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.