Marchant - Said not said: poems

Note to the Reader on Text Size where water seeps in from the pasture above, a dank air that rushes toward We recommend that you adjust your device settings so that all of the above text fits on one line; this will ensure that the lines match the authors intent. If you view the text at a larger than optimal type size, some line breaks will be inserted by the device. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a small indent. Also by Fred Marchant Poetry Tipping Point Full Moon Boat House on Water, House in Air The Looking House Translation From a Corner of My Yard by Trn Dng Khoa (Co-translated with Nguyn B Chung) Cn o Prison Songs by V Qu (Co-translated with Nguyn B Chung) Editor Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 19371947 Copyright 2017 by Fred Marchant The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law.

If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks. Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-773-3 Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-966-9 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 First Graywolf Printing, 2017 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951420 Cover design: Kyle G.

Hunter Cover art: Peter Sacks, from the Codex series. Courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery. for Stefi & James Carroll Use your head, cant you, use your head, youre on earth, theres no cure for that! Samuel Beckett

So why bother with it, let it go, this business of deciding if, or how long, a string of words should take to stretch across a page, or float, as if weightless, or reach down like a priest who after listening to your list says you are forgiven. This is not something for a grown-up to worry about, nor is it for anyone who votes, or is listed demurely as head of household . Nor is it your question for today, not after you have, in traffic, followed a purple flag to a grave where inches down in East Providence, RI, a yellow backhoe has revealed a layer of vivid red clay. The workmen who loop the straps under the coffin are whispering, wondering if the seal remains true.

In this question they are like the priest who, upon finishing his Prayer for the Dead , offers remarks on the poet by which he means the psalmist, that singer who, though he knows better, insists: when I call, answer me, God .

How do you write about a cough? How to hint at the sound of it? A cough that was odd , not from a cold, or something else you catch. I think now it was the sound of what was eating away my sisters mind. I first heard it at our grandfathers funeral Mass. I was seven and thought she should just quit it , stop bothering me, and everyone. Howard , her life spent on William A.

Howards farm, Howard the short form for what was originally the Asylum for the Incurable Insane. How the gentle Pawtuxet stream flowed past, and how I composed a song she could sing under her blanket: O bless this sweet layer of wool, bless my warm halo of heat. How the illness clutched her by the neck, tossed her up and let her go, and in the second before she landed, how she thought she might escape, could drift away like smoke from a long drag on her cork-tipped Kool. How the sound of the rust-bucket trawler named Memory followed her wherever she went, its iron nets dragged across the floor of her being, the silt clouds and debris fields, a stern winch sounding a lot like pain. How she ached to have them examine what they pulled up there, some of it thrown back, some saved in the ice-hold: a few scaled creatures to be studied in the labs, their weird antediluvian appendages, their would-be limbs. How rage at times so transformed her face I was sure she and Nero had gone fishing in the lake of darkness, and me, I had become the sane but cleverly gibbering Edgar hiding in the hollow of a tree.

Howard , a downbeat, and off beat, a first note in the music we heard when the kitchen knife found its home in her hand as she reached in the drawer. How the legal involuntary moved in and imposed itself because the great orange snowplows out on the mid-winter highway were trying to run her down.

To her I was airy sunlit ice, a comet tail, in an elliptical once-in-a-while orbit, a vague portent, a streaky omen, with nothing much to say anymore, just the rest of my self-comforting ditty. Bless the blanket over her head and under her feet. Bless the hands that weave the thread. Bless the sheep they sheared it from.

Our father, meaning to protect me, said it would be good for me to visit and see this , so Id know, so I would know know know how not to end up here or there or wherever Howard actually was or would in my life someday be. I too wanted to give that place and her a world of berth, the Xmas visits all I ever had to do really, just get a box with stick-on ribbon, some CVS shampoo, wrap it in paper printed with holly, candles, Victorian joy. An hour in the Howard parking lot, my father and I signing her out to the backseat where she opened what we brought her, a chocolate interlude, an engine idling, the heat on. Our spot outside her own red brick How and her wherefore Ward , decked out year after year in the tinsel and the garlands of disordered thought. Howard , our one and only name for the world headquarters, the genuine article, real deal skit-so-free-nee-ya , its live-in campus to the left of the cornfields, just off Rte.

Her last day on the planet she thrashed and spit while the nurses tied her wrists to the bedrail with strips of cloth that only worsened what was happening. Her last day on the planet she thrashed and spit while the nurses tied her wrists to the bedrail with strips of cloth that only worsened what was happening.

Her face was radiant, her whole being flush from the long struggle with those she knew she should never have trusted. They tried to keep track of her vitals, charted her erratic heart, peered into her cranium with a flashlight through the eyes. She said they had taped a death-line to the port in her arm. They said she should believe in the plastic tube at her nose, that it would fill her lungs with good clean air. She shook her head as hard as she could, got her whole body to say nope, thou shalt not , no way, nothing doing, thou shalt not touch me . Not with the elbow-bendable straw adjusted to the lips, not with the insidious needle pointed upward and dribbling over.