Wrigley - Earthly meditations: new and selected poems

Table of Contents

ALSO BY ROBERT WRIGLEY

LIVES OF THE ANIMALS
REIGN OF SNAKES
IN THE BANK OF BEAUTIFUL SINS
WHAT MY FATHER BELIEVED
MOON IN A MASON JAR
THE SINKING OF CLAY CITY

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First published in Penguin Books 2006

Copyright Robert Wrigley, 2006

All rights reserved

Selections from Moon in a Mason Jar. Copyright Robert Wrigley, 1986. Selections from What My Father Believed. Copyright Robert Wrigley, 1991..

Selections from In the Bank of Beautiful Sins. Copyright Robert Wrigley, 1995. Selections from Reign of Snakes. Copyright Robert Wrigley, 1999. Selections from Lives of the Animals. Copyright Robert Wrigley, 2003..

Page 175 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Wrigley, Robert, date.
Earthly meditations : new and selected poems / Robert Wrigley.
p. cm.(Penguin poets)

ISBN : 978-1-4406-2721-7

I. Title.
PS3573.R58E17 2006
811.54dc22 2006043275

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NEW POEMS

Slow Dreams

All my life I have been bothered by them,
these glacial enactments and thickened plots,
these head dense molassical happenings,
all plodding exposition or instant, endless crisis.
In my daughters dreams whole civilizations fall,
entire oeuvres jet from the pens of poets
as they pass across her patient dream screen,
from their mothers breasts to the corner
of Westminster Abbey in an eyes rapid blink.
Here comes the sun announcing not whats next
but never is. I want to say, O Mother, why
that bloody knife in your hands? Or you, naked
stranger, what were you about to do? This morning
my daughter announces that my granddaughter,
who does not yet exist, was last night elected president
of a country where only women ride horses,
and this after the war between the last two
believers in Godwhen she stops and asks me
what of my dreams? what worlds have I seen?
what miracles and vast historical tableaux?
And as always I sigh, and dredge it forth,
some paltry, not even anecdotal sliver:
the way paper waves gusher off west and east
from the archetypal mouth of a scissors;
the tome of unclench, the very continental drift
of a single kiss beginning to end;
my own utterly familiar hands approaching me,
coming straight at my face and filled
with water that no matter how long held
never completely spills. My thirst.

Testing the Cistern

The meadow there turns almost bog, and over years
Deer Creeks licked half a dozen oxbows broad
and slow to tussock and sedge, and now even
the dainty-footed does mire down and slog.
Coyotes learn a leaping ford or two,
go by hummock or hump of stone. Therefore,

four whole days, early fall, I cleaved through
the basketry of grasses and hacked a mudhewn pit
large enough for the two hundred gallon plastic tank
drilled with a hundred holes and fitted
near the bottom with a flange and outlet pipe
Id sliced the shallowing trench to from the cabin.

After the electric pump and the spigot pipe up
through the floor, there was nothing to do
but wait for water, for spring, for today.
And here it comes, spattering into the sink
the color of weak tea, and bearing in its froth
one jet leech, and a long-tailed, soon-to-be toad.

Religion

The last thing the old dog brought home
from her pilgrimages through the woods
was a mans dress shoe, a black, still-shiny wing-tip.

I feared at first a foot might be in it.
But no, it was just an ordinary shoe.
And while it was clear it had been worn,

and because the mouth of the dog
a retriever, skilled at returning ducks and geese
was soft, the shoe remained a good shoe

and I might have given it
to a one-legged friend
but all of them dressed their prostheses too,

so there it was. A rescued
or a stolen odd shoe. Though in the last months
of the dogs life, I noticed

how the shoe became her friend, almost,
something she slept on or near
and nosed whenever she passed,

as though checking it to see if,
in her absence, that mysterious, familiar,
missing foot, might not have come again.

For One Who Prays for Me

I do not wish to hurt her, who loves me
and who asks for me only every blossom and more,

but in fact, when I say God I mean the wind
and the clouds that are its angels;

I mean the sea and its enormous restraint,
all its fish and krill just the luster of a heavenly gown.

And while it is true there are days when I think
something more must be in the wind than air, still I believe

the afterlife is dirt, but sweet, and heavens coming back
in the lewd, bewhiskered tongue of an iris.

The River Itself

It takes him a week, maybe nine days,
he cant remember now, moving upriver
all the while, and mapless, making
the judgments others before him had made
meaning no tributary streams, no east, west,
south, or north forks, but the river itself
and then the lake in the higher mountains
and the largest of its inlet streams,
the pond, the brook, the tule-thick tarn,
the rivulet and horsetail waterfall, all the way
to the man-sized final slab of melting ice
stoppered in the gash just north of the peak
that goes by the same name as the river,
from which he calls hello, hello to the rain.

A Photograph of Philip Levine, on the Brooklyn Promenade, May 2000, Lower Manhattan in the Background

Arthur Lieberman, the cousin in Levines poem,
turned to watch the days last light subsiding
over the East River and suffered... what?
An attack? a premonition? His son, falling
to the Manhattan streets on Black Thursday, 1929.
It was coming and no one knew. Garca Lorca and Hart Crane,
said to be in the room, did not know their ends either.