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I've always said that the more psychically difficult the
poem is to write, the more likely I am to choose a difficult pattern to pound
it into. Paradoxically, the difficulty frees me to be more open and direct.
In "Afoot in Grays Point" the critical yet fascinated "I" (and eye) of the poem is
walking through an upscale gated community in Miami. The quatrains are
metrically exacting; lines 1, 2, and 4 are in trimeter. Line 3 of each stanza
has four stresses instead of three. The second and fourth line of each stanza
rhyme. Such self-imposed constraints are a way into the subject matter of the
poem—the contrast between these privileged lives—as orderly as the
stanzas—and the lives of those on the outside, served at a safe remove by
Miami Rescue Mission. At the same time, I confess that there is a strong
element of play here, a self-directed game rather like solving a Double
Crostic.
"The Long Marriage," a poem of nostalgia and foreboding,
while not tightly rhymed, adheres to a more or less metrical pattern of
short—dimeter or trimeter—lines, dropping down to even briefer lines of
one accent ("the door," "before") toward the end. Sounds of the language are
as important as the sounds of the jazz; shifting vowels ("sweet jazz,"
college days / spool over") and bits of consonance and alliteration ("dark
lake," "sobbing slide") are intended to intensify the mood of the music.
Afoot in Grays Point
Without a single peep-hole
through the crimson blare
of bougainvillea, she jogs
the empty street, voyeur
peering down private drives
through iron gates, to keep
secret watch how heavily
the freighted houses sleep
and as the day grows brighter
how cobalt blue the bins
curbside for cardboard, plastic jugs
junk mail, newsprint, and cans
how jauntily Green Meadows
Landscape Care, three palms
a freehand frieze on the panel truck
shatters the sunrise calm.
How Zephyr Hills thereafter
succeeds the mowers' pother
hiking natural spring water from
one shoulder to the other
Miami Rescue Mission
following close behind
to suck up a scuttled desk beside
a television gone blind
in which she sees reflected
a bank of cumuli
which shift as she approaches, while
a single dove nearby
tests the newly sheared
and pesticided lawn
then breasts the stuccoed wall that keeps
the golden people in.
The Long Marriage
The sweet jazz
of their college days
spools over them
where they lie
on the dark lake
of night growing
old unevenly:
the sexual thrill
of Peewee Russell's
clarinet; Jack
Teagarden's trombone
half syrup, half
sobbing slide;
Erroll Garner's
rusty hum-along
over the ivories;
and Glenn Miller's
plane going down
again before sleep
repossesses them . . .
Torschlusspanik.
Of course
the Germans have
a word for it,
the shutting of
the door,
the bowels' terror
that one will go
before
the other as
the clattering horse
hooves near.
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