Praise for
DAVID MASON
“Mason is by no means a strict nature poet—one of his best-known poems is about helping his aging father go to the bathroom—but it’s hard to overlook his reverence for the physical world in its infinite variety.”
—Leath Tonino, High Country News
for SEA SALT (2014)
“. . . a poet to listen to, and to trust.”
—Kate Hendry, The Dark Horse
“Sea Salt is the real thing: one of our most authentic and accomplished poets at the top of his lyric form.”
—Andrew Frisardi, Angle
for ARRIVALS (2004)
“The language and authenticity of poem after poem provide the pleasure of discovery.”
—W. S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shadow of Sirius
“Mason is a poet who justifies his claims. His forms breathe.”
—Brian Phillips, Poetry
for THE COUNTRY I REMEMBER (1996)
“This 1,300-line family and national saga is narrative poetry at its best.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review
“Readers, don’t miss this book.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“This is a work of extraordinary warmth, vigor, imagination, and sympathy.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of them and Blonde
ALSO BY DAVID MASON
POETRY
Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade
Ludlow: A Verse Novel
Arrivals
The Country I Remember
Land Without Grief (Chapbook)
The Buried Houses
Small Elegies (Chapbook)
FOR CHILDREN
Davey McGravy
ESSAYS
Voices, Places
Two Minds of a Western Poet
The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry
MEMOIR
News from the Village
DRAMATIC WORKS
The Mercy—A New Oresteia
After Life (Opera by Tom Cipullo)
The Scarlet Libretto (Opera by Lori Laitman)
Vedem (Oratorio by Lori Laitman)
EDITED
Contemporary American Poems (in China)
Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (with John Frederick Nims)
Twentieth-Century American Poetry (with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke)
Twentieth-Century American Poetics (with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke)
Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (with Mark Jarman)
the SOUND
NEW & SELECTED POEMS BY
David Mason
Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA
The Sound: New & Selected Poems
Copyright © 2018 by David Mason
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book design by Selena Trager
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mason, David, 1954–author.
Title: The sound: new and selected poems / by David Mason.
Description: Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017033240 | ISBN 9781597096133 | eISBN 9781597097574
Classification: LCC PS3563.A7879 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033240
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, and the Amazon Literary Partnership partially support Red Hen Press.
First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
New poems in this book first appeared in the following periodicals: Able Muse, the Canberra Times (Australia), the Colorado Independent, The Dark Horse (UK), the Dirty Goat, the Hopkins Review, the Hudson Review, Measure, the New Criterion, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Pequod, Pilgrimage Magazine, Poetry, Quadrant (Australia), the Robert Frost Review, San Diego Reader, Southwest Review, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), Translation, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Yale Review.
Poems from earlier collections originally appeared in these publications: the American Scholar, Boulevard, CrossCurrents, The Dark Horse (UK), Divide, Harper’s Magazine, the Hudson Review, Image, Measure, the New Criterion, the New Yorker, North Dakota Quarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Radio Silence, Sequoia, the Sewanee Review, Solo, the Southern Review, the Threepenny Review, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), and the Yale Review.
I wish to thank the editors of the following anthologies where some of these poems appeared: Best American Poetry 2012 (Mark Doty and David Lehman), Best American Poetry 2018 (Dana Gioia and David Lehman), Beyond Forgetting (Holly J. Hughes), A Broken Heart Still Beats (Anne McCracken and Mary Semel), Contemporary American Poetry (R. S. Gwynn and April Lindner), Introduction to Poetry (Dana Gioia and X. J. Kennedy), Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range (David D. Horowitz), Many Trails to the Summit (David D. Horowitz), Measure for Measure (Annie Finch and Alexandra Oliver), New Poets of the American West (Lowell Jaeger), The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Rita Dove), Poetry Out Loud (Dan Stone and Stephen Young), Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (R. S. Gwynn), Poets Translate Poets (Paula Deitz), Rhyming Poems (William Baer), Story Hour (Sonny Williams), and The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry (Jay Parini).
Thanks as well to these websites where some poems appeared: Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.
Aralia Press, Dacotah Territory Press, JonesAlley Press, and The Press at Colorado College published chapbooks and limited editions in which some of these poems appeared. I wish to thank in particular Aaron Cohick, Brian Molanphy, Michael Peich, Sally Quinn, Joan Stone, and Mark Vinz for their fine work.
Poetry publishers do heroic labor for little reward. I owe a particular debt to Mark Cull, Kate Gale, and Robert McDowell, all three of whom have put their lives on the line for poetry.
for Chrissy
CONTENTS
Walking Backwards: An Author’s Note
New Poems
Descend
The World of Hurt
Woman Dressing by a Window
Combine
The Gifts of Time
Gallina Canyon
Saying Grace
Bristlecone Pine
To the Sea of Cortez
The Secret Hearing
Mending Time
Across the Pyrenees
Sketches in the Sun
First Christmas in the Village
Given Rain
The Nightmare Version
Daytime
To Hygeia
The New Dope
Disturbed Paradelle
The Great Changer
Horse People
Sand Creek
Frangipani
Galahs in the Wind
My Scottish Grandmother’s Lobotomy
Bildungsroman
Hangman
Security Light
The Student
Old Man Walking
Passion The Show
The Show
Michael Donaghy 1954–2004
We Stand Together Talking
Epigram
; From Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade (2014)
Kéfi
New World
A Thorn in the Paw
The Teller
The Fawn
Fathers and Sons
Home Care
Mrs. Vitt
Driving With Marli
The Nape
The Future
Out
In the Barber Shop
Sarong Song
The Tarmac
Another Thing
Let It Go
4 July 11
When I Didn’t Get the News
14 July 11
Salmon Leap
The Dying Man
The Insert
Die When You Die
One Another
Leavings
Lopsided Prayer
A Deafness
The Soul Fox
Mrs. Mason and the Poets
Marco Polo in the Old Hotel
A Sort of Oracle
The Bay of Writing
Foghorns
Tree Light House
The Blue of the Bay
Sea Salt
From Arrivals (2004)
The City
Gulls in the Wake
Kalamitsi
Pelicans and Greeks
Mumbai
Agnostos Topos
The Collector’s Tale
In the Borrowed House
Adam Speaks
Ballade at 3 A.M.
Mr. Louden and the Antelope
A Meaning Made of Trees
Winter 1963
Swimmers on the Shore
From The Country I Remember (1996)
The Country I Remember: A Narrative
In the Northern Woods
Song of the Powers
A Motion We Cannot See
From Land Without Grief (1996)
The Sockeye
On Being Dismissed as a Pastoral Poet
From The Buried Houses (1991)
Gusev
The Nightingales of Andrítsena
At the Graves of Castor and Pollux
Spooning
Disclosure
Blackened Peaches
THE SOUND
WALKING BACKWARDS
An Author’s Note
The Sound is a location, my place of origin and womb of words, but it is also an aspiration and aural guide. “The sound is the gold in the ore,” Frost wrote. One hears something and wants to make a corresponding sound. I have been hard of hearing all my life, catching vowels more than consonants, so the sound I follow is watery. I hope you can hear it too.
Assembling this book has allowed me to revise some earlier work. No revision in a poem is minor, but some changes may be noticeable only to me. I have not grouped poems by subject or genre, but have allowed for accidental discoveries as well as a kind of walking backwards.
A writer of narrative and dramatic poetry requires more room than a writer of lyrics. Excerpting long poems is unfair to them, but one also wants to represent the range of effort over decades. Here readers will find the maverick products of a writer who does not want to repeat himself. I have not excerpted my verse novels, plays, and libretti but have made room to put one longer poem, “The Country I Remember,” back into print.
I am not the product of a creative writing program but of my own dilatory learning. Yet I have been lucky in my friendships with other writers, several of whom have offered advice and assistance over the years. They know who they are. My greatest debt is acknowledged in the book’s dedication.
NEW POEMS
DESCEND
And what of those who have no voice
and no belief, dumbstruck and hurt by love,
no bathysphere to hold them in the depths?
Descend with them and learn and be reborn
to the changing light. We all began without it,
and some were loved and some forgot the love.
Some withered into hate and made a living
hating and rehearsing hate until they died.
The shriveled ones, chatter of the powerful—
they all go on. They go on. You must descend
among the voiceless where you have a voice,
barely a whisper, unheard by most, a wave
among the numberless waves, a weed torn
from the sandy bottom. Here you are. Begin.
THE WORLD OF HURT
Where are its borders—the world of hurt?
Not in these woods outside the window,
not in the helpful drone of the sea.
But the mind has trouble neglecting the news,
the acid comment, expedient bombing
and frontiers brimming with refugees.
She turned from the pictures to face me, the hurt
taking hold in her eyes. Right then I saw
from the ragged green of the woods, the bird
that had come for itself in the window, and banked
before impact, and left like a song
and was gone to die some other way.
A skill of intelligent flight. Or luck.
Her look changed when I told her about it.
The bird that flew off into the world.
WOMAN DRESSING BY A WINDOW
There’s a fire between touch
and touch like the heat of noon
between moon and moon
moving a soul to such
a silent howl,
an exultation of skin.
O how could one begin
when words can only crawl
where they would leap
in every glance
like a fountain’s dance
before a long and tidal sleep?
Now she turns
to her own tasks
and nothing in her asks
that one should burn
or learn by letting be—
like time, like day and night,
like any new delight
set free.
THE SOUND
It wasn’t the drunken skipper in the dream
commanding me to Listen up or find
my head in the bay. It wasn’t the net drum,
the power block for brailing the wet line
or classes of salmon I was so inclined
to school with, breathing in the kelp and brine.
It wasn’t the purling motor of the skiff
dragging the weighty net to its fleeting purse
but the sea itself, the Sound and my belief
instructing me this work was nothing worse
than setting out and hauling in a seine,
and setting out and hauling it in again,
getting used to the play of hand and mind.
Listen up, he said, and set a course.
I said I work alone like all my kind.
Ah, self-employed. He went below to doze
in the iced hold. You would be one of those.
I headed for the point beyond the point
and stripped and greased myself with oolichan
and swam the echoes to oblivion.
COMBINE
The tractor puffing diesel
crawled along the swath,
the hayfork pulling vines
into the combine’s maw,
and the high bin filled
with damp green peas—
boy’s first shirtless job,
baked nut-brown from dark
all through the burning day
until the Sound beyond
the dikes bled red.
Gulls in the fields, crows
in the bramble hedges,
a field mouse squirming
on the fork boy’s tines
and the old mechanic standing
in white overalls mid-field
as if he’d lost his train
of thought.
Those hands of his,
work-swollen knuckles,
grease in the
whorls a boy
discerned his future in,
even the one finger nipped off
at the top joint, even that
old pain recovered from
was prophecy of a kind
(we all bleed and lose
the fortune-teller says).
The work was slow enough
for thought, still more for books
read in all weathers
when the bosses left,
and reading under the sky
to the smell of marsh salt
and chaff and rotting vines,
education’s skin and bone
for learning’s ache
and the ache of learning,
gone to school in work
and for a time a living
wage to wage a life.
THE GIFTS OF TIME
To stand in the kitchen high up in the trees
watching a sapling sway, the canopy
of leaves and needles stirred by an undersea,
and stare, a mug of coffee in the hand,
is all of time. No necessary task
impels a rush to dress and find the keys.
Decades have served for that. It’s time to breathe.
Time also for a long gray ship to turn
and for a young man standing on the bridge
to wonder if that distant speck is bird
or continent. The young man, older now,
can hear the heartbeat of an ailing girl.
He moves the stethoscope, tells her to breathe,
and knows the murmur is her leaking blood,
and he is only one, and in the time
it takes to breathe he too is gone forever.
He too is like the stir of swaying trees,
the muddy cliffs eroded by the surf.
Stand here and listen to the trees and know
their generation too will fall away.