At Times Read online

  AT TIMES

  New and Selected Poems

  BROOKE HORVATH

  Seven Stories Press

  New York • Oakland • Liverpool

  Copyright © 2020 by Brooke Horvath

  a seven stories press first edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Horvath, Brooke, author.

  Title: At times : new and selected poems / Brooke Horvath.

  Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2020] | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019056444 (print) | LCCN 2019056445 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609809836 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781609809843 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3558.O7274 A8 2020 (print) | LCC PS3558.O7274 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056444

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056445

  College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com, or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

  Printed in the USA.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Arion: “Stag Hunt.”

  Free Inquiry: “Hoarding,” “Redbud,” “Reincarnation,” “Still Life with Lamp and Dogs,” “‘Team Up with Jesus,’” and “The Three Great Ideas of Yacouba Sawadogo.”

  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment: “Notes on a Wren,” “Refugium,” “Walking the Beach,” and twelve sections of “Snapshots of China.”

  Paterson Literary Review: “Rainouts.”

  Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. Michigan State University Press (2019): “I Thought We’d Never Get Over That First Album.”

  Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics: “Definition.” Rpt. The Prose Poem Project. 2010. Web; and rpt. An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Firewheel Editions (2009).

  Sewanee Review: “Courtship in Wartime,” “Job’s Dream,” and “Prejudice.”

  Snapshots of China. Chapbook. Published by Bunchgrass Press (2015): eleven sections of “Snapshots of China.”

  So It Goes: “The Driveway” and “I Should Have Been a Painter.”

  Vocabula Review: “Connect the Dots.”

  Poems in the first three sections of this book are taken from In a Neighborhood of Dying Light, included in the chapbook anthology Men and Women / Women and Men, ed. Laura Smith and Larry Smith (Bottom Dog Press, 1994); Consolation at Ground Zero (Eastern Washington University Press, 1995); and The Lecture on Dust (Bottom Dog Press, 2007).

  I wish to thank James McAuley of Eastern Washington University Press and Larry Smith of Bottom Dog Press for their advice and many kindnesses in years past. I also wish to thank the editors of the following periodicals and chapbooks in which many of the poems taken from my previous collections first appeared: Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, American Literary Review, Antigonish Review, Antioch Review, Apocalypse: Defused or Deferred (chapbook published by the Poets’ League of Greater Cleveland), Artful Dodge, Boulevard, Calapooya, Cornfield Review, Denver Quarterly, Doggerel, Elysian Fields, Free Inquiry, Great Lakes Review, Greenprints, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Jawbone, Key Satch(el), Listening Eye, Lyric, Michigan Quarterly Review, Minneapolis Review of Baseball, Missouri Review, Now in Age I Bud Again (chapbook published by the Poets’ League of Greater Cleveland), Ohio Poetry Review, Our Voices Heard (chapbook published by Planned Lifetime Assistance Network of Northeast Ohio and Cleveland State University), The Plough, Poetry, Poetry in the Parks (chapbook published by Music in the Air / Columbus, Ohio, Recreation and Parks Department), The Prose Poem, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Sewanee Review, Sparrow, Spitball, Sycamore Review, Tar River Poetry, Texas Review, Tikkun, Unreconciled Passions (chapbook published by the Poets’ League of Greater Cleveland and Spaces Gallery), Wascana Review.

  At Seven Stories Press, Lauren Hooker treated my sometimes sloppy manuscript with great care and good humor, and Noah Kumin cheerfully pretended that my answers to his questions were helpful.

  I am grateful as well to my friend Maura, who gave me good advice for free.

  Finally, my sincere thanks to Dan Simon, who knew I was a pain in the ass to work with but was willing to take a chance on these poems because, like David Markson, he believes that “every boy should have a book.” I owe Dan many drinks.

  CONTENTS

  from In a Neighborhood of Dying Light (1994)

  The Woman in the Peter Pan Collar

  A Matter of Trees

  True Answers to Sincere Questions

  In Ohio

  Forcing Bed

  What in the World Were We Thinking Of?

  The Man with the Ax

  Domestic Violence

  Snapshot with Flowers

  Detroit Drops Two to Cleveland

  Bringing Stars Home

  Weathering March

  Why I Like Baseball

  from Consolation At Ground Zero (1995)

  The Smallest Cowgirl on Clark Street

  The Doll

  The Closet

  Posing

  Abrasion

  The Weed Puller

  Christmas Eve

  Mother and Child Reunion

  For Paul Pack, Manager of the Little League East Ohio Vending Team

  The Color of the Iris

  “The Bag of Life #38”

  Accademia: Florence

  Piazza San Marco: Venice

  Wild Poppies

  Cook’s Tour: Rome

  Tomorrow We Discuss Cottonwoods

  Evangelist with Child

  A Mary Haggadot

  1. The Annunciation

  2. Adoration of the Shepherds

  3. Madonna of the Paintings

  4. Landscape with Saint John

  5. The Crucifixion

  6. Christ Appearing to His Mother

  7. Death of the Virgin

  My Girl

  In the Neo-Natal Intensive-Care Unit

  Three Dead Birds

  The Encyclopædia Britannica Uses Down Syndrome to Define “Monster”

  Arkansas Funeral

  Alopecia Areata

  1. No Other God Before Me

  2. Sins of the Father

  3. Every Hair Is Numbered

  October Frost

  December Tulips

  Hello

  Christmas Morning

  Where Shade Comes Down

  A Dream of Stillness

  Poundian Conclusion to an Otherwise Ordinary Day

  Lake Glass

  Children in the Bedroom

  The Fourth Fact

  Consolation at Ground Zero

  from The Lecture On Dust (2007)

  The Lecture on Dust

  Reading the Tao

  Open Heart

  Reading The Gingerbread Man with My Daughter

  My Grandparents’ House

  July 5th

  Leaving the Neighborhood

  Robbing the Dead

  The Green One

  Plastic Fantastic Lovers

  The Man Beside Me

  Stir-Frying

  Winding My Watch

  A Penny for Her Thoughts

  Shining My Shoes

  H
omeless Man in Mom’s Open Kitchen

  Paying the Rent

  Physical

  Vacationing Without You

  Interview with a Suicide

  Shoshaku Jushaku

  Calling Time

  Berry Picking

  Young Woman Caught Reading in an Easy Chair

  Riddle

  A Cardinal

  One Tuesday

  Poem Interrupted by Lack of Light

  The End of Modernism

  The Bull, the Dog, the Horse

  Men Playing Catch at the Beach

  Shekinah

  Ararat from the Flood

  Spring Night in Kent, Ohio

  The Leonids

  Weeds in Winter

  New Poems

  Prejudice

  Reincarnation

  (Un)Sexy Mearns

  Stag Hunt

  The Six Four Emotions

  History of a Shirt

  I Should Have Been a Painter

  Dying to See You

  Refugium

  I Thought We’d Never Get Over That First Album

  Spite

  Definition

  Old Tools

  The Three Great Ideas of Yacouba Sawadogo

  Two for Ko Un

  Snapshots of China

  “Team Up with Jesus”

  Job’s Dream

  Notes on a Wren

  Redbud

  Because of the Snow

  Still Life with Lamp and Dogs

  Courtship in Wartime

  Hoarding

  Walking the Beach

  The Driveway

  Political Poem

  Möbius Strip Poem

  Not with a Bang or a Whimper

  A Dove

  Two Robins

  Connect the Dots

  Leaf Squirrel

  The Man at the Dump

  Rainouts

  Notes

  Index

  For Ginny—

  Comforter and confidante

  forgiving conscience

  refuge, lover, truest friend

  Frank Lima sure was right when he asked, “Why write?

  Since the highest enjoyment is a kiss.”

  “At times . . . I wanted to be a poet.”

  —hermann hesse

  from

  In a Neighborhood of Dying Light

  (1994)

  THE WOMAN IN THE PETER PAN COLLAR

  It is 1953, and my mother stands,

  in a calf-length woolen skirt,

  red cardigan, white cotton blouse,

  smiling down at her blue-blanketed

  one-month-old. Behind her lies

  a stack of lumber piled on dirt

  that will stay dirt four years

  before becoming grass, and behind that,

  a cement-block foundation

  above which rises a roughed-in frame,

  the house my father, grandfather,

  their friends and neighbors

  are building for her, for me.

  The sun is bright; she squints

  toward the camera, trying to smile,

  not knowing how long it will take

  to raise a house (that once finished

  will be too small too soon) or a son,

  who once grown will betray

  his immigrant roots to run away

  and hardly ever write, forgetting

  even the names of relations,

  yet who will come to waste his time

  obsessively fingering Ektachrome clues

  to what once was and what,

  once once, can never be again.

  A MATTER OF TREES

  Sometimes it’s just the sound of words

  and their positions on the page, read

  with a quiet violence, leaving a stain behind.

  As when the weather turned cold

  and the black walnuts fell, how

  we gathered them, grandfather and I,

  our fingers dyed brown and browner,

  how one time we entered a field

  the theme of which was sheep,

  some dead (some dog) some not.

  It was upon the dead the accent fell,

  the magical horror—a matter of trees

  and windy silence like the sound of Ohs

  and the odd positioning of bodies,

  like the exact word in the right place,

  each walnut in its place, its place

  the grass, now the basket,

  bringing them home for squirrels

  to winter on. Buried them mostly,

  the squirrels did, as farmers

  their sheep—or whatever farmers do

  with sheep the dog has ravaged,

  leaving their eyes like blank verse,

  the dog returning to the field

  to scan a line of scarecrow trees.

  TRUE ANSWERS TO SINCERE QUESTIONS

  The window fan turning

  brings in a night

  of listless mosquitoes,

  lobbed noises, cooling air;

  street ball gives way to darkness,

  final innings, returning fans.

  In the park the sycamores

  are hung with locust husks.

  Sandwiches have grown funny in their wrappers,

  the Nehi a last fizzy swallow of foam.

  Ants run across the lazy boy’s bare arms;

  his girl has grown brown.

  The engineer across the street,

  home early, uncoils hose

  across his burned-out grass,

  examines shrubbery,

  considers cutting back the hedge,

  curses a kick ball in the peas.

  He vows never again pole beans,

  maybe never again a garden.

  In his hot room

  the teenager gets ready for a dance

  in the popular girl’s backyard.

  His tight jeans not tight enough,

  long hair not long enough,

  before the mirror he tries on shirts,

  tries not to sweat,

  steals album cover stances,

  and contemplates himself.

  A mother calls her children;

  hide and seek is not for her.

  Three baths, then quiet for awhile,

  a little drink, TV, bed.

  Her husband wishes his oak would die,

  taking its acorns with it,

  leaving garden space.

  A radio cheers briefly.

  Infrequent couples walk down the ill-lit street.

  Someone shoves a wagon off the sidewalk;

  it rattles loudly, stops in grass.

  Moonlight paws the bushes, climbs the trees.

  Factories let out

  onto silence.

  Cigarettes glow,

  then grow apart.

  The second shift goes home.

  Up the street a car door slams,

  bass rumble, soprano giggle.

  Upstairs, my wife and daughters sleep

  damp beneath cotton sheets,

  legs snaking, seeking coolness.

  Five minutes in the dark downstairs

  behind the latched screen door I stand,

  watching, wanting, satisfied.

  IN OHIO

  I

  He walks across his fields

  careful of meanings

  impressed by thunder

  silent in the rain

  through tedious tractor afternoons

  dreams of bumper harvests

  and of drought

  of corn-green rows well tended

  picking up a clod of dirt

  he worries it to soil

  listening to the land

  speak its leafy language

  then cuts a melon tapped for days

  before it answered, Ready

  waiting, eating, which was better

  he couldn’t say

  II

  Dusk, and crickets come alive

 
cornflowers glow

  with fireflies aflirt above them

  as fields grow dim

  then fog, and nothing

  save fog

  and through it, crickets

  crying for love

  closing his eyes

  he sees the still corn growing

  half-asleep, thinks

  I love this as the fish the pond

  through the night, crickets

  waking, he hears them

  until the fog lifts

  from morning’s fields

  FORCING BED

  She wants the beans out early

  to see them stretch, break earth, and climb—

  grumbles at two planned rows of radishes

  which neither of us likes

  soon they’ll clot the ground with white, hot roots

  that will crack, spring seed, and rot

  but I plant anything that does its growing underground—

  potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets—

  private, misshapen, dirty

  taking time, not

  dangling in the air from stake-held strings

  * * *

  She loves to see creation forming

  persuasively in the humid air

  swaying, green

  I need to know it’s happening

  in the ground beneath me

  fretfully, unseen

  WHAT IN THE WORLD WERE WE THINKING OF?

  Today we wore shorts and rugby shirts, sunglasses.

  We sat beneath a sycamore on an old quilt

  and drank iced tea from Dixie cups.

  Our socks and shoes got tossed beside the picnic hamper,

  the ball gloves, and the kite

  as we risked bees about their business in the clover.

  Later, we lay as still as possible,

  neither thinking nor talking,

  while a killdeer cried out in the blue above us.

  A cool breeze blew, but the sun was hot.

  We got too much sun, fresh air,

  so that now you keep nodding off beside me on the couch

  waiting for the late movie to begin,

  leftover chicken still uneaten on your plate.

  A year from now we won’t recall today

  any more than other harmless summer days

  that passed without any souvenir save sunburn—

  days we keep like ticket stubs from summer comedies

  that go forgotten in a shirt pocket

  until run through the wash and lost.

  Photographs of days like these seem pointless,

  our early summer legs so white they glow

  against the sycamore-shaded green.

  When was this? Why did you take this? you’ll ask.