enter into all this? Here is where it gets really interesting. Michael Harty tells us that, although he had written a number of professional papers, he let his writing lapse for a time after entering private practice. His interest in writing was rekindled in the past decade, however — this time with an emphasis on poetry – largely due to the New Directions Program of the Washington Psychoanalytic Center, a three-year program from which he graduated in 2011. It was during that time that he began to submit his poems
to journals, (and now to us), with the happy result you see in the first paragraph
above and the three poems we share with you today.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Jackknife in Your Jeans
You knew it was there
in the front pocket, right there
with the quarter for lunch, the nickel
for a Milky Way – you carried metal undetected,
unsuspected, free to come and go. You knew
the bone polish of its flanks,
honed burnish of its blade:
spit on the whetstone, rub circles
to perfect the edge. Remember
the tidy heft of it, how you gauged it
just right to make it turn
once and a half in the air, stick
between your buddy’s feet. No fear
unless some greasy stranger
two years older, still in your grade,
flashed a danger-blade six inches long,
snick-click and you imagined
bloody slash, tight circle jab-dance,
hold on, this is way too serious. Stick
to the friendly corner of the schoolyard,
a practice place. Maybe the principal
came out in his shirt sleeves
to show you a trick. Across the way girls
might turn from their jacks and jump-ropes,
whisper something new and old, something
you needed to grasp, but that would come
later: time on your side,
room in your pocket,
the blade folded away.
Belatedly
All through the war
a silent understanding,
Daddy was away but
he’d be coming back,
they’d all be coming back
and so we could play on,
Japs and Germans falling
by the hundreds in our side yard
and when the lady at church
turned away with red eyes
it was some grown-up thing
we didn’t need to notice.
And it came true
for a while, we were whole again,
riding the forever wave
like the family in the next block
whose boy my age
forgot and chased his ball
into the street. That year
I started to believe if I searched
faces carefully enough
there would be a sign
and I would know
beforehand
which ones would be lost.
Barrel Knot
Poke it through the eye
of hook or swivel, double back,
form a loop; pull it snug,
nip it close – bite and spit
as my father did, as I do, or clip it
as I taught my son; still
the knot’s the same, always the same
in wood-bottomed rental skiffs,
dented canoes, houseboats awallow
in lily beds; by weedy farm ponds,
green Texas lakes, a waterfall
chiseled in the high meadow,
a Black Hills beaver dam.
My hands tie it as did theirs,
back and back: on a weekend pass
before Okinawa; on the spring-fed Pecos
in the twenties, smallmouth thriving;
unnamed muddy bayous before that
and the green spot beyond memory
when a peasant’s son sick
of rotten potatoes broke the landlord’s rule
and dropped a hook in the Shannon.
Father and son and father, each yoked
to one before, the stringy molecules
of our y-chromosome entangled
with fishing line. We remember
the knot and tie it again each time
the long patient picking-apart is done —
perplexity of line resolved,
the open water waiting.