WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT STONEWORK
James DenBoer is the awake one, and vulnerable to his awakeness. In this physical world he has ties to the comic and to the suffering. He pays tribute, he asks for counsel, and a great spirit is born and sustained. Stonework exhibits the bonding of difficult material to lucid expression. What an artistic fulfillment!
— Sandra McPherson
There is a great clarity of mind in these poems, and also a great humanness. Taut, expansive, full of marvels--like a good life, the poems build and build. I love also the way they alternate between the intimate personal and the social (re)public. “There is a moment,”DenBoer tells us, “when one has to take it/ all apart and put it back together.” “Call it: breaking & flowing.” Why, he challenges, “be unhappy, or afraid of this mixture?” Stonework is a collection for grown-ups,“one drop of blood, one drop of honey.”
— Susan Kelly-DeWitt
At last a selected DenBoer. How discerning his art is, how richly speculative.For example, the black dog in the final poem that I love more with each reading is other self and perfectly other – the poem is brilliantly poised, thrilling. “I fish,” DenBoer says in another poem, “for something in my mind/like steelhead -- fast, tough,/ running deep and toothed.” Toothed!
— Dennis Schmitz
Stonework: Selected Poems
James DenBoer
The Walter Pavlich Memorial Poetry Award 2007
Swan Scythe Press, Smashwords Edition, 2010
Copyright © 2010 by James DenBoer
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-930454-29-3
Swan Scythe Press
515 P Street #804
Sacramento CA 95814
Editor: James DenBoer
Book Design: David den Boer
Cover Design: Mark Deamer
Cover Art: Clarence Major
The poems in this book are, with only a few exceptions, from Learning The Way, University of Pittsburgh Press, winner of the U. S. Award of the International Poetry Forum; Trying To Come Apart, University of Pittsburgh Press, winner of a National Council on the Arts Award; Lost in Blue Canyon, Christopher’s Books; and Dreaming of the Chinese Army, Blue Thunder Press. “We Might Change” was first published in The Iowa Review.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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I.
Direct strokes [Nature] never gave us power to make;
all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents.
Emerson, Experience
LEARNING THE WAY
After the fall of first snow,
we start our game of tracking
on bluffs above Lake Michigan.
I read up in summer on the knacks
of Indians, and practiced them
on friends a half hour back;
learned to leap from grass clump
to stone, find hard ways to go
over frozen fields. Alone,
escaping, with the slow boom
of waves against packed ice
cracking below, I tested the limits
of my self by itself.
Plains winds tuned the steps
of those intricate dances.
DEAD FROG
I’m always reaching
for things to throw to keep
things back;
the belly of the dead frog
glowed like a stone
on the dark road.
My common mistake:
to take flesh for stone
or stone for flesh.
FROM THE NORTH NORTHEAST
The weather held all week,
from the north northeast,
rain full of salt, wind steady,
not cold, daily grays and whites
more colorful than the dry
purple and white weeds
in ditches along the road.
This weather will not pass.
Tall lunar fleshed weeds
cupped their seeds among
guarding thistles. At the edge
of the surf the whip
of wind would knock
you down; we held each other
against it, the breathing
of this beast at land's
end. Here in the wind,
we forgot the great cities,
streets and neon inland,
west and north
of this casual finger,
Hatteras Island. Then the lee
of the dunes was so sudden
a silence that, staggering, we
still feared that sound,
that it would leap again over
thin red slatted fencing
and rows of sown dune grass.
Above, heavy clouds flow
darkly through dark distances.
AFTER SHARK AT HATTERAS
Slit the belly of a ray,
scrape its guts out with a knife:
this is one way you get bait
for shark. The stripped intestines
gleam with color on wet sand
as we chop them into pieces,
hook-size, and hook them twice.
Bury the ray in a shallow
grave, just above waves'
reach and wash. Its tail sticks
up an inch or two to show us where.
The mess of guts goes in a pail
and I push my hands in to feel
whatever life is left there.
Harsh day -- surf crashing
like stones around our legs,
and out in dark currents,
running back and forth, fins
of shark and their heavy backs
cut and heave through chop.
So much we need does not need us.
Our hands freeze and ache with salt
in small cuts from hook,
knife and grass. The shark
are far beyond us, and our reach,
cruising on their own long
round and cast for food.
We reel in, then, and throw the pail
of ray guts in the surf -- the unlonging
dark-finned shark outlast us,
searching beyond breakers, where water
backs up against the bar and fills
with food. We cast and stumble
at waves’ edge. Our prints fill.
We head back of dunes.
ON ISLE ROYALE
-- for Stuart Kingma and Nicholas Wolterstorff
1. First Day In
Rocks give up lichen
to sun: gray, lime green,
white, bright orange, black;
we crush through with boots,
getting color photographs.
Back from shore dark trees
cage hidden moose and wolves
together in the northern nights.
Loon screams to loon.
Pike sulk and mosey in weeds
ringing inland ponds.
We kneel to worship mushrooms,
dead-white Indian pipe;
strip blueberries into our hats, then
sleep like logs near logs.
2. Small Lakes
The small lakes of the north
look up forever to the skies,
the forest whispers: look here,
look there. Sky drifts.
When the voices of pines,
maple, oak and birch speak,
we feel pressure
in our blood. Lakes see.
Clouds blow over,
stirring up birds,
forest flowers: bunchberry,
hepatica. Forest speaks.
Clouds feel the beat of veins,
whisper of blood coursing
down to lakes; we speak
to trees: here, here.
3. Sea Blood Lakes Eyes
Seas are continuous
and salt as blood, making no
distinctions (drawing
from a vein in the crook
of an elbow is the same
as drawing from a blue vein
that lies across the bones
of the ankle); a definition
of fresh water is
its disjunction, the diversity
of that which ponds or lakes,
as eyes, see (light drawn
from quartz in stone,
sheen of wet hair
on deer or beaver,
dark leaves shining underfoot,
light seen differently as
every dream) deep and clear.
4. Fallen Birch
I balance to the end
of a birch fallen in water
to angle for long pike,
edge out from the rotting
bank, no anchor for roots
cut under by water.
Deep in branches, I cast
straight up and out,
wait for the slow
pull against my reeling.
Pack-rod guides glint
like small suns in leaves.
Between earth and water,
I angle to this end,
vain for reach to deep water,
beyond shore-strength,
and now am caught, branched
and yearning, baited --
then a fish bumped bumped
hit, and I set it hard
from the weakness
of my longing. Leaves shivered
bright side up around
my face, water fed beneath me
at the shore, as I hauled
against the reluctant muscle
of a single-minded,
deeply committed, artless pike.
5. Land Asks
What's in you? our best land asks,
insists there is an answer,
that you know it, and encourages
best answers. I give my best answer:
nothing between me and what is.
I am well-prepared:
good boots, good pack, good hat.
There are things I fear
that do not stop me
from going on. I remember
what is best remembered,
forgive myself for what I must
forget. A cow moose and calf
browse down the meadow to water,
a loon stays under until
her cry has died across the lake,
wolf tracks shine near
our fish-cleaning stump at dawn.
MY HANDS
Bumpy and ridged
as Wisconsin, with tics
beneath their skin
like a cow shuddering flies
up into airy circles:
small, tight and angry.
Neat fields etched
in the moraine,
trout streams
simple creeks.
Sometimes my fingers
are silos, fly-rods,
and the veins like ropes
in a bull's nose-ring
or the lay of long mounds
where we dug clay shards
and Indian arrowheads.
The knuckles are boxcar
couplings, radio dials,
faces of old friends.
My fingers lie like five
jetties to protect this shore
from the Great Lakes' seven-
year rise and fall;
my hands teach: Our scarring
was useful. Open. Take.
HERE THERE IS NO PLACE
Here there is no place to grip:
all Wisconsin is fat country-side
in summer, stupid as butter.
Always a buzzing in grasses.
Everyone does his work.
Farms settle like cows,
rows of corn rattle slow tails.
Over green ponds dragonflies sing.
Each small town dreaming
of a court-house, a radio station
above the bank.
Children calling on empty school-grounds.
Heading home to Trenton,
the veins on the backs of my hands
pump as I crush the map.
TAUXEMONT AFTERNOON
for all the Surovells
In that branch of religion which regards the moralities of
life, and the duties of a social being, which teaches us to
love our neighbors as ourselves, and to do good to all men,
I am sure that you and I do not differ.
Thomas Jefferson, to Ezra Stiles
June 25, 1819, Monticello
I.
We gather here at Tauxemont
for warmth; together with wide
split-cane rakes on this half-acre
of Virginia's commonwealth,
in blue jeans, old Army shirts,
we hoard this wealth that grew
on trees, or bushes -- sharing
bourbon from a bottle on a stump,
naming trees and bushes,
or their leaves: willow oak,
birch, magnolia, chestnut,
hickory, red maple, walnut --
here leaves are raked five times
each fall for compost; heaped up,
carried off in baskets, stuffed
into a chicken-wire bin
staked out behind the shed,
they draw red, gold, bright yellow,
black, magenta from a far November
sun. The fires of decomposition
burn deep -- plunge your arms into
these millions and feel heat!
II.
Virginia, you are graveyard
of Presidents -- down these roads
Presidents have paced, and now
are buried beneath our feet:
from first to Kennedy.
Pale light flickers on a hillside
in Arlington; cut-glass chandeliers
at Mount Vernon stir in empty rooms.
Some burn their leaves in Tauxemont
and from low hills we see smoke
flow into hollows between
cheap tract houses -- smoke
of history in our lungs and eyes.
As for this America of millions --
is there any warmth among us? Massed
together in the rising wind, we wait
dark storms closing from December
and the cold Atlantic, while west of here
our history wisps away, smoking
across the Pacific to disappear
in Asian jungles, among exotic leaves,
new territories -- as our cities die around us.
We are breaking down under this slow
chemistry to smoke and ash
drifting across this land toward winter,
last few months of a dark year.
III.
. . . is it possible to have a small circle of friends,
friends of grace and purpose . . . on a basis of mutual
respect, work, and a kind of humorous informal
dignity, in the United States?
Clancy Sigal, Going Away
Know your friends! Keep them close
for warmth, calm in the maelstrom
from across the Potomac outward everywhere.
Time to rest, in this half-acre backyard
beneath dark trees, near brittle plants:
centered, in this eye that sees friends
close. Sharing bourbon and good cheese,
we sprawl in chairs left out from
the Fourth -- our celebration of the death
of Jefferson -- to catch the final sun,
and watch dark clouds heap up east
of here. A chilling wind is rising
cold through our shirts, bringing
last leaves down, to lie unraked till spring.
We end our Saturday, gathering
rakes and sweaters from the lawn,
stacking baskets by the shed.
Small circle, we make jokes inside
around a fire, where pine twigs snap
and blaze between rich silences of Bach;
ice cracks and melts in glasses
on the hearth. We do not differ
in the worship of this warmth.
Night begins to settle in the eaves.
Each hour dark settles the plains,
mountains, far white beaches,
and for America the sun goes out.
Leaves scratch along the road through
shadows that are trees or Presidents;
last fires smoke red below us, west.
THE JAR
My sky is low, gray;
an inversion holds
slow air and wood smoke
over the city. April
in this room, where
dullness smothers;
all color's drawn
to one jar, thrown
on a stranger's wheel,
glazed earth red,
adobe, umber,
smoldering sienna.
I have been promised
love, despite myself,
and have seen
in the depth of glaze
all I lack -- not of color
but of depth --
creator, there are many
flaws. I cross the room,
touch orange, centering.
WE MIGHT CHANGE
-- for Ernie Brower
Geese feel low pressure
in the canals of their skulls, cold
along the spines of each feather;
deer break thin ice
at the edges of springs
with their light hooves, and we,
moving through the solstice,
say, Now we might change
the way we live, trying again
for connection, asking the old gods
in the stone, the wheel
of December stars, in our warm bodies,
to tell us: what you want
is possible.
Choose what the animals
choose -- live until spring.
II
Then all our words are words of grief
. . . . sealing off the return of the world,
as if punishing ourselves for having pain.
Stanley Cavell, in “Finding as Founding,”
musing on ¶90 of the Philosophical Investigations
OUR OWN WATER
Our own water, from our own well,
hard, mineral, rusty --
turning the tap just to taste it,
I can feel cold behind my eyes,
can smell how many miles
it ran from high snow
past deer and mountain quail.
I have to sit down for a minute
when I taste bear dung
in our water -- it's the old male,
brown, dusty, back of Wellman Burn.
Our water has moved pebbles
shaped like hearts (I found one
in San Ysidro Creek), boulders,
whole mountains, shaped
the earth -- taste it, taste it!
In my blue enameled cup, our water
is white as milk at first;
clearing, it whispers at the edges
of my mouth, runs in my neck
under my shirt, cool as a lizard.
Sometimes I go in the kitchen,
only to taste our water; I have to sit down
and look out the window for a while,
watch air opening leaves.
It turns down the drain
with the turning earth, our water,
running away to rain.
FIRST RAINS
In winter the rains begin,
flooding our drive
and blocking all the drains
with leaves and twigs;
dead gopher, drowned, floats
in the lake under the car --
lists again! Wet leaves,
dead stems, open blank eyes
of a stiff gopher, rains,
sticks -- this is any good only
if I can get everything in:
dripping live oak,
hissing fire burning
cut brush, powerful sky
building above gray mountains,
sow-bug curling in my palm.
Look, look at things closely,
they rage to the close eye,
intractable, stone-hard;
can they flame out into air,
touching the skin of the world,
even the faintest touch?