NIGHTFISHING

The kitchen's old-fashioned planter's clock portrays
A smiling moon as it dips down below
Two hemispheres, stars numberless as days,
And peas, tomatoes, onions, as they grow
Under that happy sky; but though the sands
Of time put on this vegetable disguise,
The clock covers its face with long, thin hands.
Another smiling moon begins to rise.

We drift in the small rowboat an hour before
Morning begins, the lake weeds grown so long
They touch the surface, tangling in an oar.
You've brought coffee, cigars, and me along.
You sit still, like a monument in a hall,
Watching for trout. A bat slices the air
Near us, I shriek, you look at me, that's all,
One long sobering look, a smile everywhere
But on your mouth. The mighty hills shriek back.
You turn back to the hake, chuckle, and clamp
Your teeth on your cigar. We watch the black
Water together. Our tennis shoes are damp.
Something moves on your thoughtful face, recedes.
Here, for the first time ever, I see how,
Just as a fish lurks deep in water weeds,
A thought of death will lurk deep down, will show
One eye, then quietly disappear in you.
It's time to go. Above the hills I see
The faint moon slowly dipping out of view,
Sea of Tranquillity, Sea of Serenity,
Ocean of Storms . . . You start to row, the boat
Skimming the lake where light begins to spread.
You stop the oars, midair. We twirl and float.

I'm in the kitchen. You are three days dead.
A smiling moon rises on fertile ground,
White stars and vegetables. The sky is blue.
Clock hands sweep by it all, they twirl around,
Pushing me, oarless, from the shore of you.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg


[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited July 17, 2001).]

Mac, thanks for posting! My favorite by her, I think.

For those who don't know her work, check out "Supernatural Love" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Andrew, thank you very much for posting this gorgeous poem, to which I shall make riposte. Alicia too has written a fine poem about fishing with her father which all the world may read in Archaic Smile:

Fishing

The two of them stood in the middle water,
The current slipping away, quick and cold,
The sun slow in his zenith, sweating gold,
Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her—
She’d rather have been elsewhere, her look told—
Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight falls
And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
Life and death weighed in the shining scales,
The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

But here’s something extraordinary. In the seventies Suzanne Doyle wrote a poem about fishing with her father, and while it lacks the deep image and polish of Gjertrud’s and the easy mastery of trope in Alicia’s, it might be the most powerful poem of these three beauties by three remarkably gifted women on a common theme.

Where The River Meets The Sound

The river is a mirror three miles wide,
Where our white wake cuts out a crescent moon
That rides upon the gently rising tide.
We anchor and we fish, while some old tune
Of love gone wrong floats on the air.
Shrimp, pink as my own thumbs, as big around,
On weighted lines rigged with a double snare,
Sink in the summer waters of the sound.
Such sweetmeats, Father, set to lure
The common spot and croaker to our hands!
In brotherhood unspoken and obscure,
I hold the hissing lantern while your knife
Splits belly after belly in its turn
And wonder what cold, ancient monstrous life
Would not be drawn to coiling round the stern?
We wash our hands and pack up for the night,
Slinging the guts in water warm as blood.
The engine turns, the beacon blinks its light
And I keep watch behind as if I could
Defend us from Leviathan’s attack.
Sunk in the brine, the silver blades now beat
A brilliant phosphorous spoor out of the black,
A million worlds exploding at my feet,
Wild beauty in the violence that we share,
And then this darkness, darkness everywhere.

Suzanne Doyle is alas, not in print, but a handful of her poems may be found in the anthology A Formal Feeling Comes (Story Line Press).

Dear Tim,

Thanks for posting Doyle's lovely poem, and for posting mine. Nice to be in such excellent company!

I used to joke at readings, re "Fishing," that it belonged to the popular genre of father/daughter fishing poems. Little did I know... Maybe there's an anthology in it (or at least there should be of fishing poems, of which there are so many excellent examples...)

There does seem to be an odd thing with women and fishing poems, for some reason. I think also of Elizabeth Bishop's.

Interesting tangent!

Alicia

Well Aliki, as long as we're doing fishing poems, here's one of mine, surely the very antithesis of the aforementioned very serious and accomplished poems:

To A Trout


I whet my hook
beneath a pine,
then with a swish
I loft my line
over a brook
of sparkling wine.
Come little fish
and we will dine.


--Timothy

I like some of Schnackenberg's poems, but not
this one. I don't see the polish---to me, the
verse seems lackluster, a little awkward. I
much prefer Alicia's and Suzanne Doyle's. I've
seen other good things by Suzanne Doyle and it's
a disgrace that she's out of print. Anybody
around here who has a press currently idle?

Here's a little thing of mine that was meant
to be a fishing poem and ended up just At Night
and By a River. (It came to mind a week or so
back when someone on another board was asking
whether one could have different meters in the
same poem etc. I would have said, and would still
say, that in general one should not mix metrical
and nonmetrical verse (an abomination seen very
often nowadays, although probably unconscious on
the part of the writers). But then I remembered
this poem, which begins with easy pentameters and
suddenly, near the end, drops the meter before
picking it up again. (It doesn't sound at all
abominable to me, although it certainly was un-
conscious on the part of the writer.)


OF THE POWER OF THOUGHT

The rain falls like an army, clattering
on the thin plastic tied to four trees
for a flimsy roof, though not to be despised.
We watch the drenched pines through a veil of water
and wait, feeling left out, as it gets dark.
It rains hard all evening, I can hear it
even over the hiss and crash of the river.
Curled like a toad in my clammy bag I wish
I was home, at my desk,
dry clothes, pen, paper,
old typewriter under the warm lamplight--
and here I am.

Schnackenberg has written some gorgeous formal poetry, but the most recent stuff of hers I've seen is not formal and quite dull. Does anyone know what's up with her generally?

Having recently read Paul Lake's vampire novel, I would suggest that maybe someone's been schnacking on her...

A.S.

Bad Alan, BAAD. Sam Gwynn reviews Schnack in the brand new Hudson Review's Poetry Roundup (ride, cowboy, ride). He acknowledges that she's gone to hell in a handbasket. Of course our own Master of Memory veered into free verse before returning to the formal fold--triumphantly. But that was in the sixties, and the only reasons I can see for following such a course now are 1)laziness or 2) advancement in the po biz. Still, Sam expresses the hope that she'll wake up and redeem her early promise.

I've enjoyed much of her work. But I recently bought "The Throne of Labdacus" and have to say I haven't been able to really get into it. Some nice lines (free verse), but in stasis, like mosquitos in amber. (This may partly be because the whole thing is in present tense--which frankly, in my own quirky view, does NOT lend itself well to narrative.) Perhaps it gets better. I'll have to try again. Still, am not sure if we need a retelling of Oedipus, or at least not a book-length retelling.

Of course, the book-length poem does seem to be all the rage these days. Perhaps it is just that my attention span is too short...

There is a nice section on the alphabet entering Greece, tho.