Tonight– in the concrete-clean, eerie-urbane (where are the books kept?) new location of Left Bank Books in downtown St. Louis, shadowed by the Edward Jones Dome, where the Rams play, shadowed by the Arch– D.A. Powell read from his just-out book of poetry, Chronic. I stood (no open chairs), fingered a half-dozen filched snack-table chocolate pirouettes, and heard new poems.
How do you hear new poems? For me it’s an alert hesitation, like catching birds out of the air, or watching foreign movies too fresh for subtitles: I remember Powell’s voice was soft and rough, like notebook paper rumpled until cottony. I remember the poems were melancholy, funny, cruel, tender toward lust; punctuated by rage at bodily decay and at the garbages of consumption.
One poem‘s speaker is carefully, ruefully weak in love, sighing “look at the pluck you’ve made of my heart: it broke open in your hands / oddments of ravished leaves: blossom blast and dieback: petals drooping.” One’s polluted land, a sinned-against soil recalling Robinson Jeffers, stands watch “enriched with sewer sludge and urea / to green against eternity of green.”
I hear lines like these and think, Hello last and first thing. I got to shake Powell’s hand after the reading; he was gracious and called dinner supper. Yesterday I made a boutonniere of what a friend told me was lily-of-the-valley, but it drooped out from my buttonhole. Do you ever think, If only I were as calm as the grass and snow I consist of? Rather than having experience’s rough fractions icicle me apart?
This freak snowstorm paralyzed Seattle last time I returned. One night, a philosopher friend and I stumped out of his little tea-fragrant apartment through the snowdrifts, talking about prayer like amped-up teenagers, past the blossomy anonymous trees and paralyzed buses down the hill to the zendo in his neighborhood. The zendo was shut– the monk’s week of silent meditation. We sat on the curb a moment like the curb was the zendo. I like those gaps and hesitations in Powell’s long lines: like someone reaching in that infinity of time, when counting ten breaths, between breaths four and five. “In a protracted stillness,” Powell writes in another new poem, “I saw that heron I didn’t wish to disturb / was clearly a white sack caught in the redbud’s limbs.” If– like at that Seattle corner or in certain white spaces, or like when ear-groping for a new poem– only hesitation is real ecstasy, then