The Collecting Jar

The Collecting Jar

Rob Hardy

Grayson Books

West Hartford, Connecticut

The Collecting JarCopyright © 2005 by Rob HardyPrinted in the USA

Winner of the 2005 Grayson BooksPoetry Chapbook Competition

Grayson BooksPO Box 270549

W. Hartford, CT 06127

www.graysonbooks.com

ISBN: 0-9675554-9-3

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To Clara

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Acknowledgments

“Cicadas” and “Packing the Creche” appeared in The ChristianCentury. © 1998 and 1999, The Christian Century

“River Bend,” “Entomology,” “Instructions for Silent Prayer,”and “You Were Never in the Army” appeared in 33 MinnesotaPoets, ed. Monica and Emilio DeGrazia (Nodin Press 2000).

“Instructions for Silent Prayer,” “Aeneas,” “Essentialist Poem”and “Index” appeared The Comstock Review

“Substitute Teaching,” “Lodestone” and “In a Japanese Room”appeared in English Journal. © 2002 and 2004 by the NationalCouncil of Teachers of English. Reprinted by permission.

“Beethoven’s Seventh, 1978” appeared in The North CoastReview

“Food for the World” appeared in The Black Bear Review andwas reprinted in Whole Terrain.

“Small World” appeared in The Black Bear Review

“William Cullen Bryant” and “Daywings” appeared in ISLE(Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment)

“Essential Love” appeared in Essential Love: Poems aboutMothers and Fathers, Daughters and Sons, ed. Ginny LoweConnors (Grayson Books 2000)

“Falling” appeared in Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge: PoemsAbout Marriage, ed. Ginny Lowe Connors (Grayson Books2003) and in To Love One Another, ed. Ginny Lowe Connors(Grayson Books 2002)

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Contents

Acknowledgments · vi

Cicadas · 1Ladybug · 2Entomology (Will’s Poem) · 3Instructions for Silent Prayer · 4Aeneas · 5Beethoven’s Seventh, 1978 · 7Food for the World · 8In a Japanese Room · 9Essential Love · 11Small World · 12Substitute Teaching · 13Lodestone · 14Essentialist Poem · 15Falling · 16Index · 18Girls’ Night Out · 20Morning · 22You Were Never in the Army · 23Expanding Universe · 24William Cullen Bryant · 25River Bend · 26Daywings · 27Packing the Creche · 28

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Cicadas

Slit down the backlike a plastic change pursefrom which the cicadahas withdrawn its body’s glisten,the dry shape still clingsto tree bark, pompeiian,surprised by self-eruption,a mold into which one might pourmolten insect.It rose in body like heat,its high-tension dronedisembodied in the air:song of buzz-saw and drill,as if August werea season under construction,a scaffolding of dry skinon the trees, the sky at duska blueprint for fall.Somewhere there has beena resurrection,but the only sign I haveis this calloused husk,an abandoned housewhose inhabitant has goneto attend the miracle.

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Ladybug

To Joyce Sutphen

delicate lacqueredpushpin headout of nowhere,

enamelledjewel-box escapeeembossing

the window-pane,skating daylongon the undersideof light,

candy-coatedwing-sheathesreluctantly giving way

to blackspasms of flight:

when I openedyour book,a ladybug

flew uncrushedfrom the margins,as if

that’s exactlywhat poems do

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Entomology (Will’s Poem)

You came to a place where the woods, you said,were pulsing with trees. Later, coming upon a pairof grasshoppers immobilized in their stolid mating,

you told me that they were stacked like bunkbeds.I sit for hours waiting on metaphor, like thosegrasshoppers, paralyzed by the stubborn urge to create,

while you leap about in language, discoveringfor the first time the pure ecstacy of words. Thisis what I stopped to think. But you went to find a jar.

The grasshoppers looked so vulnerable, locked in theirsecret knowledge, as if sex were an instinctive surrenderto death, but you thought only of the supreme pleasure

of bug-collecting, their pale-green bodies uncouplingunder glass. Like you, I often feel the urge to encloseevery natural act in some clear container, a poem,

something to remember by. You came of such an act,such a longing to compose myself into somethingseparate and new, something I can no longer contain: you.

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Instructions for Silent Prayer

To Heather Moody

There is nothing more natural, the caterpillarsays, than to give birth to oneself—to pull the chrysalis from your body’s ragged sleeve,folded in a glistening transparent stillnesswhile a deeper grace wings itself within.It looks painful: skin split and contracting,this straight-jacket escape, the body peeled awayto its volatile core. We never become lessphysical by such decrements and involutions,only more spiritual. What the body teaches usto love becomes the spirit’s cargo, wingsspread to gather up the body in benediction.

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Aeneas

To my Father

I went downtown last night with Mother and Ellen. We got you a pairof gray pants at Edwards. They are a gray check. You may think theylook a bit loud when you first see them, but remember that clothes don’tlook as loud when worn as when off. They are a fine pair of pants andI’m sure you will like them. We also got you a literal translation of theAeneid. Let us know how it helps out.

—Letter from my grandfather to my fatherat Cornell University, October 19, 1948

You were never loud, only worn and gray,something passed along to us at birth, incidentalarticle of parentage—or so we always thoughtwhen we saw you translated into a dead languagein our midst. Your epic was a series of smallupstate towns—Ulysses, Hector—allusionsin the landscape to some heroic faithfulness,some checkered fabric of loss and hopefulness,something not always appreciated at first sight.

How often the miles bled from your heart,the highway your martyrdom, the landscapeindifferent behind its scrim of rain, kept awakeby the self-flagellation of the windshield wipers.You came home to an absence that grewuntil your return no longer filled it.

Exhaustion rubbed the nap from your easy chair,wore away all the surfaces where we touched—we watched you erode. If you were Odysseus,where were your stories? There was no Circe,

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no suitors, no Sirens: only the radio turned uploud enough to keep you awake behind the wheel.

There was no war. We never went out to find you.

We never understood your sacrifice, alwaysexchanging love for duty, that estrangementwhich we could never see as the price of yourdevotion. If we seem to turn away, it is onlybecause you have given us this road, far-flungsparks of smouldering Troy’s self-consuming fire.

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Beethoven’s Seventh, 1978

A pressed metallic iridescenceis not the same as the rainbowetched in black vinyl, unravellingto a smooth, repetitive silence.A part of my life was mappedin diamond dust, grooved latitudescompassed with sound,where I slid easily into belonging.Now I long to return to that placetwo and a half inches inwhere the Allegretto beginsand the needle rides soft wavesof abraded sound, like the shuffleof hands rubbed together for warmth.That surface noise was my longingtattooed into the music’s whorled skin,or my own fingerprint rubbingagainst something eternal.

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Food for the World

My mother never said there were childrenstarving in Africa. My mother fed the world.She carried the gross national productof Third World countries in her grocery cart,sailing like a frigate through the well-stockedaisles, archipelagoes of fresh produce,geopolitical cuts of meat, the artificial arcticof the frozen foods. Syrofoam bargesof ground beef thawed in the lock of herkitchen sink. She peeled the latitudesfrom potatoes as big as moons, quartered,gibbous, orbiting planetary roasts crateredwith crescents of garlic. We grew as wideas continents while the cupboards emptied outwith extinctions. My mother’s cart rolledrib-cage bare through the distended aisles,past starving children reaching from the shelves,their poor bodies drawn up empty like string bags.

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In a Japanese RoomMinneapolis Institute of Art

I say, slow down and look.I want him to seehow a painting creates focus,distance, and a source of light,how we are drawninto a moment alwayson the point of dissolution:the knife poised abovethe cake, the child readyto blow out the candles,the last instant beforethe smoke and the crumbsand the disappointment.Look at the father, I say, his facea blur of thick strokes,an abstraction, a black suitstanding in the doorway.

How would I paint them,these colorful groupsof first-graders swirlingthrough the galleries,excited to find that beyondevery room is anotherand another room, alwaysleading back to a placewhere they have already been?I know this will only happenonce, this moment,perfect as it is,when we find ourselves

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in a Japanese room,under the dark, carved beams,where the furniturestands in the foregroundof a paper screensuggesting tranquil mountainsand light, voiceless birds—an uninhabited spacewhere life is always an art,so uncluttered of everythingbut what we imagine it could be.

Outside, the city, the traffic,the fifteen schoolbuses,West Twenty-Fourth Street,and not a single tranquil mountain.I want to tell him, stay,because I will fail you,because I will never be perfect,and God knowswhat you will think of me.But he hurries on, just happyto be with his Dadat the museum, lookingforward to a picnic in the park,to the world of smoke and crumbs andwhat comes next.

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Essential Love

Place the palm of your handflat against your cheek,push outward againstthe insidewith your tongue—this is how it feels, onlysmoother, tighter,rounder. And you knowyour tongue’s a tongue—but what’s this?An elbow? A knee?In another darkness you beganwith familiar contours,a specific fondnessfor the sweet curveof a jaw, the softinside of a thigh.From these known shapesyour touch adjuststo a shared darkness,feeling out the intricate loveyou have shapedbetween yourselves.But to these kicksyou extend a general love,a love which requiresno other definition.Birth will complicatethis love, too, with details—but for now it simplyis.

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Small World

Peter asked for clay.All summer he built himselflittle chairs, tables,a drawbridge for his fortin the backwoods, dreamingof a bigger worldwhere he could build housesbig enough to live in,big enough for everyone.Happiness was a hammerin his hand, saw and nails,everything fitting togethersnug and square. Hisseven years had given himstrength and skill enoughto piece this much together.He asked for clay,and made himself a modelof the trade center towers,a place where he had never been.He made them, he said,for remembering:things small enough to hold,like the small white pawnstaken from a board, the toy-sizedcity of ghosts left standingat the foot of his bedwhile he sleepsand sometimes dreamsof picking up his hammer,and of what he would build.

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Substitute Teaching

Nothing I could write is as beautiful as you.For you I put out the flower of myself,and you likewise cannot help but blossom.There is nothing more natural than the flourishwith which you open into the world,petalling outward in the profusion of yourselfas if radiance were the simplest gift.Even the girl on the playgroundwho sits alone with her knees to her chinis a bud of great hopefulness, the centerof her own creation. She knowsthe best thing is to be wanted, and the miracleis that she will blossom so many times,resiliently reaching sunward for her placein the world. It is the same for me,coming each morning to a differentset of lesson plans, graphing myself to the arcof your upward growth: for you I am flowering again.For you I have had to relearn everything but love.

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Lodestone

In eighth grade geoscience,the boys and girls identifyminerals by their streak and lustre,their hardness, heft and cleavage.A girl holding a piece of magnetiteasks another girl, “Whenwas the first time it happened to you?”and a boy at the same lab table asks,“The first time what happened?”The girls give him a dirty look,and lean in close to whisperwhatever it is that both of them know.A boy can’t identify the streakand heft of their conversation,only that the mineral in her handis iron, magnetic, and possiblythe meteoric trace of life on Mars.He knows it attracts. And girls,he knows, are metamorphic:or are they igneous, crystalsfrom some earthen fire, some deepflow of magma, somethingvolcanic that gives them lustre,cleavage, and a certain hardness?

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Essentialist Poem

S is seductive,sidling up,sibilant, softening he,who turns away,who thinks he can make iton his own.She eases into things,sifts and settles. He only haltsand takes what he needs.The shape of S is pregnant,sustaining, seeing both sides:spin S and she survives,symmetrical.S makes she the subject,insists on plurality,lives in the present.He objectifies, puts S last,makes ithis.

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Falling

for Ruth and JasonAugust 23, 1997

You already know about love.You fall in love. Falling is easy. Maybe you don’tsee it coming. Maybe you brace yourself against the wind in the

door,see the earth circling belowand jump. Falling is easy. It feels like flight.You feel your kinship with clouds, with light,stuff of stars, atoms that float and fall,meteors, stars that still glowwith the start of everything.You raise your arms like wings. Butterflyor belly-flop. You feel the earth expanding—don’t look down. Reach for the cord.Falling is easy. But is this loveor gravity? Pull the cord. Yes—love blossoms from the weight you carry,the question, the tug at your heart.The parachute pops like a cork.Now you float in the arms of the atmosphere,milkweed floss, dandelion seed,no longer afraid to take root in the earth—but still floating a while, ecstacy and trust, your high-altitude heart settling back into a steadier beat,the tilt of the earth, seasons and days.But here you are floating—buoyed by invitationsand arrangements. Now you look down.The ground looms like a date, circled for a landing.The fields look like RSVPs. Your feet touch. The parachutefalls around you like a wedding dress.

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You’ve landed together. Dance while the earth steadiesbeneath your feet. Hold each other up.Now you will walk together into ordinary days.Your parachute may become a maternity dress, a mortgage,a tissue for your tears. It may be divided into diapers,waterproof sheets, a layette, stories to tell your grandchildren.Days may come when you forget how it felt to float.But still this moment of landing lives inside you,when the touch of the ground felt like a vow—I will always be there. I will catch you if you fall.

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Index

“Finally, I am indebted to my wife, Jane Anne,for much help with all phases of the book,especially with the preparation of the indexes.”

—John T. CurtisThe Vegetation of Wisconsin (1959)

mornings, September,New England astersand stiff goldenrodmap the old fields with pollen,conjuring prairiefrom the sandy loam,flares of sumac in the draws:

look up the flightof the waxwing overhead,seeding the grasslandwith juniper,spores of migrationtaking root,collating the prairieand the pine forestnorth to south,

and you will findJane Ann Curtiswith her index cards,retracingher husband’s footstepspage after pageinto the undergrowth,among ephemerals

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dying back into shade,and sometimes stumblingon the accidental poetryof how the worldcomes together:

fern, sweetfernsfidelity

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Girls’ Night Out

No matter how much I scrub or cook,housework is never alchemy enoughto grant me temporary change of flesh—I’m always the admirable chimera,never resolving into my grosser parts,or never escaping them. The facts arethe facts. Our flesh genders usfor different conversations and sexbecomes untranslatable, nuanced as it isby the experience of our bodies.A conversation about bodies themselvescan mean different things in and outof the idiom of desire.

In short, I’m left alonewith the rhythm of the second handrubbing the clock toward midnight,rounding to the nearest solitude,nudging me closer and closer to myself.Poor boy, with no story to tell of his firstperiod and likewise never knowingwith men how to begin a conversationunless about a tool I need to borrow.Could I get together with your husbandsand talk sensitively and with humorabout our first ejaculations?It’s not the same somehow, as if there werepoetry embodied in your moon rhythmsbut not in the rough earthsongs we forcefrom ourselves.

Go sing yourselves backinto bodies and blood. I can only tune myself

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to her body’s hum, skirling out pleasurelike a round, becoming completewith a voice sounding above and below.

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Morning

I’m not myself until I’ve had my coffee,but the brown campesinos still complainwhen I measure them into the coffee grinder.It’s too early for this.For God’s sake, I was kept awakeall night by the screams of the dark-skinned woman in my closet who was peelingstrips of her own flesh to cobble into shoes.All I want is peace in the morning—not the pleading of ordinary things to considerconsequences, only the stillnessof the thing itself, the smooth earth-and fleshtones of the coffee bean,glabrous and infolded,shedding a double shadowin the light from the corner windows.I could do without the clockticking off the children who died in my sleep,the translucent whorl of fingerprintsstitched into the soles of my shoes.

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You Were Never in the Army

To John Shaw

When I won’t eat the doubtful chicken delvedfrom the back of the up north refrigerator,or the can of wintered-over beef soup, shelvedlong past its expiration date, he says,“You were never in the Army.”

I don’t reheat coffee the way he does,in a small pan, as if helmet-brewedover improvised fire, day-old, as it was,or may have been, fifty-odd years agowhen he was in the Army.

I have never lain bloody in the cold Ardennes,in the open sores of blasted snow,nor have I stood at the old world’s endwaiting to heal my wounds and build it newafter I was done with the Army.

I have no scars, and can never fall asleepupright, as he can, as if I’d been marchingor waiting night-long in the anxious deepof my foxhole—or simply at peace, havingnothing to do with the Army.

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Expanding Universe

I can’t find a pen to writeyour address downor the poem I started yesterdayafter I watched you go

with all your belongingspacked into your car

when you hugged me goodbyeI thought of seedsdispersing on the wind

how the light of starstakes so long to get here

how everything started outin one place

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William Cullen Bryant

My heart is awed within me, when I thinkOf the great miracle that still goes on.

—Bryant, “Forest Hymn”

He was born to the cutting and clearing,the old forests going down around him as he grewinto a love of the crepuscular and vanishing,migrations, extinctions, the Indian and bison

diminishing west beyond the railhead,the wilderness filling with the immigrantdrone of bees. We picture him in twilight,gray as weathered clapboard, his face

an overgrown field in which the eyesstill burn a clearing, the patriarchof old hymnals and abandoned farms,the one-room schoolhouse and granite

death angels fallen among the weeds.But clear away the dust and a foreststill covers half the continent, openingonto prairie still unfurrowed by the plow,

and the pioneer who has gone furtherthan any white man before still imaginesthat he is standing at the end of the worldor about to go back to the very beginning.

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River Bend

These places, like Old Testament miracles,have ceased to exist, waiting for usto recreate them. Like a prayerthe snow falls, my footstepsscatter sparrows from the grass,the ducks mumble over their pond. The prairiecups itself to my ear, closes out the emptystomach-rumble of the highway, and I hearthe grass voiced like an organwith wind and birdsong, tongues of milkweed pod,winter poised above me like a dark chord.

I come here with a heart in waiting,to learn the patience of seeds sleepingwinterlong above the frozen earth, the patienceof Sarai waiting to be renamed into flower.This prairie is a covenant renewedin the earth, a promise deliveredin the voice of fire, just as Moses heardthe voice of God in the wilderness. HereI listen to the requiem of snow, the earthawaiting the resurrection of its dead,the whisper of wings making angels in the air.

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Daywings

(Ephemeroptera, “daywings”)

In a net of late sunlight, mayfliesdip and rise, caught in the brief updraftof instinct and fizzling outin a determined shimmer of wings.What grace they haveis reserved for this hour before sunset,the males casting themselvesinto the current of air, the flyfishing for another of its kind,the females swung up under,hooked into the dance of survival,the air gilded with the lightof a thousand couplings. They swarmlike static amid disturbance of gulls,morning dun still floating ashorefrom their watery second birth,their bodies winged for this one dance:dying proof, if we need it, that beautyis the upshot of our mortal business.In the morning they’ll be gone,a million sparks burned down to ash,littering the beach grasswith their flimsy one-night wings.

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Packing the Creche

Petals scab and peel, blackened afterbirth,poinsettia thinning to a knuckled stalk,winter whitening like a scar. Alreadythe fevered aisles are flush with hearts.By the lectionary, the disciples stare snow-blindat the transfigured Christ, Lazarus dies: but herethe Magi wait, the shepherds tune their pipes,the angel of the Lord still fidgets on her thread,the baby Jesus lies cradled in familiar dust.Before the creche is transfigured into bric-à-brac,I swaddle the sheep in tissue two by two,old hatbox of an ark, kings and cattle stowed,angel furled, riding the rising floodof available light. An early thaw tempts the earthinto expectation, birds modulate into spring.Two shepherds, left high and dry by Lent,still tune their pipes, still look into the undecorated skyfor the angel, still wonder where they will findthe manger, the child, their own flocks.