Beyond the Masks
New & Selected Poems
by
Harvey Stanbrough
Copyright 2011 by Harvey Stanbrough
Published by Red Willow Digital Press
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Dedication
for all of us, observers all,
who live and strive to see beyond the masks
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges prior publication of various poems in this collection in ByLine, The Candlelight Poetry Journal, Castalian Springs, Feelings, The Formalist, Penny Dreadful, The Raintown Review, and Tucumcari Literary Review. Some of the poems herein were previously collected in Lessons for a Barren Population (Hardshell Word Factory, 1999), Residua (WJM Press, 1998), and Intimations of the Shapes of Things (WJM Press, 2001). The author also gratefully acknowledges John Oelfke and Central Avenue Press for having first published the print version of this book and for nominating it for the National Book Award in 2006.
On Viewing a Road Gang, Incidentally
Lessons for a Barren Population, 2v.
The Leading Man Thinks to Strike
Concerning a Quiet Mystery of Life
The Magic Cakes: The Story of Little Red Cap Retold
For My Part, After Christmas, Having Slogged
Intimations of the Shapes of Things
One Evening Beneath the Summer Sky
Something about the cosmos comes to mind,
something tragic, something without end:
something about amœba growing larger
flailing through the ages into fish
crawling onto land and growing legs
fur and feathers, hands and claws and wings
black white brown red yellow skin and hair
then building gods, inventing them and kneeling
to their Names and to their Sons and killing
others in the name of those god-Names
then begging off responsibility
because those gods could wash away their sins
and leave the overgrown amœba clean,
washed as if its cilia were pure.
Residua, 3v.
"November, n. The eleventh twelfth of a weariness."
~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
I
I would invoke the muses here, but fear
their shoulders turned and cold might render this
a failure, and I couldn’t bear to fail
unless I blamed the failure on myself,
as is my earned inheritance. Instead
I will invoke the reader, you who sought
this mirror and who search it, hoping both
you will and will not find herein yourself:
This is your verdict, your portrait, your fault,
a meager shot at a superficial redemption
of sorts. We take them when we can, don’t we?
We all need that redemption, though we seek
and find it in our different ways. My way
will course along your bloodstream, through your thoughts
and back to me through careful observation
until it comes to rest upon a page
much like this one for all the world to see,
for you are my redemption. You—reader
and subject in the same soft shell—provide
the wheat that screams between the stones of this
unobtrusive mill of Things, and I,
the miller in this case, provide the bread,
the chance to dine upon yourself. How rare
this mild occasion is, and how painless,
for as you read herein your faults and ills,
you read your neighbor’s too, and that, my friend,
makes the drifting finally worthwhile.
II
My father had a bout with lust and lost
(as he was wont to do, he threw the fight)
and loved the woman of his current dreams,
filling her with more than warmth that day,
remorse and other sorry, soggy stuff,
and I was born, as was my wand’ring pen,
into a weariness, a wandering,
from this sweet fruit to that. I have sought
Things that cause a smile; avoided
Things that bite and sting (as I have learned
most Things do if given time
and opportunity); and absorbed
what I could absorb. I’ve come to find
no oddness in this wandering: no place
to go where none has gone before; no pain
that has not been endured by someone else;
no thing I have affected over much;
and finally, no thing that has escaped
this subtle influence—this ragged pen—
scrawled across some surface, once pristine
until it suffered me and this loud touch.
III
Most Things wander, wearily, from things
to other things and other things, then fall,
left out or over from some larger Thing
or Things, and seldom learn a direct route
from sanity to sanity to home
or any plot they might call home. Things fall
and die and rot and are forgotten there,
the flotsam-jetsam of a muddled past
remembered in the hearts of other Things
but only in a few. They seldom leave
anything as bold or consequential
as poems speaking loudly and concretely,
calling things not Things but by their names—
persons, places, actions, and events.
Sadly, though, sometimes Things
are things and nothing else, and at such times
things must be called Things, appropriate
to atoms, molecules, and combinations
of those smaller Things, which, after all
comprise the lot of us and every Thing
and matter not at all, as we do not,
our one redeeming trait our group omission,
that we have been left out, residua
shoved hard aside, a disturbing fact
everywhere substantiated. So
without concrete, specific imagery,
here I record that drastic omission
of Things from other, greater, larger Things,
that you might be forewarned: to be a common
Thing is to exist. You must affect
the other Things around you; strive to leave
them out as often as is practical;
let them, not you, become residua.
IV
Don’t you tell your children Be SomeThing?
And don’t you, with that same advice, advise
them to do what they must to affect
the other Things around them? Don’t you wish
that other Things would not omit your children,
leave them mere residua? We slide
from one omission to the next, each Thing
among us lesser, greater, and the same
as every other thing, and we avoid
the lessons of omission in no way;
nor do we spare the other Things, whose paths
we cross, the lessons we would have them learn.
And so it goes, this weariness, a drifting
from remorse into regret and back,
my pen my greatest comfort, and a book
my solace in this funny little world
where so few laugh and where so many die
and seldom spend a second looking forward,
too busy simply striving to survive
their past and what some others thrust upon them:
residua in the true sense of the word.
V
Residua, as it is used herein
should not be misconstrued to mean the poems—
that is, these varied works were not left out
of some great tome you missed during trips
to libraries and bookstores—no, Dear Friend,
residua refers to you and me,
the common Things, left out from time to time
of some great feat or cause or some grand notion
in which we might have played a worthy role.
Residua refers to everyone
but Neil Armstrong, whose footprint marked the moon;
and everyone who’s never stood in line
to serve or sup on soup on Friday morning
and all of those who have; and everyone
whose parents were divorced and everyone
whose weren’t but wished they were; and everyone
who prays in every church for everyone
who doesn’t belong to theirs; and all the meek
and all the pushy bastards; everyone
who’s fought in war or on a picket line
or in a bar or on a seedy street,
and everyone who’s never fought at all
except their guilt at never having fought;
and everyone whose hands are calloused;
everyone’s whose aren’t; everyone
who’s given birth and all of those who can’t.
Residua refers to everyone
left out of anything at any time,
in any way at all—the non-essential
chaff remaining when the wheat has gone,
those whose job it is to ooh and aah
at any great event that slings past them:
Residua refers to you and me.
VI
We occupy the shopping malls and stores,
the city parks, the broken marriages,
each city, every state, and every nation—
the wops, wasps, spics, kikes, gooks,
cops, thugs, bikers, politicians,
injuns, lawyers, hookers, prima freakin’
donnas, former girl- and boyfriends,
computer geeks, librarians, and barbers,
housewives, butchers, bakers, editors,
prophets, preachers, seminary students,
plumbers, comics, writers, movie stars,
spies, explorers, witches, prisoners,
haberdashers, guards, adventurers,
role models, craftsmen, publishers,
novelists, readers, and dead poets,
the best looking, the ugliest, the mean,
the rich, poor, fat, thin, healthy,
vegetarians and all the rest—
who share the trait: We’ve all been left behind,
residua of families and clubs,
remainders of society gone trite.
VII
Just as a mirror, closing on itself,
reflects itself and everything and nothing,
having also shut against the light,
so might this mirror work either way,
providing reflection or reflexion,
what you need or what some others need
the sight of self (the surface, to be sure,
holding certain items in reserve)
or the sight of someone else’s self,
less interesting but more enjoyable,
and practically begging your benevolence.
Now aren’t you kind? But here’s the truth:
This simple mirror shadows your dismay
that what you thought a special, secret sin
for which you might never be forgiven
is also special to some million others
who, like you, thought themselves the special sinner,