The Easy Wreckage (poetry)

The Seamark Press
Iowa City, Iowa
1971
Black and white illustrations by Donna Violetti
33 pages, soft cover.

This book has been hand-set in Van Dijck types and printed on Italian Garda and Fabriano papers in an edition of 250 copies. Soft cover, paper label on front.

Available through Alibris and AbeBooks.

ANTI-ELEGY FOR FATHER AND SON

  R.E.M. 1908-
  K.D.M. 1043-

Shaggy, leaning into a calyx of light
My face consorts to move with things.

Here is a rotted skiff on the crest of a hill
and a calf is a streambed, swollen,
bullheads excavating its flanks.

And here is the smokehole vision
of the trees on the other bank—
I walk into it letting it happen.

Video from Heartsongs presentation, February 13, 2014.
See Acknowledgments for details.

I see a codfish drying on a rack
And butter beautiful with maggots
in the easy wreckage of my youth,

My lips become salty, ancient. My two dogs
puff in their sleep like tiny bears.
I am intruding, edging out through Delta mist.
There is zebralight in the muscadine.
I smell the sawmill but it is not there.

A figure is walking ahead of me. I approach
but find no footprints in the snow.
It is 1920, my forehead opens like a
window to the night. Father, I am you.

And I can’t remember getting there or falling
But the danger is my nature. As this game
becomes a game no longer, we both play to win;
It is the only alternative to losing.

Fate is a pale excuse for anything, but please,
Is there some way we might talk to each other,
for the first time, as two people, afraid.