Stobb - Absentia

Table of Contents

Nervous Systems

In memoriam

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors of the following publications, in which many of these poems were first published: American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Jacket, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, MiPOesias, OCHO, Oranges & Sardines, Phoebe, Poetry Flash, The Offending Adam, Southwestern American Literature, and Touchstone.

Some of these poems appeared in a limited-edition chapbook of desert fragments entitled Artifact Eleven (Reno: Black Rock Press, 2011).

Some of these poems appeared in a downloadable chapbook for mobile devices entitled Pointless Channel (Goss 183, 2010).

Special thanks to David Krump, who read many drafts of many of these poems.

No road in 1960, so they dragged the cabin
across ice, installed it after thaw.
Forty years later, sun- and wind-tired,
four children lounge in front of satellite television.
Four parents, old friends, stand at the windows
of a screened-in porch, trying to gauge
a reasonable level of concern:
against heavy northerlies, four-foot swells,
a motorboat struggles to pull a sailboat
back to harbor. Eight p.m. Boats barely advancing.
The two men hunkered in the hull
friends? brothers? afraid?

We put the children to bed.
When we come back out, the boats are beyond us.

As if looking down at something
shining in deep water, we view our former selves.
The solstice sun pinwheels along the northern shore
and day extends beyond our supply of wine.
Riding persistent wind, the lake grows louder.
Finally overtaken, I try to turn in
but cant find quiet inside, either.
I read by flashlight about a woman
who emptied herself for passages.
What requires me channels through.
My thoughts return to the two men,
probably drinking at a bar, telling their brave tale
or dreaming through the crest and trough
their bodies are slow to surrender.

After three, I drift back to the porch
to see the sun skim the northern rim.
Winds calmed some
but the agitated lake still hacks at the beach.
This place seems impossible.
The expanse of water, frenzied or frozen,
too great an obstacle.
Thinking toward the furthest reaches of my life
I watch starlight bounce away from the chop
many precise trajectories
woven above the surface of the lake.

I wonder if I am awake.

Then our youngest cries and late dissolves in early.
The last look I gathers a gray field punctured
by the peak of another first sail out of harbor.

Wheeler Peak

To canyon crevasse and sun
wheel spun under a million
visible stars unsuspecting
voyagers are called
to disintegrate and report back.
One used a pocket knife
to saw where his arm was crushed
beneath a boulderdescended delirious
a glacier to camp where
his belongings had already been burned.
Saved he said gradually everything
splinters. A sleepless teenager
I stepped into night wanting
to live soon, here.
I didnt imagine this overstimulated
prone to drinking
near tears drifting toward
sleep beside my five-year-old.
Silver field of his tummy hairs
shimmering in strange
night-light auraby attending
I would merge and by merging
rebuild civilization in me.
Settlers to this country
pushed rickety carts across
deep time through
their own bodies to geology
beyond West inside.
Desert peak teetered up by cooling
surface stretching to fault and rift.
Ten thousand years
a grove petrifies on the ridgeline.
Polished by elements at some elevation
I grew up. And away.

Harsh and consoling, deeply roaming
final precincts of oblivion and trials of encounter.

Neither unbounded singularity nor dread
of solitude, best known unmasked,
we emit organized sounds in the shape of X.

There is no complete echo.
There is no free animal.

Three roads meet between Thebes and Delphi.
Conduct springs from wells deeper than
a private tongue refusing any relation.

Inward eye to purchase wider than.
Peregrine toward waking
the persuasion of our fiber.

Our condition is stranger.

I ended up talking with a young botanist
who seemed a little lost at a bar party.
Id recently seen the bristlecone pines at Wheeler Peak

and he listened as I described the hike:
the strange entangled trees clinging to granite
and the stump of the dead Prometheus
once the oldest living organism, cut for research.

He walked away. I worried
Id bored him. I lingered at the edge of other
conversations. A bit later

he came right to my shoulder.
More visible in the bar back lantern glow
his face a figure eight between lamb chop sideburns,
eyes set apart and flush on mine, assessing

he handed me a small envelope
with something like a cylinder inside.
I couldnt believe what you were saying, before.

I just returned from Japan where I visited
Great Sugi of Kayanono exaggerated sagebrush,
Sugis a hundred and sixty feet tall.
And at seven thousand years old,

hes earned the status of a priest.
Commoners and emperors alike approach him
with questions about their lives.
I went to see the old master
but met a protective barrier. Why had I imagined
I would touch him? Thwarted,
I felt the mystery of my journey fading.

Then standing there with my head hung low,
I noticed scattered sprigs that could only have