Library of Congress Control Number: 2012933930
Softcover Edition ISBN 978-0-9852435-0-0
ISBN: 9780985243517
Design and Layout by Patricia Sargent,
Dragonfly Bindery
Cover Photo by Anna Low
Winnikinni Press
Rumford 02916
2012 © al basile
“It’s hard looking from a lit house into the darkness.”
American hurdler Edwin Moses, when asked how he thought his competitors felt about racing against him.
“We Must Destroy…”
“Whose Sins You Shall Forgive…”
A Constellation of Mercy
A Fly in Amber
A Higher Prime
A Home Room Moment
A Kind of Triumph
A Morning Exercise
A Mortal Experiment
A Necessary Transformation
A Pause in Fireflies
A Place For Something to Occur
A Pre-Valentine’s Day Poem
A Pushing Feel
A Simple Gravity
A Specific Progression
A Toast Proposed
A Useful Accommodation
After the Group, the Individual
After the Storm
An Old Complaint
Animal Crackers
Applause
Before the Fall
Below and Above
Ben Trovato
Better Living Through Technology
Certainties
Closing the Ring
Darkness at Noon
Dream Gems
Eighty Five If
Encounter With Borges
Equally Untrue Friendship
Fingal’s Folly
First Best Friends
Fishing with Sock
Four Eyes
Getting the Eggplant Right
He Awakens From a Dream of Flight
He Dreams of a Girl He Taught In High School
How I Learned About Pain
How I Learned How Much I Didn’t Know
How I Learned the Value of Money
How I Read Your Poems
How To Play Scopa
How To Skim Stones
I Play One of Louis Armstrong’s Trumpets
In Praise of Gray
In Praise of Redirection
It’s Not a Nut
Jimmy Cobb Leaps Through Time
King of the Mountain
Learning a Language
Leavin’ Trunk
Like This Like That
Lord & Taylor Closes at Five
Mixing Day
Muscle-bound Flies
Nessun Canta
New Worlds Rewritten
New Year’s Day 2011
On Hearing Ned Martin’s Comments During a Red Sox Game
Praise
Premonition
Quasimodo of the Stairs
Read Me Aloud
Red Sox Win, 2004
Same Old Story
Samson: A Secret Life
Sons of Phillips ‘66
Sound Language
Spring Ahead
Squirrel and Dead Bedbug
The Archangel’s Reply
The Believer Has His Doubts
The Elements
The Famous Person
The Grand Climacteric
The Language of Music
The Listener
The Mint
The Problem With Knowing
The Sleeping Father
The Stillness of the Strung Bow
The Subtler Cut
The Tree of Spells
The Tree Warden’s Son
The World Makes an Offer
The Young Cry, the Old Listen
Thinking About Baseball
Tipping the Scales
To Friends at Graduation
Toward a Personal Style
Untimely Complication
Waiting
What I Was Thinking Onstage
What Lies Beyond
Whistle Down the Wind
Youth, a Metaphor
The following poems have been published as indicated. Many thanks to the editors of these publications who chose my work for their audiences.
Tar River Poetry, 2006:
The Mint;
Thinking About Baseball After my Birthday, 2005
the Texas Review, 2006:
Fishing With Sock; Tipping the Scales
Further Fenway Fiction, Rounder Press 2007:
Red Sox Win, 2004;
On Hearing Ned Martin’s Comments
During a Red Sox Game, July 26, 1985
Silver Boomers Anthology, Silver Boomer Books 2008:
Skimming Stones; First Best Friends;
59 - A Higher Prime
Louisiana Literature, 2010: Ben Trovato
Italian Americana, 2012:
The Subtler Cut; What Beethoven Heard
Literary Imagination, 2012: Eighty-Five If
Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center,
www.nccsc.net/poetry, 2012
A Place For Something to Occur
What’s here and now arrests the possible,
stops up the passageway from the unseen.
What teems beyond will have to wait its turn
until what has been realized is razed,
and banished back to the invisible.
And what emerges as it disappears?
Prerequisite for what can happen next:
the absence that alone can tempt the new.
And so make room. Return the space that what
was only taking space was taking up.
Nature adores a vacuum, rushes to it;
restore the void to see what tumbles through it.
The black band at his neck is punctuated –
a square of spotless white shows underneath.
The flesh swells just above it like the dough
that’s risen past a pan rim, and some yeast
that started in the womb has blown his face
beyond the boundaries of the refined.
His clutch of moles evokes the moist, dark soil
beneath the feet of mushroom hunters, stained
bags in hand, in European woods.
He’s Thaddeus to most, Tadeusz at home,
but Father Ted to me and to my folks,
who volunteer to help the seminary
he runs, just out of town. I serve at Mass
on weekends there. I’m making my confession,
but to him, for the first time, face to face.
No dark confessional in which I kneel
and spool out sins into a waiting silence;
he looks at me directly, his expression
benign, as mild as when he sets the host
upon my tongue, when I am in a state
of grace. But now I’m thick with sin, and we
both know and can remember what I say.
Abstraction tries to live a secret life:
the face of God is comfortably beyond
imagining. It’s harder to confess
to someone you can see, and who sees you.
My soul, trapped in the flesh, is visible,
a caught grasshopper sealed in a glass jar.
But Father Ted is calm, allows himself
to be seen in return. The sins I name
all disappear, raindrops in even waters.
I see he is a person who forgives.
He has a face that in another life
might have looked on when taxes were collected,
or fish were hauled in nets. A go-between
content to serve in someone else’s name,
the man’s as plain as risen bread, or Tuesday.
1.
I haven’t served at Mass in fifty years.
When Mass is said at funerals and weddings
then I attend. I take the sacrament
because I search my sins out every day,
confess, and try to make contrition perfect.
I see no priest; I take it to the top,
and trust in God my best will be enough.
But how, in absence of the sacraments,
am I to go on living in the light?
One source provides a daily substitute:
“I can’t sing (cannot sing) unless you send
the Holy Ghost down,” sang the Trumpeteers,
and I maintain a different state of grace
by means of music, listened to or made.
2.
Since even interstellar distances
are crossed by surety of light and time,
I hold that when our souls are disconnected
and we can find no way to touch, we fail
because these distances are greater still.
We don’t know where or how to look; our sight
itself is faulty, so it seems the light
must fail us, and we lack the will to try
(will draws on courage, courage stands on faith:
faith must be buoyant, floating on the void).
When faithless, we are most in need of mercy.
3.
So far from being comforted by touch,
in this part of my life I am denied
even the mercy of acknowledgment.
A “no” withheld will not release its grip;
it clings long after I choose not to care.
All I can do is lose myself in music.
“Have mercy, baby – have mercy on me”
does help to heal the wound. I find a kind
of sacramental power in the blues –
though secular as hell, it eases pain.
It stirs the memory as well. I hear,
as through a wall, my younger voice in prayer.
I trace back with a finger of the mind
along the constellation, from the Stones
to Don Covay, across the gospel threshold
to Mitchell’s Christian Singers, standing at
the bedside of a neighbor, as they plead
“Have Mercy, Lord.” Beyond a great divide,
confounded by the distances between us,
beggared by silence (longing for reply),
I cry my Kyrie Eleison.
4.
The light from stars, more similar than not
in its appearance to the naked eye,
has traveled different distances to us,
some sources bigger, older, brighter, or
already gone. But all arrive together,
and so it seems to us they twinkle kinship.
We even print design and put a pattern
from the mind into the sky, to see
a meaning fashioned from proximity –
though looking up is only looking in
and finding what we put out there ourselves.
And yet, arrival of the light remains;
and innocent of us, the light abides.
“…a gull patrolling between the wave
crests of the desolate sea
will dip to catch a fish,
and douse his wings…”
the Odyssey, book five
(Fitzgerald translation)
They say the goddess spoke on my behalf.
I only know the way the moment came
to me. I hadn’t grown the least bit tired
of melting kisses and the graceful shape
of slim Kalypso, who would string time’s bow
and hang it on the wall unused while we
made love. So easily at her deft touch
the woven threads of earthly care unwound,
while out beyond her silent grotto flew
the unseen arrows, in their ceaseless swarm
piercing the lives of men, and bringing age,
dissatisfaction, fear, and every kind
of loss – all weakness in those venomed barbs,
to fall in thicker hail than those at Troy,
which darkened everything, even the sun –
but nothing with immortals is the same.
If you could call it life, we lived outside
of time, yet hidden still within that stone
within a spell spun out upon a loom
where every day no sooner done than came
unravelled, as if never made. My touch
could leave no lasting mark on that white breast,
my kisses merely vessels lost at sea.
without a chance to carry or unburden
all the riches I’d accumulated
in my life as a man. A goddess, she
could spread her veil of immortality
and welcome me beneath. And in return?
What more, or less, or different could I mean
to her, for whom no change was possible?
Could we be joined within a mortal ring?
Unequal as I was, I couldn’t bring
a gift to make me worthy of her feast.
True warriors fight on level ground at least.
Man finds his meaning in the field of time.
All this I’d known before we met. And yet
such was the power of that spell the nymph
sang over me, I felt myself suspended,
a fly in amber. For to hide from time,
both past and future must be left behind,
one square removed. The action flows around,
beyond, beside, beneath, but never through.
What happens, happens – only not to you,
and you can’t frame the word, much less the will
to move – for to imagine is to prove
already that the future can half be.
And so the now was all she let me see.
She sang her spell, a skein of melody
which bound my beating heart in knots around
the sound of its own rhythm. I lost track.
All trace of a beginning or an end
dissolved into a turning world of tones
that led me – nowhere, toward no rocks at all.
So was I by Kalypso held in thrall.
They say that every day I watched the sea
and cried for home, and for Penelope –
that may have been the reason. All I knew
was looking at the waves unsettled me,
for with their crests and dips, in ceaseless play,
yet never getting anywhere, they showed
reflections of my restlessness. If I
had made my lips form “home,” or “Ithaka,”
then everything might have come tumbling back –
wife, son, Great Hall, a life already lived,
one waiting to be lived again. But all
untouchable outside the tunnel wall
of slim Kalypso’s melody lay sealed.
Perhaps the pressure of the world beyond
in all directions hidden, of the words
unformed, the life unlived, the images
unsummoned, rose within me. That’s for one
more favored by the gods than I to say.
I only know that on the shore each day
as I looked out, the teardrops brimmed in me
unbidden, overflowed, and joined the sea.
Perched in the rocks, how little did I know
of how to find my way, though the horizon
presented me each morning with a clue.
One day the answer simply came to me:
my eyes fixed on the line where green met blue,
I saw a skimming gull close to the foam
cut of a sudden down to catch a fish
and in the process wet his wings. I saw
at once a creature, touching, and touched back.
That split me from my shell – that single act.
One consequence became my messenger
to bear the host of thens into my now.
All past, all future folded into me.
I saw the island trees cut instantly,
the lash, the tiller, and the open sea.
The song was ended. With my beating heart
loud in my throat again, I knew that once
begun, I would stalk down, without remorse
or pause, the distant moment of my death.
And I was glad. As through me passed unseen
all the fell arrows of time, I passed into
myself again, and the sharp world of men.
They say that Hermes the Wayfinder came
with word from Zeus to the nymph Kalypso.
To what world that message came I couldn’t say;
I only know I finally found my way.
Though longing for escape in the sublime,
man finds his meaning in the field of time.
Advancing age, misunderstood. It need
not be diffusion of vitality.
The slanted rays of a declining sun,
although providing less heat overall,
yet may be trained upon a chosen point
(refracted through a lens that mind and heart
may grind and spirit polish), yet will burn.
The silent man stands up before the group,
inviting a like silence, as a sign
for the announcements to begin. A loop
of murmurs circles through the room; a line
of comments cracking like a playground whip,
the last loose whisper suddenly snaps free.
Provoked, some heated words escape those lips
that begged respectful quiet formerly.
Thus branded, the offender slings a phrase
that sizzles in the juncture. In reply,
the stander simply damps his tongue, ablaze.
All pause to watch the moment passing by.
Proud of its unformed temper, quick to blame,
the iron resists the influence of flame.
Bullet riddled, propped erect, with sticks
supporting arms which reach unnaturally,
its features shattered beyond all naming,
too black and shaggy to be any Snowman,
abominable enough to flood my face
with fear at a mere glimpse, and ring
my kid’s spine in a hot, stiffening grip,
it blasted at me from a right hand page
of Popular Science, my boyhood choice.
It scared me more than any image had.
It put me in a panic; I would drop
the issue from my hands as though it burned,
and stand, wholly dismayed, utterly still,
until the tide subsided, and I breathed
more easily again. That stab of fear
was hateful. Yet I secreted the issue
beneath some books piled on my nightstand shelf,
and every day for weeks I made believe
I didn’t know the article was there,
the August issue, two-thirds of the way.
I’d turn the pages absently, and feign
partial attention, but deliberately,
my fingers neatly covering the corners,
obscuring the page numbers as they summoned
doom. The ruse kept working. Every day
the same hot flash that made me look away,
but not before I’d seen it all again.
That exercise from fifty years ago,
what was it? Death? Did it prepare me to
look on the dead? Surely not that alone,
for once life is bleached out, remaining forms
don’t seize me by themselves. They never did.
Disfigurement then. Now we’re getting warm.
That figure, violated, mutilated,
was once animated: unfamiliar
though its flesh, its form in splendor fit
its spirit. Smudged by bullets, imprecise,
a forced distortion of itself, it gave
the lie to nature in the photograph.
And so disfigurement. I still recoil
at the torn forms of the formerly alive.
And yet I think if I should turn the page
to gaze on it today, some other bells
would ring out in me: first, the landscape in
the background of the photo, snowy, sparse,
the few trees offering poor cover, food
so hard to find, the desperate treks grown
ever longer, solitude become
a spectacle for hunters; second, they
themselves, a grinning band, their rifles slung
at hips and shoulders, in their eyes the light
of questions answered, shown once and for all.
This extraordinary thing, so rare
it moved like truth between real and imagined,
concluded in an image on a page.
By killing it, they proved this creature lived.
Their reputations made, their smiles confirm
they could continue in a kind of triumph.
More than the sight of what they ended, now
I fear the sight of what they kept alive.
The boy’s legs hang beneath the picnic table.
He paddles with his sneakers. They don’t reach
the floor. His elbows spread, he props his head
which hangs over the board. His knuckles stretch
the flesh under his cheekbones, push a fold
up toward his temples, as he ponders moves.
He thinks about Reshevsky, who’s so bald –
when he assumes this pose the wrinkles seem
to go all the way up. “But at my age
he was a master,” the boy thinks, and looks
back at the pieces. He is playing White.
He sees a combination four moves down
a narrow corridor of thought. If Black
is too intent on building up his forces
on the Queen side, he might not think it out
to notice that the Bishop must come up
before the Knight, or else he’ll lose a Rook
in the exchange.
There is a door into
the room of what Black actually will do;
he passes by the latch. He doesn’t slow,
much less reach out to touch. Long habit tells
him to regard it as a thing forbidden,
and nothing more; he doesn’t feel the need
his friends feel to rebel at what they’re told
they mustn’t do. He tells himself, and so
he rebels otherwise as he obeys.
He determines that he’ll take the chance
and gamble on Black’s eagerness. His hand
goes out and moves his Rook to Queen’s Knight two,
a tempo move, for all it looks to be –
it doesn’t seem to make much difference.
He swings both legs up to his right, to free
himself, and drags a heel over the seat:
the brown edge of his All-Stars makes a squeak
of rubber against pine. He reaches out,
his left hand steadying the board, and steps
with careful feet, with darkened mind,
into the other seat. Now he plays Black.
My arms outstretched, my body pulls me down.
My head lolls; it is hard to draw a breath.
They look up at me, searching for a sign.
It is our second year in boarding school,
and we are all fifteen. I’ve asked the ones
I trust to crucify me on a door.
I’ve heard that death comes by asphyxiation,
but now I long to know it for myself.
They’ve promised not to let me linger past
my point of certainty. I chose the group
with care – the ones who wouldn’t turn on me
and laugh to see me struggling for air,
then leave me gasping in an empty room.
I know the ones who would – and they are many –
would first pretend to be compatriots,
and win me over slowly, only to
betray me at the point of helplessness.
“Once to every man and nation, comes
the moment to decide,” we’d sung together,
standing in Chapel. Now a moment comes
to test us all: I say “it is enough.”
They show their open hearts, and ease me down.
for John Frank, 12/1/2007
He always said someday we would invent
something – it could be anything – and start
a business. When I brought him an idea,
he did a careful market study, then
concluded that it wouldn’t fly. Demand
was just too low, he said, and added “But
don’t worry, we can think of something else.”
Quick to adapt, armed with an energy
that suited him for exploration, he
was born too late to lead the expedition
that really suited him. The undiscovered
territories of our time lie in
the mind; their riches are invisible.
The thing now is to get ideas, then
get the world to pay you what they’re worth.
He always seemed to have a new idea –
that was the easy part. Then came the problem:
the world intruded, throwing up a cliff
that needed to be scaled. To get ideas
off the ground and up where everyone
could see, you had to find footholds, the right
places to grip, and every cliff was different.
The toy biz, movie scripts, or getting published –
he spent a lot of time learning the ropes
and figuring the angles. When he saw
his way, he’d climb up to the top – so Elmo
walked and talked, and the world looked on and listened.
Sometimes he couldn’t find the way to climb.
The best course then was coming back to earth.
The game remained the same: to generate
ideas, then to make them real, then solve
the problem of the world – to make
it look and listen, and at last make it say yes.
The summer day we buried him the hawks
scooped out fantastic arabesques against
the open sky over the grave, as though
to mark out in the air the ease and grace
of nature. Swooping in the elements,
they slipped in loops and darts that seemed to say
“We dip beyond the struggle. Like ideas
self-contained, self-realized, we pose
no questions and we generate no answers.
We are in a world that carries us;
it is enough for us to simply be.”
After the long climbs leading upward, now
he’s come back down to earth. He is beyond
the struggle, and beneath the elements
themselves. Outside the boundaries, and off
the maps and charts, he’s in that place unknown
where the old is ended and the new begins.
He’s made a necessary transformation.
He needn’t climb this stone, or solve the world.
Inside its secrets now, he bears it up.
A week’s engagement in upstate New York,
the town close to the border, named for Fate.
Canadians come over on the weekends
to stay in the motel, where every room
is decorated as a different country.
I move from Spain to Austria mid-week.
Deep in the night after the show on Friday,
the traffic at the crossroads lapsed to silence,
I see an aerial display close to the ground
and step out of an Innsbruck of the mind
into the tall dark grass that leads away
on into Canada. A lazy rush
of fireflies hovers just above the tips
that brush against my chest as I wade in,
and in a dozen steps I am engulfed.
The cool lights of the fireflies wink around me.
I loom among them, blocking off their view
of one another. Inexplicable
to them, like vast dark matter interposed
between the distant galaxies, I am
in no way luminous. The grass is tall
beside me, and its swishing as I turn
is like the lapping waters of a pool.
The fireflies laze about, untroubled by
my suddenly appearing in their midst,
an utterly unknown phenomenon.
I stand, well haloed by the drifting lights,
and well contented in my mystery.
for R.G. Hamilton
“I make a place for something to occur,”
he said in his old age, a black patch tied
over one useless eye, the other dim,
presenting information if he leaned
in close enough, the clear smell of the paint
commingling with the loud burn of cigar.
His words meandered out, matter-of-fact.
“My system is to put a lot of junk,
abstract expressionist, exciting – paint –
down first, then cover it up with a coat
of lamp black, then uncover it, and it,
after a while, it starts to look like – something.”
He showed the outer edge of his right hand.
“I used to have lamp black a quarter inch
deep here. I used to take it off like that,”
he said, and swept his hand from right to left,
“and then use brushes. Sometimes I would take
all of the lamp black off, and put in blue
or green. I consciously invent the place
for this to happen in, might make a dozen.
I haven’t seen this place before, but then
I do my trick – I put down junk, I cover
it, uncover, slop it in, and find –
little pictorial events, or plays.”
The last one that he finished showed a man,
blue-green in profile, set inside a circle
red against a blue background, a grin
across his face, a blue-green fish across
his head like a chapeau, their eyes apposite,
gleaming, and the same grin on the fish.
I went into his studio a month
after he passed. All undisturbed, as though
he’d just stepped out, it barked the acrid chord
of the perpetual cigar. The easel,
oversized to suit the near-blind workman,
held the place for the next thing to occur:
A circle, red against a blue background;
the center, lamp black, answer undisclosed,
awaiting the attention of the hand.
Science Daily (Feb. 13, 2001): After a 5-year, 2-billion-mile
journey – the last year spent in a close-orbit study of asteroid 433
Eros – the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft has touched down the
surface of the asteroid, the first time such a feat has ever been tried
or accomplished. Eros is 196 million miles (316 million kilometers)
from Earth.
You couldn’t say it was intentional.
The idea was to close the gap enough
to get a better look. At that, the trip
was made against long odds from the beginning,
to a place that would be uninhabited
for years to come, and not until great arcs,
carved out in cold and emptiness, had scored