[Tim Murphy]

Dave Mason takes over as guest Lariat next week, so I'll be posting a few favorite poems. Also I'll post his superb essay on Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break," over at Discerning Eye (where I've already put up his essay on Heaney and Frost.) Dave's older brother fell tohis death in a climbing accident on Mount Shuksan, and Dave has written affectingly about that terrible loss:


LETTER TO NO ADDRESS

Another winter holds the town at bay,
inward-looking as the river freezes,
dark water glazes over, and closes.
Home from work, I mark the narrowing day.

For hours this letter weighed upon my mind,
a secret hauled from underneath the ice,
kept from others till I could find a space
for lines I have no notion how to send.

The past I would recapture is a land
whose contours changed the further I moved out,
years from cedars where we built a hidden fort
and you were the scrappy leader of our band.

Brother, I want to map the old hardscrabble
places we ransacked, bluffs or high above,
leaping from stone to stone with a wild love,
the ache of play erasing all our trouble.

As boys we followed parents up the pass,
switchbacking marmot rocks through Devil's Club.
We hunkered under peaks from the weather's stab,
but storms could not prepare us for divorce.

That route, chosen without our consent,
abandoned children in a wilderness
where breaking voices met hard silences,
fear the one emotion never spent.

Perhaps to conquer fear, I followed you,
the distant older brother, when you traveled.
Like you I married, though my love unraveled
far from the woods and mountains that we knew.

And you were not a boy on that last climb.
The trouble you carried upward was your own,
the glacier where you fell as white as bone.
When I recall that instant I go numb.

I live in a world too full of elegies,
and find no compensation in these lines,
nor can they map where memory begins
its restoration under winter skies.

[Jim Hayes]

A wonderful, touching poem Tim.

Thank you.

[Tim Murphy]

Here's another of my favorite Mason poems. It will amuse all Deep Enders to know that this was thirty-six lines, and when Alan showed Dave the twenty line version, he said "Dammit! You're right."

NIGHT SQUALL

That dream again: a boy manning the bridge,
the surging, Force Eight sea, the rolling ridge
raising his bow to clouds without a mark,
slamming him down to salt spray in the dark.

One lonely cabin light would keep him warm.
Imagining a refuge from the storm,
land out there like a hand upon the waters,
perhaps a family with sons and daughters

leaning in lamplight to their evening meal,
he lends their image secret powers to heal,
granting himself this gift, as if the earth
could give a damn for his imagined hearth.

He knows no better than a bobbing gull
the forces tossing him, how well the hull
will hold, how long the engine will secure
his progress inward to some sheltering shore.

But if he'd lost his bearings in the murk,
with years he will learn a navigator's work,
steering from dread to dimly figured joy,
arriving, somewhere, like that bearded boy.

[jasonhuff]

It's a shame we can't post his long narrative, "The Country I Remember." It's a great poem. Any one who hasn't read it should run right out and pick up his book (same title as the poem). Here's one of Mason's that I really like.


Song of the Powers

Mine, said the stone,
mine is the hour.
I crush the scissors,
such is my power.
Stronger than wishes,
my power, alone.

Mine, said the paper,
mine are the words
that smother the stone
with imagined birds,
reams of them, flown
from the mind of the shaper.

Mine, said the scissors,
mine all the knives
gashing through paper’s
ethereal lives;
nothing’s so proper
as tattering wishes.

As stone crushes scissors,
as paper snuffs stone
and scissors cut paper,
all end alone.
So heap up your paper
and scissor your wishes
and uproot the stone
from the top of the hill.
They all end alone
as you will, you will.

[David Mason]

Thanks for your kind remarks. If you don't mind, just for variety I'd like to post another poem of mine--another example of work from the third (unpublished) book:

ACROSTIC FROM AEGINA

Anemones you brought back from the path
Nod in the glass beside our rumpled bed.
Now you are far away. In the aftermath
Even these flowers arouse my sleepy head.

Love, when I think of the ready look in your eyes,
Erotas that would make these stone walls blush
Nerves me to write away the morning's hush.
Nadir of longing, and the red anemones
Over the lucent rim. My poor designs,
X-rated praise I've hidden between these lines.


This is one of the few occasions when I've thought of the form I would use before I wrote the poem. My wife's name, Anne Lennox, dictated the direction the poem would take.

[A. E. Stallings]

Sorry to be tardy... I've been in the States visiting family, and only just returned to Athens. It is great to have Dave Mason on the boads (another poet with the "Greek connection"), and I've enjoyed the posted poems. Welcome!

[David Mason]

Thanks for the welcome, Alicia. I'll be back in Greece in May with a score of students. Hopefully we can connect then. My trip last September was rather rushed....

[David Mason]

Just in case anyone wonders, I tried to edit two typos in poems posted by Tim--probably my typos:

In "Letter to No Address," stanza seven, it's not "fear" that unraveled, but "love"

In "Night Squall," stanza three, it's not "granding" a gift, but "granting" one

[A. E. Stallings]

With apologies to Tim for taking liberties with his posts, I've gone ahead and made the adjusted changes. (Though there is something rather grand, if vague, about "granding a gift", come to think of it!)

[A. E. Stallings]

And if Dave doesn't mind, I'll post another poem to proofread... It has a "topical" message without being preachy, and doesn't take itself too seriously, as so many such poems do. And I love how the end of this sweeps back to the beginning, and the surprising aptness of the final image. (Perhaps I am also partial to this because am myself living in a "land that is unlucky enough to be popular".) This is from <u>The Buried Houses</u> (Story Line, 1991).

Versions of Ecotopia

God help the land that is unlucky enough
to be popular, where everyone wants the view
of islands like loaves and fishes in the west,
the seiner placed just right in the composition,
and rain is gentle as a Japanese scroll.

Perhaps you've been there, remember salmon smoked
on alder coals, or have seen the northern lights
like a drunken cloud off a gillnetter's deck,
and said, "I want to own these stars and davits,
lower my skiff each night in the same dark sound!"

Or was it you who stood inside the dike
and watched the valley heated to a griddle,
the playing field of gulls and combines, cooked
in the flying chaff? You waved your arms, shouting,
"Milkpails, silos, trucks, pallets, fog--all mine!"

Goggled, slogging with ice axe to the glacier,
you watched the comb of Heaven touch the clouds
and make them cry, the blue diadem of ice
reach forever in heart-stopping air, until
you prayed your bones would vanish in this grave.

Mountain, sound or valley clung to you
like sweat in suburbs where you worked and thought.
But others like you dreamed of the Promised Land
and schemed to have Ecotopia, whispering,
"There's more than one way to skin a madrona tree!"

For those who always lived there it was dull
as drive-in movies and hot cars, until
the heroes of development had built
a bit of Phoenix by the oyster beds,
a Trumpish tower downtown, L.A. at the fringe.

As slaughtered buffalo disturb our dreaming plains,
a rainy fish smell lingers in Ecotopia.
At night the plaid giant rattles his axe
and growls in Swedish, up to his neck in muck
where the tall, unbarbered forest used to be.

You find yourself in unexpected traffic,
pressed in a narrow shoal of weeping lights,
looking through the rain for an exit sign,
and thinking of an old scroll you once saw
rubbed to nothing by a billion loving hands.