noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer they would like to bring
to the readers' attention.In this issue, Lawrence Revard is highlighted.
Lawrence Revard's poems are clear-eyed and don't flinch: "The things I want to say to you aren’t blue. / I take them in / like rich cloth endlessly answering to touch." They are confident in where they take us but surprising in their change of direction: "The words they used / stood guard like little gods / whose faces represented ancient truths..." In these strange times, let's trust the twists and turns of these poems: "The second death, a zombie life, thus takes / our memories and turns them / against us."
Blue Incantations
Incantations to the Boys
Incantations to Coffee
Sonnet to the Leaves
Cicada-Killer
Hoverflies
No One Is Safe
The things I want to give to you aren’t blue
or green or yellow.
They aren’t some book I bought or jewelry
I handled, standing
in that quaint expensive thought of love.
They’re likenesses—
like postage stamps of flower petals, messages
and messengers
that grip a letter and a bee. Their habit,
like ladybugs,
lifts off or lands on fingertips with ease.
Their teeth are bright
as the mingled salt and ice the headlights catch.
The things I want to say to you aren’t blue.
I take them in
like rich cloth endlessly answering to touch.
They are not things
we wept to have or even wept to lose.
We pluck a shell
from some broad bleak desert and listen close.
Yes, listen close:
come hum and kiss and hum and kiss my neck,
a word between
us like cookie, sugar, butter, milk, and chocolate—
our fingers, too,
that press a yes, a no, a please don’t go.
What stood beside me in my numbness when
your beauty took
me into its good house? Let me give
such sure enfolding
back in the holding of your hand. Let me
stand like a wall
of day and night by broken and by healed.
Be healed, be held,
beholding in more than the eye the moment
of being with you.
Revealed, retold, reworked, let me see you
that in seeing
I pass that boldest insight back to you.
Let me give back, like borrowed scripts of sunlight,
textures of leaves
of many trees of unlike age and types,
and canopies
where—without least dependency—the stems
and limbs become
uplifting selves and others. Yes, let me give—
give by becoming,
give the good change of being so well-bought,
and let, unasked,
my wish come so to pass all loss stands calmed
outside us like birds
that sleep over the ocean on the wing.
The boys discussed their plans for rape behind
me in the common room:
they didn’t care I heard. The words they used
stood guard like little gods
whose faces represented ancient truths
they’d copy down in snide
asides into the essays they composed
for weary teachers we
shared in those days. I didn’t know. Instead
I knew a mix of envy
and contempt poisoned my disapproval.
I’d only learn the cost
from sobbing explanations years away.
The boys discussed the men they guessed were gay
with artfully bruising terms
like ass and cock. I sensed arousal, fear,
and glee disperse like scents,
like ancient gifts of myrrh and frankincense
meant for an inner god.
Desires stayed clear of the essays they’d compose
for the teacher weary
of terms like plethora and symbol. Yet
their ears pricked up to hear
him read some dirty Shakespeare. Which one sent
an unsigned note to let
him know he cared? He wasn’t like the others.
The boys discussed their time vacationing
in Aspen or Miami
with negligence. It was okay,
I guess. Then something really
cool or weird or awesome in a hush
proved a certain message
from winged figures they’ll pay off sometime
later in life, weary
from guilt and loaded like an altar. Or not.
The prophecy was vague.
What does it mean to pay? To atone?
Is it to become
the man the boy was scared of all along?
Bitter and sweet and then some ground between:
plantation, trees, and fruit:
the sun has made us so: bright chemical,
dark liquid: in between
fire and time and steam: addiction, too,
which is only time’s
limits made to trimly fit our bodies.
Milk and sugarcane:
a way to handle darkness and its heat,
a tempering of belief,
a lessening to give shape to taste, or at least
to keep the shake at bay:
the tigers that are poisons that are drugs.
Bitter and sweet and then some grounds between:
the two banks and the river,
the valley and its cliffs, environment
and object: café, coffee:
labor and rest and capital: addiction
is an economy—
desire that crosses borders at a cost.
Chicory, hazelnut,
vanilla: carried, mingled scents and flavors,
exotic and domestic,
demotic and despotic, mornings and afternoons,
we measure out our lives,
burning bright, and unframed, and unafraid.
If there’s a God, they speak in leaves
pulsing with sunlight’s power through night.
No matter whether anyone believes,
they happen, breathe, become, invite
our faith in numbers none need count
where ignorance is vacant doubt.
Their quiet is a pride they flaunt
when evil comes to taunt and tout
its singular hate. If God is good,
hate lets hate down. Hate helps hate drown
when waters rise like truths we could
admit, concede, allow, or own.
If there’s a God, they don’t insist
one love is less than many is.
A cicada-killer wasp as long and fat
as the first two joints of my index finger
got in the house. My father pointed it out
when I came to pick him up. He carried a rolled
newspaper. Told me to wait so he could kill it.
I frowned, asked him to go in the kitchen
to find me a proper spatula. They work better. Use
the proper weapon, I said. Get a plastic one. Works
like a fly-swatter, assures a kill. I heard him rummaging
while I got one of the tall, empty vases left in the dining room.
They’d held the flowers for my mother’s funeral.
With one of those and a piece of cardboard, I captured
the wasp against the window, its fury
thrumming the glass. Then I walked out the front door, set
the vase sideways on the pavement, drew away the cardboard.
The wasp rose in a smooth arc.
So it was another warm,
arid September afternoon, a droning
chant high up in the ash trees, a peculiar yellow
light penetrating under the yew trees where
I used to dig and play. Where I saw
cicada killers first. Where I plucked the crisp
skin shells of cicadas from where they clung
to the bark—the eyes translucent so they
could make their way up from the soil. And
be free. And sing. And die very slowly.
Whatever shadow there was in that world
it was the one each cast
onto the other…
—Jorie Graham
Tiny black and yellow striped hoverflies quiver together
in the slight breeze from one
clover to another on the pasture.
From the corner of my eye I see a wood duck land
in the center of the canal.
The water is green.
In the golden angled early light, the water absorbs
the steady glow
on the trees on one side of the canal.
Even I see that the trees can change such light. Even I feel the weight
of the water below. In my view, the ringed
ripple from the duck’s landing takes possession
of the canal’s gilded wall of leaves.
In these terms my thought clears. Just so, under your gaze,
my feeling moves. A swallow slips into sight, cutting
and bending the air with its dark blue wings.
The swallow does not complain of its difficult turns.
It offers a trill for its song. It is not hard at all.
The hoverflies are not disturbed, moving but suspended over
their richly dewed pasture,
pairs sometimes like tiny golden scales.
What keeps them together? One gift of your presence
has been a fresh memory. As I worry, I return to your seriousness
and your severe black dress.
In my worry, I return to your steady forward gait, a balance
you hold in my view—floating into the fabric of every room.
I carry the memory through the trees. I hold the memory up so the sun
lands on it, changes, and the swallow darts through.
“No one is safe,” you said, explaining how
that grim, apocalyptic
serial drama keeps
the viewers hooked on its thin storyline.
No character—old or young, loved
or hated—is not hostage
to fate, wandering the wastes of our decaying,
once opulent country.
Surely we fear for them
because their wandering is a little like
the dazed day-to-day
stagger of luckless people we all know.
Of course, you meant a little more—you meant,
really, that the characters,
however flawed, so endear themselves
by loving, forming bonds
like families, and struggling to find their roles
within the group, they seem
to shape the corresponding lives of viewers,
whose families are just
exactly so precarious by nature:
unsafe ventures, moneyed
into a tentative stability.
Sickness, unemployment,
drug addictions, crime, or any number
of failures may break a family.
You meant that failure’s maw lies under all,
rich and poor alike.
Here too our double death:
First a violent transformation shows
the fear or bravery
defining character. Did she fight?
Did she betray another to survive?
Did she sacrifice
her blood and flesh to be
the food and inspiration of the group?
Since “no one’s safe,” they all
can—any moment—turn hero or villain.
The undressed threat of loss,
and death itself, first tests, then proves the way
we feel about a person.
Loss makes the living and the dying certain,
a monument to being.
But then, when a character dies, something
inhuman rises—a memory
that takes the purest version of a person’s
story and finds the doubts.
We’ll doubt their worth. We’ll doubt our own. Soon nothing
seems real without doubts.
The second death, a zombie life, thus takes
our memories and turns them
against us. Mindless, shambling crowds of dead
grow in our lives as we
grow older, losing friends and family, gaining
the disembodied memories
walking our minds. In time, we strike them down—
to get on with the day, to keep our minds
our own, or simply to make
room for living thoughts of living friends.
“No one is safe,” indeed.
I wonder how we watch
so grim a world unfold inside our own,
but I know we’ve all had
real losses which make fiction far less sad,
less true, even.
Did I ever tell you
how I nearly died
at Pensacola? My mother took me swimming
when I was ten or so.
We got caught in a riptide undertow,
drawn out so fast I saw
the shore receding—and I panicked. I yelled.
And since there were no lifeguards,
the people on the shore looked strangely at me,
were unconcerned, had lives
to go about in which the drowning of
a child and mother was
not so unusual. That was a shock—
that thought. That and my mother’s
coaxing led me to catch my breath and tread
the churning water slowly.
That is when I knew,
from the shaken patience in my mother’s tone,
she couldn’t help me either.
The tide would drag the weaker of us out.
Weighing her down, I’d only take her with me.
From the solemn, chewed
look in her eyes, and from the shame that dulled
her later when she talked
of that bad day in Pensacola, I knew
she would have let me go.
Well, somehow I swam in,
pulled by the riptide on an oblique angle
until the land gathered
under me like something rich and strange—like love,
like the queasy joy of that great reward
I’ve no right to—like every
time I’ve laid my eyes on you. You know?
You know no one is safe
and nothing is a given.
That’s true. But luck is real—the footing firm
in a world outside our own.
It is the reason we must save ourselves.
Lawrence Revard was born in St. Louis and has spent the last two years in a lovely apartment in Richmond Heights. He teaches in the College Writing Program at Washington University. He has published poems in Pleiades, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Raven Chronicles, New Letters, and elsewhere. His translations of John Milton’s Latin and Italian poems were published in Wiley-Blackwell’s Complete Shorter Poems in 2009.
