The Last Visit: Poems
by
Chad Abushanab, MFA
A Dissertation
In
English/Creative Writing
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY
Dr. John Poch Chair of Committee
Dr. William Wenthe
Dr. Curtis Bauer
Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School
May, 2019
Copyright 2019, Chad Abushanab Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the editors of the publications in which the following poems, sometimes in slightly different versions, first appeared:
32 Poems, “Halloween” The Believer, “Silva’s Quarry” Best New Poets, “On the Dred Ranch Road Just Off 283” Birmingham Poetry Review, “Poem Begun in a West Texas Corn Maze” Ecotone, “Boys” The Hopkins Review, “Dead Town,” “Cheating in a Small Town,” “Drinking All Night in Tennessee,” and “Plastic Men” Literary Matters, “The Dive” and “Missing” Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, “Girl Found Dead in the Sequatchie Valley” The New Criterion, “Visiting My Own Grave” The Raintown Review, “Restless” Rockhurst Review, “Toward Your Understanding” Shenandoah, “Small Funeral” Southeast Review, “The Future of the Past” Southern Poetry Review, “A Voice from the Wreck” The Stirring, “Love Poem with Five Lines Stolen from VHS Tapes” Unsplendid, “Necessary Rituals” Wildness, “Negatives Under Microscope”
Acknowledgment is also due to Texas Tech University and the TTU English Department for the following recognitions and support: Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Texas Tech University 2018-2019 Graduate Student Research Assistance Grant, Texas Tech University 2017 William Bryan Gates Graduate Award in English, Texas Tech University 2017 Mary Sue Carlock/Joyce Thompson Scholarship, Texas Tech University 2016 Benjamin Rude Memorial Scholarship, Texas Tech University 2015 Helen Devitt Jones Scholarship in Creative Writing, Texas Tech University 2014- 2016
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ii
ABSTRACT...... v v
I. INTRODUCTION...... 1
1. Poetry as Fiction...... 3 2. The Idiom of Human Spontaneity...... 11 3. Contemporary Formalism: Modality of Verse and Narrative Cohesion...... 19 4. A Poetry of the American South...... 30
II. THE LAST VISIT...... 38
Negatives Under Microscope...... 39 The Factory...... 40 Plastic Men...... 41 The Way...... 42 Dead Town...... 43 Ghazal...... 44 Toward Your Understanding...... 45 Missing...... 46 Confession: Silva’s Quarry...... 47 Boys...... 48 Found Dead in the Sequatchie Valley...... 49 The Dive...... 50 The Future of the Past...... 51 To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage...... 52 Cheating in a Small Town...... 53 Ghazal...... 54 Again...... 55 Layover After Visiting My Father...... 56 Poem Begun in a West Texas Corn Maze...... 57 Ghazal...... 58 A Haunted House...... 59 Restless...... 60 Custody Denied...... 61 Ghazal...... 62 Roadkill Ode...... 63 Visiting My Own Grave...... 64 Halloween...... 65 Love Poem with Five Lines Stolen from VHS Boxes...... 66 Drive-In...... 67
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Ghazal...... 68 Drinking All Night in Tennessee...... 69 Small Funeral...... 70 Desert Elegy...... 71 A Voice from the Wreck...... 72 Ghazal...... 73 Rubáiyát for My Father...... 74 Necessary Rituals...... 75 The Landlocked Lighthouse...... 77 Love Poem with Desert and Stars...... 78 On the Dred Ranch Road Just Off 283...... 79 Hometown Knowledge...... 80 The Phone...... 81 The Last Visit...... 82
WORKS CITED...... 83
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ABSTRACT
The Last Visit is a book of poems that primarily explores the breaking down of families: fathers struggling with violent tendencies and addictions, mothers who stand strong in the face of enduring abuse, and children who want to escape all this only to find themselves forever haunted by the habits and memories of home. Set in and around the rural South, these poems place the characters against the background of small town life, paying particular attention to how these relationships and communities erode over time.
The speakers in this book range from fed-up wives to suicidal fathers, from confessing murderers to lovelorn werewolves, and from children suffering abuses to the complicated and questioning adults they ultimately become. Yet along the way, there are moments of undeniable tenderness and compassion as even the darkest characters find space for redemption and a desire to capture something beautiful in the most harrowing of moments.
Additionally, the poems in The Last Visit are very much interested in poetic form, often times manifesting in traditional received verseforms like the sonnet,
Ghazal, or ballad, among others. The chosen form for each poem speaks, in some way, to the world of that poem, and ideally augments the reading experience by inviting the reader to consider the specifics of its arrangement, and to read it against the language and meaning of the piece as it unfolds.
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
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For many, somewhere along the line, poetry became inseparable from non-fiction and autobiography. Readers came to expect, or even demand, that a poet’s work be a mirror held up to his or her own life and experience. It may have started with the
Confessional poets, but they understood that to write a poem means crafting a kind of fiction, and that the details that make art interesting quite often diverge from the details of biography. For me, the goal is convincing the reader of a poem’s “truth,” though it remains for all intents and purposes fiction. This means striking a balance between life lived and life imagined—harvesting what details one can from one’s own experiences and then using these details to populate a poem that moves beyond experience. In the world of my poems, I recognize many places, figures, behaviors—but the narrative consciousness that emerges in the book is not meant to be a reflection of my own “story.”
Rather, it feels more like the work of some Doppelganger. I see much of myself in these poems, but chasing down those thoughts and impulses that seemed beyond myself kept me writing; I began to simultaneously learn and create the speakers of the poems. All this in an effort to build voices that compel the reader to believe them, to take them at their word.
In order to craft such a book, I relied on four key concepts—ideas that will be explored individually in each subsequent section of this introduction. They are:
1) Considering the relationship between poetry and fiction, and how the latter might inform the former.
2) Cultivating the idiom of human spontaneity—a technique devised to recreate something closer to actual thought and speech reflected in verse.
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3) Utilizing traditional poetic formal techniques to create narrative cohesion.
4) Putting emphasis on place—in this case, the American South.
Section 1. Poetry as a Fiction
I spend a considerable amount of time writing and thinking about fiction, both short and long form. This is not unusual, of course. Some of our finest poets have also shown an interest in producing prose fiction, and some of my most loved fiction writers have a penchant for writing poetry here and there. Learning the craft of one genre helps to further understand another. Studying fiction can teach a lot about writing effective poetry—things that often times get left out, or at least not explicitly discussed, in poetry craft books (especially those designed for students of the art). One such idea comes from what Tom Bailey calls in his guide to short fiction, A Short Story Writer’s Companion,
“fictional truth” (Bailey 4). Seemingly paradoxical, Bailey defines “fictional truth” as the act of convincing a reader that what he or she reads is real. Of course, each reader goes into the act of reading fiction knowing, as Eudora Welty put it, “Fiction is a lie.” And yet, if the story or book has enough strength, the reader may find herself having an emotional response much akin to those reserved for so-called “true stories.” Intellectually, the reader knows the events of fiction remain confined to the page, the product of the author’s and reader’s imagination. And yet, the mind and body can still respond as if it is real.
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I argue that poems can, and often do, operate in the same way. While the pressurized nature of poetic language certainly does not allow for the level of “fictional truth” building afforded to writers of fiction, I believe it should still be the goal of the poet to work towards it. A great poem often feels like a pipette plunged through a novel cover to cover. The extracted material maintains the depth of the novel while taking on the laser-focus of a poem. It not only exists in its own narrative or lyrical moment, but also implies a past and a future. Meaning: I believe that things came before this moment in the world of the poem, and I am left speculating as to what comes after. This mechanism keeps me returning to the start of my favorite poems just after finishing them, much the way a great novel makes me want to turn to the beginning immediately after reaching the end.
A striking example of such technique is Donald Justice’s early poem “In
Bertram’s Garden.” The poem begins with Jane, getting dressed after a tryst with
Bertram:
Jane looks down at her organdy skirt As if it somehow were the thing disgraced, For being there, on the floor, in the dirt, And she catches it up about her waist, Smooths it out along one hip, And pulls it over the crumpled slip.
On the porch, green-shuttered, cool, Asleep is Bertram, that bronze boy, Who, having wound her around a spool, Sends her spinning like a toy Out to the garden, all alone, To sit and weep on a bench of stone.
Soon the purple dark must bruise Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
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And the little cupid lose Eyes and ears and chin and nose, And Jane lie down with others soon, Naked to the naked moon.
In 18 short lines, Justice gives us a peak into the dark relationship between Jane and
Bertram. The situation—sex comingling with shame and a difference in perspective on the importance of the act itself—is both familiar and complex. This certainly helps to build “fictional truth.” As do the specificity of the details: the “organdy skirt,” the dirty floor of the Bertram’s home, the stone bench, the cupid statue losing features in the dark.
But what truly cements the “fictional truth” of the poem is the language that points us elsewhere—the implication of things that have passed, and of what is to follow. Here, we open on Jane getting dressed, feeling “disgraced” by the sexual encounter that occurred before the poem began. The reader imagines this unshown tryst, and considers what about it made her feel this way. When we learn of Bertram’s callousness—retreating to the porch for a post-coital nap instead of comforting Jane—it helps us to imagine their encounter and what it must have been like to leave her in such a state of distress. The final stanza does an immensely effective job of pulling us out of the moment of the poem and thrusting us into the future. From the introduction of the coming night—“Soon the purple dark must bruise…”—the poem pulls utilizes the word “and” to pull us along.
First we watch the Cupid’s face grow indistinguishable in the failing light, with each feature given its own “and” until the conjunction pulls us away from Cupid and back to
Jane. In this moment, we are told not what’s happening, but what will happen: “And Jane lie down with others soon,/ Naked to the naked moon.”
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While the poem’s title clearly positions us “In Bertram’s Garden,” it is something like a sleight of hand trick. The poet deftly directs our attention to accomplish this—to make us believe that a present exists because it has a past and future. This technique works in this case largely because the poet leans on a narrative mode of delivering the poem. Stories—in the general sense of the word—depend on beginnings, middles, and ends. The reader, positioned in what seems to be the middle of a story, finds it easier to believe the beginning and ending must exist somewhere. So what about more lyrically minded poetry? Can this technique be seen in poems that rely far less on narrative? I believe so, yes. In considering this question, I often look back to A.E. Stallings’ sonnet
“Explaining an Affinity for Bats”:
That they are only glimpsed in silhouette, And seem something else at first—a swallow— And move like new tunes, difficult to follow, Staggering towards an obstacle they yet Avoid in a last-minute pirouette, Somehow telling solid things from hollow, Sounding out how high a space, or shallow, Revising into deepening violet.
That they sing—not the way the songbird sings (Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)— But travel by a sort of song that rings True not in utterance, but harkenings, Who find their way by calling into darkness To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.
It is a much different poem from “In Bertram’s Garden.” We see no specific setting (such as the garden), nor do we see anything “happen,” per se. No one leaves the house and cries on a bench. No one takes a nap on the porch. Instead, we have the lyric voice of the
6 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 speaker drawing ghostly connections between bats, poetry, and song in a didactic though tender manner. Still, we see movements pushing the reader beyond the edge of the poem’s utterance, albeit in a more abstract way.
In this case, consider the title “Explaining an Affinity for Bats.” The very act of explanation implies that some information vacuum exists, and that the speaker explains for a reason. Something occurred that moved the speaker to not just pronounce, but expound on the affinity. Whether this is because the speaker stands outside, watching the bats and following the associations they bring, or because someone simply asked her to clarify why she feels a sympathetic relationship with the flying mammals, we can only speculate. Of course, the motivation or situation is much more open to interpretation than
“In Bertram’s Garden,” but there is the subtle and powerful notion that this poem did not spring from nothingness. Rather, we can imagine it as situational, and as such can believe this speaker exists in her own “fictionally true” timeline that extends beyond the confines of the page. It is a subtle consideration, for sure, and yet I feel it lends an urgency to the speaker’s argument (tying poets to bats, echolocation to poems)—as though triggered by something, and necessary rather than incidental. When we reach the second stanza, repeating the syntax of the poem’s opening “That they…” it lends purpose to the repetition. The speaker tries to convince the reader/listener of this mystic affinity, and stylizes the rhetorical approach to suit this purpose.
I utilize this technique a good deal in The Last Visit, and I will bring in a couple of examples where I am doing so narratively, as in Justice’s poem, or more implicitly like the Stallings sonnet. First, let us look at my short poem, “Drive-In”:
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Footsteps stop outside the door. His heavy boots divide the light that creeps across her bedroom floor, and the knob turns slowly to the right.
Forever, she’ll replay this scene. The killer grins down from the screen. Inside a desperate, foggy car, her pleated skirt is pushed too far.
This poem owes a lot to the impression “In Bertram’s Garden” made on me when I first read it almost 10 years ago. The dramatic situation of “Drive-In” is certainly similar to
Justice’s poem, each with their own problematic physical encounters. My poem is written in a semi-obscure Italian form called the Rispetto, which feels like a tiny sonnet with its opportunities for voltas and final stanza of couplets. Likewise, “Bertram” is written in sestets with concluding couplets. Even the skirt makes an appearance in my poem, though pleated rather than organdy. What I find most significant—and am frankly most proud of—is the way this poem puts the reader at the drive-in theater during an explicitly specific moment in time, and yet propels the reader forward in the life of the unnamed character, imagining the “forever” for which she will be forced to play this scene (both on the screen and in the car) out in her mind.
I believe there is more to this poem, of course. I could discuss the way in which the first stanza becomes fantasy while the second becomes the reality, mirroring the image of a drive-in. Or how the “she” gets lost somewhere between the screen and car.
But I feel that even getting far enough for such an analysis to feel productive depends upon my ability to make the dramatic situation mirror the reader’s own perception of reality. I am reminded of Kenneth Koch, who in a poem said, “We are not inside a bottle,
8 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 thank goodness!” (Koch 80). Indeed, we are rarely static creatures, and so we respond to poems who present themselves as non-static as well.
In terms of being more implicitly in the style of “Explaining an Affinity for Bats,”
I point to my poem “Confession: Silva’s Quarry.” While this poem lacks the purer lyrical quality of Stallings’s poem, I feel the title goes a long way towards setting up the dramatic situation of the piece. “Confession: Silva’s Quarry” finds its shape as a kind of dramatic monologue wherein the speaker details hiding the body of a murder victim in a flooded rock quarry:
“It seemed we were doing some good by dumping the body in the quarry;…
The title, however, implies a story being told in form of a confession to someone else— perhaps in a church or the interrogation room of a police station. These implications change the way we hear the tone of the speaker’s voice. It also suggests a past—the
“confession” commences in medias res, much after the actual murder—as well as a future beyond the final line. What are the consequences of this confession? What happens to this speaker and to the family of the victim? What of the other men or boys involved in the crime? These things go unspoken. And perhaps that is what much of this technique seems to boil down to: providing details that suggest, but do not entirely address, what lies beyond the poem. It is important for there to be spaces left open to the reader’s imagination. However, we need to suggest an emotional shape for empty space so the reader can create the missing piece and allow it to become a part of their experience of the poem.
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I should point out, too, the technique of enclosing the entire poem in quotation marks. It is not terribly unusual to see quotation marks in poems—you will find much dialogue and dramatic staging in Frost, for example—but the practice of placing an entire poem inside of these marks seems to accomplish something different. It suddenly feels like captured speech—like something overheard and then recorded. I borrow this from
Robert Lowell’s poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage.” Lowell’s poem is a monologue from the perspective of a wife whose husband is constantly getting drunk, visiting prostitutes, and generally being terrible. That it is a monologue already creates a certain kind of kinship with fictional truth, as we are compelled to more implicitly imagine a “character” for the voice. Containing the entire thing within quotation marks then creates another layer fictional truth, making the reader consider more carefully the origin of the language on the page. Of course, our suspension of disbelief will only take us so far—the Lowell poem is written in rhyming couplets, after all—but there is nonetheless an important dynamic between fiction and truth being manipulated by this seemingly simple choice of punctuation. I believe that my attempt to capture this dynamic in “Confession: Silva’s Quarry” is perhaps made all the more “believable,” so to speak, by rendering the poem in a loose blank verse with far more reliance on plain style speech, hopefully making this poem all the more realistic and affecting.
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Section 2. The Idiom of Human Spontaneity
In this section, I explore the idiom of human spontaneity— a technique devised to recreate something closer to actual thought and speech reflected in verse. In Poetry as
Persuasion, Carl Dennis spends a chapter titled “Midcourse Corrections” describing a particular effect cultivated in poetry wherein the speaker seems to be finding his or her way towards the ultimate topic of the poem. Dennis gives us as an example Robert
Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” and demonstrates how Lowell spends the first five stanzas of the poem making observations of private concern before finally moving on to the public concern of America’s relationship to its past (Dennis 123). To a degree, a move like this trades some authority for a sense of genuine humanity in the voice of the speaker. While we do not get the feeling of a pristinely structured argument being unfolded in verse, we do get a sense that a uniquely human consciousness is using association and memory to reach something important beyond the scope assumed early in the poem.
Dennis goes on to describe how a similar move occurs in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “At the Fishhouses.” He takes particular interest in her shift from purely imagistic observations about her surroundings to lines that “boldly generalize on the human experience,” noting that this radical shift in tone is highlighted by the speaker’s inability to face her description of the sea, falling back twice on the description “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” (133-134). However, more so than demonstrating the speaker’s inability to face a particular description, I believe it shows a willingness of the poet to revise herself, re-using a line in order to see it function in the context of new lines, as
11 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 though testing the waters to find the best usage. To me, this creates the illusion of a mind at work with less concern for how traditionally “poetic” the process of thinking may be.
We see this happen repeatedly in Bishop’s poems, though one particular example occurs in “Poem,” wherein the speaker describes what is first thought to be an unfamiliar painting:
It must be Nova Scotia; only there does one see gabled wooden houses painted that awful shade of brown.
The object itself—that is, the painting and the frame—are known to the speaker. She appears to know its lineage of ownership, as evidenced in the opening lines of the poem, but the example above clearly shows that, in her mind, the painting remains the rendering of an unfamiliar place whose location she can only determine by using clues within the image itself. Suddenly, in the third stanza, the speaker has a moment of epiphany, which essentially un-does the investigating in much of the previous stanzas:
Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it! It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name.
Of course, it is uncertain—as the poem ultimately concludes itself—if this is memory projected onto the painting, or the painting triggering memory. It seems unlikely that the speaker can really see the farmer’s “barn backed on that meadow…” in the “one dab” of
“Titanium white.” But nonetheless, we feel convinced of this revelation, in large part due to the sudden exclamation in the middle of the poem. Too, we see a shift in language as thoughts come more quickly and become disordered. “It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name” shows the speaker shifting suddenly from one association to the next, from a place to a name, cutting the idea short syntactically without stopping
12 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 to clarify for the reader. It is genuine in that it feels like a mind in the act of having a great revelation, one that is so important the occasion of the poem cannot prevent it from suddenly changing the direction of things.
Too, this sudden shift acts as an occasion for Bishop to move from observation
(or, in this case, memory) to grander commentary about existence, as Dennis pointed out earlier in “At the Fishhouses.” In “Poem,” the speaker’s memories become increasingly specific, allowing her recollection to move far beyond the frame of the painting. She imagines instead the man who painted it, and how it found its way into her hands:
A sketch done in an hour, “in one breath,” once taken from a trunk and handed over. Would you like this? I’ll probably never have room to hang these things again. Your Uncle George, no mine, my Uncle George, he’d be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother when he went back to England.
In this passage, the speaker clearly quotes another’s speech, which reflects in the revisionary nature of the language: “Your Uncle George, no mine, my Uncle George.”
And yet, interestingly, this kind of speech mirrors the language used just a few lines later by the speaker when she starts to make her larger point about the nature of memory:
How strange. And it’s still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided—“visions” is too serious a word—our looks, two looks…
The speaker first goes with the more romanticized choice of “visions,” only to revise herself, with the em dash practically standing in for the word “no,” and choosing the more colloquial “looks” instead. This creates a beautiful meeting of the grandiose and the
13 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 human, as the utterance struggles to articulate large, impactful truths, and the language works to actively de-romanticize and humanize the way in which that truth is told.
If Bishop’s poems resemble a human voice in the act of struggling with grand things, then John Berryman’s poems in The Dream Songs may in some ways be seen as their converse, a poetic voice attempting to articulate human flaws and failures in grandiose poetic fashion. As such, I believe Berryman’s poems draw more attention to their “poem-ness” than Bishop’s. In terms of the metrical frame, while Bishop’s poems are unmistakably poems, Berryman’s Dream Songs, by virtue of their compact and repetitive metrical arrangement, appear to announce themselves more fully as poetic endeavors. This is apparent, too, in Berryman’s syntax, which often arranges itself in strange ways, or blends archaic syntactical arrangements with contemporary idioms. It is all very attention-getting—partly by virtue of the attention required to decode the speaker’s utterances—and seems closer to poetry as a kind of language machine than the snapshot of a mind in the process of finding its direction.
And yet, we get an overwhelming sense of humanity—albeit haunted and disordered—in Berryman’s Henry, the primary speaker of The Dream Songs—which is captured in the shifting modes of Berryman’s syntax. Most of The Dream Songs show
Henry capturing the day to day dramas of his life in the tightly controlled space of the poem. Syntactically, these renderings can move from confusing inversions to almost plain speech. Take, for example, the openings lines of the very first Dream Song:
Huffy Henry hid the day, unappeasable Henry sulked. I see his point,—a trying to put things over. It was the thought that they thought they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
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But he should have come out and talked.
By speaking about himself in the third-person, Henry gains a critical distance from his character, a distance he uses both to aestheticize the experience with the irregular, run-on syntax of “Huffy Henry hid the day,/ unappeasable Henry sulked,” and to comment critically on behaviors: “But he should have come out and talked.” There is a deliberate simplification of syntax between the first and last sentences excerpted above. And in the following lines, there is another sharp return to complex (although this time more pointedly archaic) sentence structure: “All the world like a woolen lover/ once did seem on Henry’s side.”
Gregory Orr, in his essay “Order and Disorder in Lyric Poetry,” discusses at length the spectrum on which syntax operates in poetry, concluding that
…syntax can function along the entire continuum from order to disorder, starting from the straightforward simplicity of the transitive sentence and extending to the passionate expressiveness of Yeats, and further toward the vitalizing or bewildering disorder of Hart Crane’s work. (Orr 33)
What is interesting in Berryman’s Dream Songs is the way in which we see the far ends of that continuum so deliberately colliding. It demonstrates the very human tendency to second guess one’s approach. In a sense, this is similar to what we see in Bishop, only
Berryman doesn’t change the course of his topic, but the syntactical medium through which the topic is explored, bouncing back and forth between complex and simple arrangements. Orr argues that disorderly syntax can create a sense of disorder, or can reflect a poem’s thematic elements of disorder (he uses Crane’s “Voyages” as an example). In Berryman, I feel we rather have a speaker hyper-aware of the destabilizing
15 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 effects of disordered syntax, and who uses such disruptions as a way to access new approaches to complicated ideas.
Depending on the ratio of complex to simple sentences, the weight either choice carries is affected. Take for example Dream Song 29, which begins with this iconic and complexly phrased sentence:
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart so heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good.
The sentence begins fairly simply—“There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart”— but then snowballs into complexity, ultimately introducing grammatical irregularities (“in all them time”) to further destabilize the meaning. The poem continues in this manner, with its sentences becoming increasingly complex, as though the speaker intentionally tries to obscure the ideas each sentence contains by scrambling the language. The poem—which seems to be about the weight of guilt and the ways in which one processes it—ultimately breaks down in its attempt to obfuscate its meanings when we land on the simple, declarative sentence, “Nobody is ever missing.” We feel a cryptic power in the straightforward nature of this sentence after so many winding syntactical puzzles, as though the human voice behind all of the poeticism has finally revealed itself.
The same is true of the ratio in reverse, wherein a series of simple sentences can lead up to a destabilizing shift in tone resulting from a sudden complexity of syntax.
Specifically, I am thinking of Dream Song 22, “Of 1826.” In this poem, the speaker uses a repeating syntactical arrangement over 12 of the poem’s 18 lines, each beginning with
“I am..”:
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I am the little man who smokes & smokes. I am the girl who does know better but. I am the king of pool. I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.
This pattern continues, each time reaching a new state or identity. It is not until the third stanza that we see one of Berryman’s trademarked complex sentences:
Collect: while the dying man, forgone by you creator, who forgives, is gasping ‘Thomas Jefferson still lives’ in vain, in vain, in vain.
This is the moment where the speaker moves away from the “I” and instead attempts to address a “you,” the creator. Except, unlike when Elizabeth Bishop moves to her grand statements, the sentence becomes deliberately complex and disordered, again obscuring the true meaning of the utterance. It is as though the speaker, when faced with powers outside himself, is unable to clearly articulate his positions, and this sense of disorder is reflected syntactically.
I try to deploy the sense of human spontaneity often in my poetry. Sometimes, I will be more conscious of this technique at key dramatic moments in a poem. A good example of this appears in my piece “Necessary Rituals.” The poem is written in the second person, but is meant to feel more like the speaker taking directions from a mirror version of himself. In the poem, the “you” has lost his wife and children. He spends each night performing an intricate, macabre ritual wherein he salts the barrel rim of an unloaded revolver and places it in his mouth:
Guide its wet snub nose into the dish of salt, listening— a crunch like bits of glass,
when steel is pressed into the grains,
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cracks in the quiet kitchen…
Throughout the poem, though, he finds his mind slipping towards his absent family— something not only disrupts the ritual, but causes him distress:
This is your cue to think of Jean, your kids, and how you miss them,
and how they walked away, left the house a vigil of silence.
Because he keeps slipping into this mode of thought, the voice must constantly interrupt itself and revise its direction. It is much like Bishop’s speaker correcting itself in “Poem,” though given a sort of remove through the use of second person and the way that allows for commands:
Lower the oil-slick barrel into your mouth and taste
the salt, and think of all that’s salt. Your once-wife’s tears, the martinis you consume without limit. The salty largeness
of the sea, where Jean might be, hiding away with your sons— Stop. The next steps must be taken. The salt will stand
static until tomorrow night’s ritual.
When the speaker commands himself to “stop,” we experience an illusion of spontaneity, of self-editing, and revision. It gives the reader the sense of improvisation. Not only do we read the poem, we see a mind in the process of making the poem—or so it seems. I feel this goes a long way toward humanizing the speaker of this poem who engages in
18 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 such an extreme ritual. Just like us, his mind wanders—perhaps in an unconscious effort to pull himself out of the cycle of the ritual. However, he seems unable to stop himself.
This revelation becomes important once we reach the end of the poem, and realize the speaker is struggling with addiction. Much like he must tell himself not to break the ritual—perhaps as form of self-punishment—he must break into his own thoughts and remind himself, constantly, not to drink:
When the house is dark, sleep. Fall through the inky milk of dreams. Think of hours passing swiftly waiting for night.
You will not drink.
Repeat:
You will not drink.
Again, the speaker commands himself to repeat his mantra—as though it might not happen otherwise. I think in this poem we see a mind moving in many directions and a conscious effort to rein in his thoughts. Furthermore, this idea reflects in the verseform of the poem—a kind of “broken ballad” wherein the lines struggle to make their rhymes and sometimes stumble over the rhythms. This poem—like its speaker—wants to maintain control, and must often correct its course.
Section 3. Contemporary Formalism: Modality of Verse and Narrative Cohesion
Two contemporary formal poets whom I greatly admire, and whose poems and books I referred to often while writing The Last Visit are Carrie Jerrell and Michael
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Shewmaker. There is much to admire in these poets, but I want to focus my time here specifically on two qualities of their work that speak most directly my own poetics—the modality of verse, and the cultivation of multiple voices as well as narrative cohesion throughout their collections. In the following pages, I will look closely at poems from
Penumbra and Jerrell’s After the Revival to demonstrate how they interact with and complicate the histories and expectations of their verseforms, in particular the sonnet. In addition, I will examine the methods by which the poets modulate voice within their poems, and still manage to create a strong sense of narrative arc throughout their collections.
Modality of Verse
While I stated earlier my belief that all poetry inevitably exists in or through form, this does not mean that all poets—especially contemporary poets—exercise the same control of form as craft. After the Revival by Carrie Jerrell and Penumbra by Michael
Shewmaker, in terms of versification, displays their own eccentricities and senses of inventiveness. But there is much to be said, too, of the appearance of recognizable, traditionally received verseforms. Rather than just filling out these forms by meeting the traditional requirements of rhyme and meter, they engage dynamically with the received histories of these forms—the expectations of how they work based on previous and current examples. John Hollander explains this idea in the chapter “The Metrical Frame” in Vision and Resonance when he talks about the dual functions of the sonnet form. On
20 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 the one hand, the sonnet has certain expectations, such as rhyme scheme and line length.
Hollander continues:
On the other hand, the sonnet form itself is like a title, in that it serves to set up a literary context around the utterance, directing the reader to give to it a certain kind of attention just as the frame around a picture can urge a viewer to look at the picture in a particular way. (163)
Shewmaker and Jarrell, when engaged with traditional verseforms, have the impressive ability to utilize not just the metrical components of the forms, but to engage with the implications and suggestions of the frame in such a way that augments or expands on the semantic sense of the poem itself. In order to make an example of this technique, I will examine a sonnet from each of these poets (sonnets being a noticeable touchstone in both collections): Jerrell’s “The Getaway, and Shewmaker’s “The Pastor.” For each poem, I will describe how the poet recognizes and subverts expectations created by the sonnet- frame, and how these subversions work in dramatic conjunction with the poem’s narrative and thematic elements. Afterward, I’ll look at a sonnet of my own, “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” and briefly discuss how I see the same happening in my poetry.
Each of the poems I will look at plays with the expectations of a volta in the sonnet form. The volta is a crucial element of the sonnet that has no set metrical realization. That is to say, the expectations that come along with a volta are entirely semantic and rhetorical. There are certain expectations as to where in a sonnet the volta may occur—whether it is the final couplet of the Shakespearean model or the sestet of the
Petrarchan sonnet. But even this—the position of the turn from one mode of thought to another—affects the semantic outcome of a poem bound to the sonnet’s terminal form.
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In some ways, Carrie Jerrell’s “The Getaway” falls in line with the non-metrical expectations of the sonnet form: it is a kind of love poem, and there is presented a dilemma which requires thinking-through. In other ways, though, this poem subtly subverts the expectations of the form by only half playing into them. The love—fresh and newly unionized as it may be—is already presented as problematic. And the dilemma is never truly answered, at least not in the neat, Shakespearean way one might desire:
The poem’s narrative begins after a wedding, as the bride and groom get into the groom’s truck. It is revealed that the groom has to sell the truck to pay for the wedding ring. The details surrounding this scene—the imbalanced description of the truck as opposed to the bride, the messages written on the cab in soap, and the tonal syntactic shift in line 8 once the ring is brought up—all point to a character who has acted despite obvious lingering hesitance. The ending offers no resolution, only a veiled sense of danger ahead.
Understanding this, we can go back and think about how these moments play out in the frame of the sonnet. Let us start by looking at the non-metrical element of the volta. I see the turn occurring in the eighth line, beginning with the words “Now she’s for sale,” as this sets up a typical rhetorical dichotomy (that was then, this is now). It’s also the moment where the speaker moves from fetishizing the truck on behalf of the groom to speaking about selling the truck to pay for the ring. What is most interesting here is the position of this turn in relation to the typical sonnet scheme. Typically, we expect the turn either in the form of a final couplet or sestet. Here, Jerrell turns the poem one line earlier than would be expected. This may go all but unnoticed, except for the way in which
Jerrell also divides the poem on the page: in equal units of seven lines. This draws even
22 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 further attention to the volta, as it also begins a new stanza. These deliberate decisions reveal themselves in their significance when viewed within the context of the sonnet frame.
We can make meaning by considering the significance of the early volta in context of the language comprising it. The line begins: “Now she’s for sale (you bought a ring.),” which implies a couple of things. First of all, the groom is not a rich man—he can’t afford to have both the ring and the truck. Secondly, even though he can’t afford both, he has purchased the ring ahead of selling the truck. The implication here is that he will make payments on the ring, but has to sell his truck in order to do so. In an alternate figuring of this same scenario, he might be compelled to sell the truck first in order to procure the ring—but this is not the case. There is a certain sense of putting the horse before the carriage here, so to speak. Or, to put it in the context of the observation made about the position of the volta, acting too soon.
This reading is reinforced by examining other, metrical expectations of the sonnet form in relation to those found in “The Getaway.” The rhyme scheme combines elements of both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet tradition, beginning with eight lines of alternating rhymes and ending with the standard Italian sestet. The stanza division then separates the last line of the first octave from the rest of its group, placing it instead with the lines that make up the rhyming sestet. In a sense, the early volta, as made more concrete by the decision to also divide the stanzas at this moment, has a destabilizing effect on the rhyme. All of this additional meaning becomes possible through the poem’s communication with historical examples of the sonnet form through the sonnet frame.
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Michael Shewmaker’s “The Pastor” does something else entirely when engaging with the expectations of the sonnet frame. In this poem, we encounter the eponymous pastor in a conversation with God, wherein he questions why there hasn’t yet been
Judgment Day, and hopes for it to come soon. In the process of doing so, the pastor also reveals that his wife has been unfaithful, and implies a more personal motivation for judgment and absolution. Shewmaker’s poem is a single stanza, Petrarchan sonnet, which
I read as having two voltas, both of which come in unpredictable places.
The first turn occurs in line seven (mirroring Jerrell’s “The Getaway,” but as you can see, to a much different effect), wherein the mode of discourse moves from observation and questioning to commanding with “Sound your trumpet. Raise your flaming sword.” At this moment, the poem shifts from a man observing “the sins of idle men,” and asking, “Why must you tarry, Lord?” to actively wishing for the end of time, for a reminder of “what it means to fear a death/ and a return.”
Because of this semantic and rhetorical shift, and our expectation to find only one such turn in a poem, it comes as a great surprise when the sonnet shifts yet again in the final line. While there are implications throughout that the pastor’s wish for fiery sword may be borne out of a personal crisis, it is not until this moment that he makes it clear that it is his will to see the prophecy fulfilled: “And not because it’s my will, Lord, but yours.” For me, this has a destabilizing effect on the poem’s “sonnetness” overall, as I have some difficulty (much like the Stallings poem) recognizing the machinery of the sonnet outside of its metrical components. However, it is Shewmaker’s strict adherence to the traditional metrical arrangement of the form that allows for this move to succeed without compromising the reader’s ability to look at this poem and recognize it as a
24 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 sonnet. Instead, we are inclined to read the confusion created by the double volta as an additional tool to make meaning out of the poem. Here, one imagines the poem’s uncertainty about its volta as the pastor’s uncertain position in speaking with the Lord.
While he is praising, he is also saying he has “seen enough of your creation.” And while he is clearly a pastor—a servant to the Lord—the first turn sees him giving orders rather than receiving them.
In my own poem, “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” I utilize the double- volta technique in a different way. Here is the poem in its entirety:
When he’s on a binge, he will not meet her eye. He stays out late. Out where? She doesn't know. He sweats Manhattans, answers slurred and slow, and staggers while he conjures up a lie.
She hides his keys—the wreck wasn’t long ago— then holds him shaking in the upstairs hall as he begs her for just one more drink, that's all. She always bargains, always lets him go.
And so, tonight she waits for his breath to fall into a raspy sleep. When the powder glow of not-quite-dawn falls on her naked woe, she writes a note (I’ve gone—PLEASE DO NOT CALL)
then tears it up, resigned to quantify the countless nights it takes for him to die.
To begin with, I think this poem strongly announces its intention to be viewed in the sonnet frame. The shape on the page, of course, gives one a clue. The title, too, has been used by two other sonneteers—Robert Lowell and A.E. Stallings—both of whose poems centered around toxic marriages. As such, the reader is primed to look for a volta in the usual positions. Unlike Jerrell, I turn my poem (for the first time) at the start of the sestet, as expected, beginning with, “And so…” I chose this language very deliberately, as it 25 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 harkens very closely to the kind of language a sonnet typically turns on. It is meant to lure the reader into a sense of knowingness, thinking that this poem will end with the wife leaving the husband a Dear John letter and making good her escape.
The poem turns again, however, in line 13, “then tears it [the note] up, resigned to quantify/ the countless nights it takes for him to die,” confounding those expectations. I chose to place these turns in their typical positions in order wring a kind of unexpectedness out of something more or less ordinary.
Multiple Voices & Narrative Cohesion
In A History of Modern Poetry, David Perkins describes the ways in which the rise of the novel as a serious and sophisticated literary form affected the course of
Modern poetry. On the level of the poem, Perkins notes the introduction of novelistic tendencies to verse—story, plot, character, and a more evolved sense of setting, among others (243). It is Robert Frost, in particular, to whom Perkins associates these observations. Which is fitting, since I see a direct link between Frost’s design of character and plot (especially in his shorter narrative poems, like “Home Burial”) and the design of characters and narrative arcs that reveal themselves over the course of Penumbra and
After the Revival. Though these poets do not necessarily aim for the full-on dramatic approach of Frost (“Home Burial” could practically be staged), they nonetheless avoid the trapping of many contemporary books of poetry, wherein the only voice that emerges is the voice of the “poet.” There is much vocal variety to be found in these three collections, and each collection creates that variety of voice in its unique way.
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Michael Shewmaker’s poems cultivate this vocal variety in the most traditional way of the three. From the very onset, many of his titles announce the presence of a new persona: “The Pastor,” “The Baptist,” “The Pastor’s Wife,” “The Somnambulist.” As such, these poems typically function in the mode of dramatic monologues, wherein a character and a conflict is introduced and realized in the short space of the poem. “The
Baptist” is easily the most dynamic of these monologues, as it features a character speaking in a particular Southern dialect, and is rife with rhetorical questions, implicating the reader, herself, as part of the scene. Take, for example, these lines:
This all while sitting next you, while talking freely as we have been. Relax. There’s nothing doing.
Here we see a combination of colloquial language (“There’s nothing/ doing”), a placement of the reader in the scene (“This all while sitting next to you”), and reaction and command based on an action not pictured, but implied to be on the part of the reader/listener (“Relax”).
The poems in After the Revival, which largely revolve around the themes of marriage and spurned love, present a different stage on which the collection’s voices might gather. Because of the thematic similarities in the poems, especially in the book’s second section, wherein a series of sonnets examine from many angles the steps involved in a modern wedding, Jerrell takes a subtler approach to the cultivation of vocal variety.
The poet utilizes a shifting distance in perspective, in the sense Carl Dennis describes in the chapter “Point of View” in his book Poetry as Persuasion. In this chapter, Dennis describes the spectrum of reader distance achieved by the shifting use of personal pronouns—first person, second, and third, singular and plural (42). Of course, Dennis
27 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 specifically refers to the careful modulation of these persons in the space of a single poem in order to alter the distance between reader and speaker. But I believe that we can see this same affect working on a macro level in After the Revival in a bid to create a more textured sense of voice throughout.
We see this kind of modulation spread across the book’s various sections. The book’s first section is exclusively written in the first person, cultivating a particular kind of voice—one who reports on lived experience, minimizing the risk of overgeneralization by keeping observations and larger statements, like “Nobody belts a torch song like the dirt-/ poor girl of ten” in “Tennessee Snapshot,” entirely tied to the individual perceptions of the speaker. In the second section, the speaker shifts from the voice of the first-person reporter to the second-person reporter. In this section, the speaker watches as events unfold—all surrounding a “you.” The speaker in this section is distinctly different from the speaker in the first section. There is a kind of prophecy implied by the speaking to the
“you” here—as though the speaker in this section already knows every move you will make, and how it all turns out.
My own poems strive for this type of texture, as well, and often utilize different points of view in order to create varying levels of distance between the reader and the speaker. “Toward Your Understanding,” for example, uses the second-person to create a similar kind of prophetic tone found in the second section of After the Revival. The speaker of “Toward Your Understanding” begins with a direct appeal to the psyche of the
“you” with, “You believe your father is made of stone…” This immediately establishes a strange kind of wisdom in the speaker. Here is someone who not only can recall the color of the sky or the day of the week, but is also able to look into the mind of the “you” and
28 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 judge the emotional climate there. In this poem, I believe the speaker using the second person acts as a way to tell the “you” things he may not want to remember, or may have a desire to misremember. It acts as a kind of outside auditor who is able to tell it like it was, or at least not obfuscate the emotions within the memory.
“Necessary Rituals,” on the other hand, utilizes the speaker and second person approach to a different end. Here, instead of acting as the bringer of memories, the speaker is a force that urges the “you” along, insisting he take part in a bizarre nightly ritual. While the speaker here clearly knows the history of the “you” in the poem, it does not focus on revealing forgotten memories and truths. It is rather something of a companion to the “you.” The speaker becomes something closer to a literal voice in conversation with the “you.” When the speaker commands the “you” put the gun in his mouth, he does. When it commands him to “Stop,” saying “The next steps must be taken,” the “you” follows suit. And there are rhetorical motions that imply the “you” is cooperative with these commands. For example, in stanza nine when the speaker says,
“Now, set the gun/ down,” the “Now” implies the previous step has been completed, and the speaker may move on with the sequence.
This technique of creating texture through reader/speaker distance via point-of- view appears many times throughout The Last Visit. The second-person is used again in
“Hometown Knowledge” and “The Phone,” both to different effect. Likewise, I believe that the variations on point-of-view I use for each poem performs a function in the way the poem itself unfolds. Whether it is the first, second, or third-persons, the decision to cast the speaker’s voice has been with careful regards to how it will affect the way the
29 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 poem is read, and how the mixture of such distances will alter the experience of reading the book.
Section 4: A Poetry of the American South
I never felt particularly Southern, despite growing up in a small Southern town.
Perhaps it was the color of my skin and the length of my last name that kept me feeling like an outsider looking in. Or maybe it was an innate mistrust of what had always been billed to me as “Southern,” like a ready made identity of willow trees and lowland swamps and rebel flags; as though it could mean the same thing to me that it does to anyone else. Looking back, I see the South I grew up in just as much as a complex political landscape as it is a geographic region. As such, my own poetry—in the tradition of so many other poets from this beautiful yet problematic place—seeks to explore these complexities and form my own particular kind of Southern identity.
The tradition of 20th century Southern poets taking on the political begins in the
1920’s, often times taking on subjects such as the destruction caused by the Civil War and the various deficiencies of the South (Bryant 48). Poets like John Crowe Ransom and, perhaps more recognizably in this regard, Allen Tate with his “Ode to the
Confederate Dead,” approached the political in poetry by presenting political situations in personal contexts. The quarrel always seemed to be with oneself in facing the political issue, rather than the politics themselves, using poeticisms and metrical inventiveness to keep an appropriate critical distance from the subject (Bryant 56). And while the poetry that ultimately emerges after the First and Second World Wars dispenses with some of
30 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 this distance, allowing Southern poets like Dickey and Komunyakaa to get closer to their political subjects, they still maintain a necessary distance from any overt political statements.
James Dickey’s experience as a combat pilot during the Second World War presents itself throughout his body of work, beginning with the National Book Award winning Buckdancer’s Choice. From this point on, Dickey’s war poems would be scattered throughout all of his volumes of poetry (Bryant 187). “Scattered” is a key word here, as Dickey’s collections tend to have a slightly schizophrenic nature to them in terms of how his war poems appear in relation to poems of more personal or private concerns.
Take, for example, the great war poem of Buckdancer’s Choice, “The Firebombing.” In the space of the collection, it is set apart as a single section, literally separated from the rest of the poems in the book. In terms of subject matter, “The Firebombing” resembles little of the other poems in Buckdancer’s Choice. It is as though this poem is not meant to co-mingle with the more domestic trappings of poems like “Fathers and Sons” or “Dust.”
Likewise, the final poem in the book—also highly political—“The Slave Quarters,” occupies its own space in a single section, essentially sandwiching the poems in the rest of the collection between political book-ends.
Other than the practical decision to isolate the two longer poems, what are the implications of such a move? Based on evidence in the poems themselves, as well as their positioning in the collection, one might conclude that these poems demonstrate a speaker who feels compelled to engage with these public matters—war, racial injustice—but also feels a need to separate himself from the experience described within. Take, for example, these lines in “The Firebombing:”
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Snap, a bulb is tricked on in the cockpit
And some technical-minded stranger with my hands Is sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light, Having a potential fire under the undeodorized arms Of his wings, on thin bomb-shackles, The “tear-drop-shaped” 300-gallon drop-tanks Filled with napalm and gasoline.
The imagery here is intense and specific—the “glass treasure-hole of blue light,” the
“undeodorized arms,” the exact capacity of the drop tanks, the relaying of overheard language to describe their appearance (“’tear-drop-shaped’”). There is little doubt that the speaker has firsthand knowledge of this particular cockpit scene. But there is a deliberate distancing between the speaker and the image. The cockpit contains not the self, but a
“technical-minded stranger.” And this is complicated even further by the stranger also having the speaker’s hands. The speaker does not want to implicate himself here, despite his need to delve into the necessary details. Perhaps because this poem demonstrates a speaker who is both repelled by and attracted to the violence that’s present, unable to fully commit to a stance.
A similar move is made in “The Slave Quarters.” Here, the speaker wavers between the condemnation of such a practice as slavery, and an indulgence in a kind of domination fantasy. Despite the obvious negative associations throughout the poem, the speaker cannot help but be drawn back to this fantasy, as in these early lines:
I look across at low walls Of slave quarters, and feel my imagining loins
Rise with the madness of Owners
Despite the “low walls” and the clear knowledge of the “madness” of slave owners, the speaker nonetheless feels his imagination rising to taste the experience of that madness.
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He recognizes, with dawning horror, that he is drawn helplessly to this desire—the desire to own, to master, to dominate—theorizing that this is an effect of whiteness, an effect on which the sun will never set:
What happens when the sun goes down
And the white man’s loins still stir In a house of air still draw him toward Slave Quarters?
The speaker is implicated here, but so is the whole of the race. Still, this commentary becomes compartmentalized in the space of the collection, and rings strangely out of place compared to those poems which make up the book’s second and third sections.
Conversely, the idea of compartmentalizing the overtly political does not appear in the war poems of Yousef Komunyakaa, especially not in his collection Dien Cai Dau.
Each and every poem in the collection centers around imagery of the Vietnam War. In contrast to Dickey’s wandering lyricism in “The Firebombing,” the poems in Dien Cai
Dau root themselves in a clear time and place, exchanging high poeticisms for raw narrative detail, crisp images, and an unflinching point of view. In these poems, the role of the speaker as a poet and the role of the speaker as an implicated actor become inextricably intertwined. While it often feels as if Dickey is speaking from a perspective above the war, Komunyakaa always seems mired in physicality of the moment. As such, it’s impossible to let himself off the hook for the acts of violence he’s committed.
One of the best examples of this at work is his poem “Starlight Scope Myopia.”
Like many of the poems in the collection, it is set during a combat operation. It is night and the speaker spies on Vietcong soldiers as they load ammunition and rice onto oxcarts.
He watches them through an infrared scope. The purpose is to kill these men.
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Making night work for us the starlight scope brings men into killing range.
As direct as these lines are, there is an interesting sense of ambiguity. “Making night work for us” could either mean the night is working in favor of the speaker, or that the starlight scope itself is making more killing work throughout the night. Each interpretation implicates the speaker in the violence, though the second implies more hesitancy than the the first. This sense of hesitancy, and of the guilt that follows the actual act, is further developed:
Smoke-colored
Viet Cong move under our eyelids…
years after this scene ends.
This memory will linger, then, after the scene ends, the shots fired. But that is later.
Now, we remain trapped in the moment, forced to watch the scene unfold as it always will. In this sense, the speaker, no matter how much guilt he may feel, does not allow himself to be absolved, but instead allows the memory to unfurl as it will. We feel forced to watch as the speaker humanizes what began as shadows, only to finally take aim with the rifle:
One of them is laughing. You want to place a finger
to his lips and say “shhh….”
This one, old, bowlegged,
you feel you could reach out & take him into your arms. You
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peer down the sights of your M-16, seeing the full moon loaded on an oxcart.
The speaker wants to stop what is about to happen—he even wants to quiet the VC who is drawing attention to himself—and yet he is incapable of doing so; the memory must play on. Perhaps the only slack he cuts himself is ending the poem before the shots are fired.
Both Komunyakaa and Dickey—though their approaches in these particular collections are very different—realize what Carl Dennis describes in his essay “Political
Poetry” as methods to garner authority in the setting in politically-minded poems. Dennis suggests that a shared quality of good political poetry is the speaker’s tendency to be
“honest about the the limits of their positions,” “recognize that the best political choices are not ideal,” and “that the good they bring is often accompanied by some harm”
(Dennis 94). In the case of Dickey, the distance he creates between his speaker and the subject in both “The Firebombing” and “The Slave Quarters” allows him a kind of aloof perspective, wherein he can talk about something as ghastly as the white race’s innate desire to dominate over others with a certain level of critical detachment. His position is not clear, in any sense, and so neither side is truly lauded or demonized. In
Komunyakaa’s “Starlight Scope Myopia,” the speaker admits the limits of his position by demonstrating his inability to change anything about the past. Plus, as an active participant in the very war he is criticizing, any critical position he may take is complicated. As such, the speaker is distanced from making any kind of clear, direct political statement.
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The Last Visit is very clearly set throughout Southern states—we see mentions of
Tennessee, Texas, and the Carolinas. But I feel that my book moves beyond simple referents, and instead attempts to render a vision of the American South on its own terms.
The Last Visit tends to see the South filtered through the eyes of the speakers, who in turn feel trapped, or even claustrophobic, despite the rural landscapes and open spaces. Often times, we catch speakers escaping, or contemplating escape. In “A Haunted House,” we see catch a speaker “on my way out of town,” in the middle of the night, running away from his home and himself. In “Dead Town,” we see the converse—a speaker who feels trapped in a small Southern town fading away. In this case, the absence of people and sounds becomes the oppressive force: the “deafening sound of silence at its peak” as the
“old mill [is] making nothing.” Elsewhere, we see imagery from the edge of towns: the crash site in “A Voice from the Wreck,” the endless dark where the speaker’s bottle sings at the close of “On the Dred Ranch Road Just off 283.”
The notion of “escaping” the South is not a new one for Southerners, particularly members of marginalized groups. In fact, as was explored in remarks made by John Poch during the 2018 AWP panel “Intersectional South: New Perspectives in Southern
Poetry,” we see a kind of drifting away from the South, especially in poets of color. But this raises the question of what it means to “leave” the South, and further questions whether or not a clean break is even possible. I take this notion up in one of the last poems in the book, “Hometown Knowledge.” It begins with a speaker who has learned of
(another) tragedy in his hometown:
And back home, someone else has killed herself— dropped her kids at school, then killed herself.
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We immediately know that the speaker is somewhere else—that “back home” is a place in the past. And so we move through the poem with the assumption that all of this knowledge is second-hand, sent across the wire so to speak. When we reach the final stanza, however, the notion of ever really leaving such a place is called into question:
That’s the way the stories tend to go— They catch up with you everywhere you go. Though you’ve escaped, you cannot help but know.
To me, the final line shows the futility of leaving the past behind. The speaker may not be in the hometown anymore—he may not even be in the South anymore—and yet, he cannot help but feel that place in his bones.
Like the speaker of that poem, the South clings to me, too. And like any long-term relationship, it is vastly complicated. There are moments where I am unequivocally in love with the region—when all I want is to live among the Spanish moss and palmetto trees, get lost in the foothills of the Appalachians, and eat collard greens until I burst. But it of course has its dark side. Hatred and violence are no strangers to the South, and to ignore these things would be to cast a pallid, hollow version of what the region truly is.
Reconciling these two—the beauty and the darkness—is something that never quite leaves my mind. I imagine it lingers in the imaginations of so many poets from the South.
Beginning with The Last Visit, I am adding my voice to this endless and necessary conversation.
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CHAPTER II
THE LAST VISIT
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Negatives Under Microscope
I’m focused on the space inside your eyes— first pupil, then iris, now cellular disruption— in search of some clear catalyst, some reason for these scars, for this crooked helix on my chest. I want the DNA for empty bottles. I need to know what made your cruelties grow unwieldy, like cancers let loose upon a body. I’ve scoured the entire frame, pushed past the edge of every family negative believing the secret’s hidden, like a code between the plastic and the acetate. I stare for hours at a single portrait, deducing from a smile the hell behind your face. At times I think I smell the whisky sweet perfume of you, as though each image captured something of how you lived, how you breathed. But then each clue turns out a part of me: a hair, a thumbprint left while leafing through the pile of specimens, a flake of skin, a barely visible scratch I made in haste— more me than you, more you than science, naked and pinned down beneath the lens, as though our cause is finally in the frame, begging for exposure, for the light.
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The Factory
Hulks in shadows just outside of town: a rusted mess, a post-industrial tomb. Poorwills roost in smokestacks falling down and cry out something awful in the gloom.
Elsewhere, men with bloody lungs keep coughing up clots like overripe berries. Their wives beside them pretend to be asleep, imagine different endings to their stories.
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Plastic Men
After each fight, Mom took us both to Wilson's Five & Dime to pick some cheap toys. Our father's slurred voice became a ghost of breath beneath the long tin ventilation shafts. Mom waited by the counter, spoke to the clerk about discontinued spools of thread, buttons she'd meant to sew on weeks ago. She wore green bruises below her eyes. Her split lip kept her dabbing blood with Kleenex—a poppy flowered rag. Digging through crates of army men, we looked for figures of tragedy: missing arms, hands broken at the wrist, the grenadier who'd gripped the bomb too long. Back home, we’d line up the men on our bedroom windowsill. We smiled at our army of maimed green soldiers. They could not raise their voices despite their mortal wounds, their missing limbs.
41 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
The Way
The day I found him doesn’t stand apart from any other, save for how a rain cooled the afternoon and left the hills smelling of steam and creeping amber rosin. The afternoons were hot, and beneath the shade of spruce and pine I followed narrow creeks until their quiet, strangled ends. I searched for caves and the remains of ancient arrowheads. The woods were deep and took me far from home. Failing light made shapes look soft, unclear, and at first it seemed he might be drunk or sleeping— he slouched against a sweetgum tree, and maybe, I thought, I saw him move, or twitch, or flinch. The sudden stench of rot said otherwise.
His eyes were open, clouded over, blank much like the sky now hidden by the trees. He sat surrounded by fallen ochre leaves, legs splayed out into wide, facing angles. A film of something green touched his lips, swollen from the heavy August heat. He gripped a small revolver in his hand.
Behind his head: the splintered trunk, a ring of blackened blood, glittering fragments of bone. I froze, afraid the slightest move might bring him back, might rouse him from his bleeding rest. I watched until the red sun died away, and darkness dimmed that shining in his eyes. It seemed this scene had been set up for me.
He walked into the woods to die, while the sun drew out the long shadows of the forest. And when the gun went off, there was no shudder among the trees, no importance felt by the birds, just violence and the body, waiting for me, the pupil, who wanders in the woods, already on a path toward knowing death.
42 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Dead Town
A dead town full of ghosts—it left behind its brick and mortar bones, the pharmacy windows dark with dust. Each day we find the Bijoux Movie House's bleached marquee unchanged, and no one really seems to mind. 7:00—The Day The Earth Stood Still. The seats stay empty since they closed the mill.
Instead, we haunt the Late-Nite A & P, the last place left to shop for Wonder Bread, Del Monte peaches, and Chef Boyardee. We eat our dinners sitting up in bed. For company, the rabbit-eared TV. Infomercials fill the anxious quiet, the midnight mantra, “Don’t believe us? Try it!” echoes through our rooms paid by the week. It drowns the sound of industry collapsing, the deafening crash of silence at its peak— no cars, no crowds, the old mill making nothing— the sound of losing purpose, so to speak. Our part-time days, like stories stretched too thin, cannot escape the were, and was, and when.
43 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Ghazal
When my father left for good, we were living in the desert. I wouldn’t cry for him. My eyes became a desert.
44 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Toward Your Understanding
You believe your father is made of stone, a tower whose strength is silence. Neither of you speak. This is not unusual. Today he walks ahead, leads you down Cranberry Lane, to White Horse, where you are outside the dead man’s house.
Your father says, "He shot himself in there," a white house with a browning lawn and a single twisted-up crepe myrtle. And maybe because it looks so familiar— like your own home—this does not frighten you. Your father says, "He shot himself in the head."
He leads you to the window, grips your waist and lifts you to the darkened glass. Your reflection fades into the room, sparsely furnished, gray carpet, white walls. You see it there above the sofa: a blossom of blood, a ring fanning out to nothing.
In the center of the plaster: a small black hole. It seems, somehow, impossibly empty. When you’re lowered back to the ground, you feel the neighborhood beneath your feet. Even the bone-white sun is fading faster than it should. You know it will be dark soon.
45 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Missing
When Bea McConnell disappeared, she was only eight years old, and because of what our parents feared the neighborhood went cold.
We saw the posters everywhere, the broken nose, the curls. The frightened words above her hair said Have You Seen This Girl?
We started locking doors at night though we never did before. No matter the hour, we burned the light that hung above our door.
Police put corpse-dogs on the trail and dragged the quarry lake. They looked in every open well in hopes the case would break.
It never did. The posters faded. In time, so did the search. Her parents, pale as plaster, waited. They often cried in church.
Like the nights I’d hear my mother weep and open my bedroom door, and I’d pretend I was asleep as she slowly crossed the floor.
She’d place her hand upon my head, her fingers light as air, and whisper in a voice like lead a single, shaken prayer:
“Dear God, please let my child stay. I know that you are just. I need him to survive the day. Take others if you must.”
46 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Confession: Silva’s Quarry
“It seemed we were doing some good by dumping the body in the quarry; that each ballast we stuffed down her throat to pull her toward the bottom was a good intention approaching salvation not for ourselves but for others, say, her family, or friends, who might be haunted by the sight of her for lifetimes to follow. We brushed her nails clean and never undressed her. We wrapped her in a sheet. When Vaughn rolled her down the hill toward the mossy rocks, with Sid out in front, walking backwards, stepping over roots to control her descent, her arm lolled out, got spotted with leaves, and we stopped to wrap her up again. We picked debris from her forearms, hair, thighs, and wrists. It was a wasted effort, we all knew that, and so no one had to say it as we stood by the quarry's edge. Out on the black water a small snake swam, made ripples as it approached our shadows, which were long. The water lapped at the granite, and an owl, or something, moved beyond the branches of a tree, prompting me to stand. I’m the one who nudged her over the edge, and we watched as she sank, the water bubbled, and her shadow disappeared as though ink had spread about the pool.”
47 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Boys
The fall of ’93. Red leaves drift, spinning toward the ground, and pile beneath the schoolyard eaves. Once struck, he just stays down, swallows back his shock and tears. It’s me who picked the fight, and I’ll carry on this way for years. I pack a solid right left bloodied by his broken lips. I lift my arms to play the victor, satisfy the script. But before I walk away, back home where my dad swills gin, curses game-show hosts, and trucks of smuggled Mexicans, I know I’ve made the most of fear. Today I am a man. My dad will sure be proud. The rest, stunned silent when this began, are cheering, wild and loud.
48 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Found Dead in the Sequatchie Valley
They found her body lying here between the skeletons of pine. Like by some design she died in fall, the time of year when shadows kissed her thin wrists, and the sun, at last, turned cold and white, a ball of frozen light. The talk is vague, but most insist her boyfriend led her to the hollow at night, they had a fight, she was newly pregnant, and he was mad, and madness is what followed.
The stories try to get at reason, but the local papers let it go, leaving these woods to know or to forget. Now’s the season when the dead wind mimics desperate cries, the purple clover turns to brown, and all the lights in town look far away, like listless eyes.
And I wonder what’s out here to learn besides the silence of these hills once final sunlight fills the valley like a broken urn?
It cannot hold. The light escapes as though it’s liquid through a sieve, and I want to believe— as all gets tangled in the drapes of night—in wholeness, if not peace. The girl is dead. Her voice is lost in all the stories tossed like leaves when autumn strips the trees.
What happened here, we’ll never know. These secrets make the kudzu grow. 49 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
The Dive
A busted exit sign above the door invites no one to leave. The windows are barred, and the panes themselves are painted over with tar. No question as to what this place is for.
The regulars all stare into their drinks, lamenting futures, forgetting pasts. Bar stools are split at every seam. The TAVERN RULES say No Cussing, though mostly no one speaks.
They’re married to their grief, you think. But here you are: Jack Daniel’s and your worries. The same as any drunk who will not lay the blame on himself, drowning instead in whisky and beer.
A man with roadmap eyes searches his pockets for jukebox change and comes up short. Instead, the ceiling fan keeps rhythm while each dead minute tumbles off the Highlife clock. “It’s closing time!” Time for another drink. The barkeep brings it over, snatches the cash, flicks his cigarette and drops the ash into the rusted pit of a clogged-up sink.
This dive, this glass, these greasy fingerprints, they’re each a part of something very old: a need to slow the way a story’s told to keep it all from making too much sense.
50 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
The Future of the Past
We thought we would, by now, retire the wheel; that we could lay to rest that early invention. Instead, the sidewalks just became more cracked, more broken apart by wild vegetation pushing through fissures in worn-out roads. The movies lied. They promised us new modes of transportation, but science fiction lacked the science frame by frame and reel by reel.
Our stories rarely end in slow dissolve, a fleur of music, credits, special thanks to all of those that made this possible. There are no squibs, no CGI, no blanks. Our futures stall, our cars will never fly, and when our loves begin to die, they die. We always want what’s most improbable. Our hearts, like the first machines, do not evolve.
51 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage
When his drinking gets bad, she cannot meet his eye. He stays out late. Out where? She does not know. He sweats Manhattans, answers slurred and slow, and staggers while he’s conjuring a lie.
She hides his keys—the wreck wasn’t long ago— then holds him shaking in the upstairs hall as he talks her into “one more drink, that's all.” The years of bargains wore her down, and so tonight she listens for his breath to fall into a raspy sleep. When the powder glow of not-quite-dawn falls on her naked woe, she writes a note (I’ve gone—PLEASE DO NOT CALL) then tears it up, resigned to quantify the endless nights it takes for him to die.
52 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Cheating in a Small Town
It was dim enough to call it dark, an amber bulb the only light. The Jameson had done its work to complicate the wrong and right. Her wedding photo on the shelf looked down on us. We didn’t quit. We got undressed in spite of it, as though we couldn’t stop ourselves.
I wanted this. I wanted to know the harm we’d cause, the damage done by giving in, by letting go. I knew her daughter slept just down the hall, her husband was on a job in Memphis. I had so much less to lose, my life already a mess. After, when she began to sob,
I left. The light was creeping in to expose our nakedness, our sin. On my way out the door, I said that I’d come back. I never did.
53 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Ghazal
We packed our clothes in garbage bags, rented filthy rooms. How many cheap motels line the highways of the desert?
54 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Again
She’s bleeding from the mouth again. Each drop that slips between her fingers, spatters the countertop, and blooms like tiny poppies on the tile. He’s split her lip with the back-hand I’ve feared as long as I can remember. But she is not afraid. My mother provokes him. Spits his name like poison. She smiles wide, the words swelling to cancer, toxic, eating her guts.
Tomorrow, she’ll drive ten miles out of town to shop where no one knows her face. She’ll laugh when the pretty cashier asks if she got into a fight. When loading up the car she’ll save the frozen peas to press against the cut that weeps beneath her cheek.
55 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Layover After Visiting My Father
A woman dressed in black pajamas waiting to fly to Houston grips her cell phone like a bludgeon, speaks in silent wisps of teeth and tongue, and stumbles when she shuts her eyes. She’s telling him, the one who isn’t worth forgiveness, he is forgiven once again. She’s holding back what’s left of love.
When we meet eyes across the gate, I know what keeps her up at night like splintered ribs that will not mend.
56 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Poem Begun in a West Texas Corn Maze
I listen for children shouting through the dried- up stalks, but all I hear are whispers and crows, what few remain. For over an hour I’ve tried to solve the maze, navigate its rows, and now the comforting smell of funnel cake has faded. In the crisp, October cold, the families have started home; their brake lights burn beyond the field. I shiver and fold my arms. A cool, translucent moon rises, and I quicken my pace to reach some final gate. Is it left? Or right? The sudden dark disguises the way, and I half-remember another late autumn, when I was nine and playing here. The sun fell soft behind the stalks and I ran further into the dark while closing time grew near. I recall it still, but no longer understand the thrill of bolting, blind and breathless, deep into the maze. I know those days have run their course, since now I cannot help but keep the end in mind, the setting of the sun, the fallen ears of corn gone soft and rotten. It works against these paths and how they’re crossed to spark in us, again, the long forgotten joy of the deliberately lost.
57 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Ghazal
I wrote him a letter once but left it in a motel drawer. To where could I address it? The envelope said Desert.
58 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
A Haunted House
Just like me, it fell apart: the doorway left a toothless mouth that couldn’t hold back its history.
More rotten, less recognizable each day. Strangled by weeds until it looked more like kudzu vine than house.
The paint gone sick and flaking off. The garden rushed by wild grass, until the fall, when everything dies, except the henbits and dead nettles. They sprout with superstitions, and spread about the same: everywhere.
Leaving town tonight, I see it parched like a skull just off the road. Ten years ago, I made love among its graveyard of empty cans, the moonlight shining through the holes punched in the rusted-out tin roof.
I remember mice and rotten cloth, the feeling of October’s fingers sliding along our nakedness; being stripped of all my flesh, a pile of bones that couldn’t make a body despite what she was whispering.
59 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Restless
What comes, then, of the man who crept into his study late at night and typed by dull green banker’s light while others slept?
His wife would toss and turn in bed, and lay her arm across his chest. He loved her but he couldn't rest. He wrote instead some lines about his childhood, a girl whose hand he used to grip. He wished he could kiss her bottom lip but never would.
The loves that sleep inside the mind are steeped in restless mystery. Not bound by time or history, they rather find a quiet nook to turn and toss and wake a husband in the dark— a warm and wanton question mark to hang his loss.
60 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Custody Denied
The subject, A, is hereby deemed unfit to care for his two sons, B and C. His love, no matter how they want for it, is problematic. Subject says he quit abusing alcohol, but smelled of whisky. The subject, A, is hereby deemed unfit for visitation rights, unless observed and split between locations found clean and hazard-free. His love, even though they want for it, cannot excuse his sudden, violent fits. I recommend a psych exam. See: when subject was told he’s hereby deemed unfit, he threatened to beat the social worker, hit the table with his fists. She agrees his love is toxic. Still, they want for it.
The boys will be removed, pending this writ, and cared for by the state of Tennessee. The father, A, is hereby deemed unfit to love, no matter how they want for it.
61 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Ghazal
When I drink my head fills up with sand. I cut myself but do not bleed. I’m empty as a desert.
62 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Roadkill Ode
I find you broken— a mottled possum dead beside the road, mouth regal, painted red, teeth still sharp and proud.
Your eye protrudes miraculously from the weeping socket, looks back on a life made fat by what was discarded.
How many empty cans of beans turned into your goblets, adorned with rust, collecting a thick sweet drink of rain?
At night you shook the brush, guided by the scent of rotten apple cores. The flies respected your desires and kept their distance while you ate.
You were king and court. Your reign was one of tousled dust and dark, a headlong plunge toward betrayal by two headlights and a tire.
Did the crack of your spine strike you as undignified? From the way your nose points to the curb it looks like you almost made it back.
Or were you crawling, inching to the fallen leaves, to dig yourself a grave? Oh, I know that I’m not whole, and sometimes feel the flies swarming, like much of me is rotten.
63 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Visiting My Own Grave
The plot next door has complex etchings, flowers, crawling vines that intertwine like figures on an ancient urn, while mine is squat and square: a simple granite marker, my name, the dates. It feels like something brought me here, but I, not knowing what to do, just steal some flowers from the nicer, neighboring plot to praise my memory (my thanks to Daniel Johns, d. 1990). I say a dead prayer. For whom? I’m not quite sure. I’m not—or wasn’t—a man who went to church. I never believed in the way believers do. But here I am the same, though shadow, though shade. I stand unseen, unheard, above the spot where my body rots in a very plain box. When I came back, I wandered the earth for a while. My spirit did, I should say. And when I say “the earth,” I really mean my neighborhood. You know—the street I lived on, the grocery store. I walked the aisles touching things I bought back then and noticed how the bright clear light of hanging halogens made each tomato burst with a red more vibrant than anything I’d seen before—back when I was alive. That’s the only beauty when you’re dead: the things you knew, ignored, and now have lost. Tomatoes, bottles gleaming in piles of garbage, the shades of pearl in a pool of motor oil. The wind picks up and cuts between the graves. A figure stands a hundred yards away framed in the dark between two concrete angels. There is no moon, no stars. It’s impossible to tell a mourner from a ghost—
64 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Halloween
For Halloween this year I'll be a man. I'll work my hands to bloody rags and use my fists to prove which truths I understand.
I'll paint my face into a mask of bruise like coming home after a barroom fight. A man should fight, my father said, and lose sometimes—no matter if he’s wrong or right. I’ll swallow up a pint of Cutty Sark. I'll stumble home and fumble with the light.
He said if you drink, you won’t feel the marks, you’ll never know the places where you’ve bled. For Halloween, I drink the autumn dark.
I'll be a man the way my father said. On Halloween, we're closer to the dead. His teeth were crooked. His hands were red.
65 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Love Poem with Five Lines Stolen from VHS Boxes
My clothes became too tight, and crescent claws broke through my fingertips. “It’s beautiful,” you said, while floating down the spiral stairs. I wallowed in your want for me and tore your powder evening gown to ribbons. You fit me with a studded leash, a mongrel beast who writhed beside your feet and lapped the pools of moonlight from the street. I loved the way you made me less than a man. I loved the way you fed me from your hand, said “Good boy,” when I was being bad. I drank the blood of alley cats I snared between my teeth. From what I can recall, the lust for meat was terrible and sweet. I swallowed all I could, then you sent me out for more. When neighbor kids began to disappear, you stroked my head. You watched old horror tapes for strategies to keep me wild, hidden, yours. For weeks, I stayed inside. I fed on bones and rot. You sat in the window and wished away the sun. You asked of me just who is more depraved, the monster or the one who made him so? Your love’s like blood. It coats my hungry tongue. For reasons such as these, I still don’t know.
66 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Drive-In
Footsteps stop outside the door. His heavy boots divide the light that creeps across her bedroom floor, and the knob turns slowly to the right.
Forever, she’ll replay this scene. The killer grins down from the screen. Inside a desperate, foggy car, her pleated skirt is pushed too far.
67 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Ghazal
Ten years later: I step barefoot on broken glass. I search for leftover Jack like water in the desert.
68 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Drinking All Night in Tennessee
The night is long, and whisky kills the minutes. It makes the hour cry. There’s nothing in it.
But you’re too drunk to listen. It’s the sound a hostage makes when hope of being found is lost. He sees the end, knows he will die as sure as there is blackness in the sky.
It’s the sound you make when everyone’s asleep and the sun has yet to ribbon on the steep array of mountains just beyond the hills. You have your coffee cup of Jack, your pills.
And, because you can’t take one more second of slow, deliberate suicide, you reckon to scream but only sigh, and pop the top from off the plastic amber bottle, then stop.
The sun, at last, has crested on the ridge, its crooked spine on fire like a page that’s torn and burned for what it might reveal. Soon, the sun will light the room. You’ll heal, and sleep, and steel yourself to have the wounds torn open again, forever, until you’ve found an antidote for grief, a lasting relief, something stronger than liquor, like belief.
69 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Small Funeral
I find him curled up on the lawn, a silver tom turned stiff with frost. A portion of his skull is gone. A frozen ring of blood’s been tossed in jagged splashes. Now here he lies, where first November ice preserves the violence for my morning eyes. Its monument goes undisturbed.
I think about my brother, dead at twenty, the broken window glass, the stench of burning flesh, his head cracked open in the moonlit grass, and I know a tombstone is less real than records of post-mortem harms. Or bodies twisted up in steel. Or bones that sprout from broken arms.
Some are left as misshapen vessels mangled beyond the point of prayer when morning mist dissolves like angels and night escapes the fuel-soaked air.
I kneel beside the cat and tear his body from the greedy earth. The ground is hard this time of year. I’ll dig a grave for what it’s worth.
70 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Desert Elegy
Mike Schiffler said, “I’m banking on the end,” this winter while we occupied the long oak bar at Seely’s Tavern, raising defenses one bourbon at a time. He died that May, after the dirty piles of snow had melted away for good. We all went to his house, paid our respects over finger sandwiches, the clinking of ice in tumblers like a chorus of angels for one who dies with his hand on the bottle.
Tonight I walk out past the edge of town, the place where streetlights barely nudge the shadows falling from the mountain. I need a drink, and here, this rancher’s road just off of 61, allows a man to swallow up his darkness, disappearing—for a moment—from the world.
I drink to giving in. I drink to Mike and to the stars, which comfort in their coldness. A pickup crests the ridge where road meets sky.
71 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
A Voice from the Wreck
I’m an accident on the south side of the town, on the outskirts, where the desert holds its ground against the streetlights’ last defenses. I’m the fire leaping from the Chevy’s frame to smite the sky and drain the cool out of the night. I’m the cell phone in someone’s shaking hand, woken up by the explosion in the street, the calls for help. I’m an ambulance, a siren in the dark. I’m the stoplight. I’m the kid out driving drunk, vodka on his breath and bile in his throat. I’m the headlights slamming final recognition. And when you whisper names like curses in your room, I’m the smell of gasoline in bloom, the bloodstained moon behind the clouds. I guzzle broken bones and busted radiators, coolant running thick in thirsty gutters. And if you ever manage to shut your eyes, to sleep, I’ll wander from the wreckage as you dream.
72 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Ghazal
My father’s voice like wind on dunes—I hear it from the bottle. “Remember who you are,” it says. “You’ll never leave this desert.”
73 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Rubáiyát for My Father
This is how the cycle starts. It binds together both our hearts and leaves the tender skin of my back a document of jagged marks.
I’m beaten first, then made to strip and show you where I’ve met the whip. You sterilize the harm you’ve done with steady-handed craftsmanship.
But after the swabs and alcohol, it’s like you’ve never seen, at all, the fresh wounds on my shoulder blades or all these bloody cotton balls.
The scars get tangled on my skin despite the cool of lanolin. You say you love me, yes, you do, but love has worn me ribbon-thin.
You are my father, but you are a fiend— the one who cut and the one who cleaned, who turned that taste of suffering into a casual routine.
Forgive me now. This ghost I hold is often angry, often cold, and longs to rip the stitches out before the wounds can go untold.
74 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Necessary Rituals
Dip the pistol’s rim in water taking care to treat the barrel like a damaged lover’s lacerated heart.
You should be firm but understanding. Guide its wet snub nose into the dish of salt, listening— a crunch like bits of glass, when steel is pressed into the grains, cracks in the quiet kitchen. This is your cue to think of Jean, your kids, and how you miss them, and how they walked away, left the house a vigil of silence. Next, you lift the pistol by its handle, taking a moment to gaze into its black and absolute mouth, knowing you were sure not to load it with any bullets this time—this is the ritual and not the act. Lower the oil-slick barrel into your mouth and taste the salt, and think of all that’s salt. Your once-wife’s tears, the martinis you consume without limit. The salty largeness of the sea, where Jean might be, hiding away with your sons— Stop. The next steps must be taken. The salt will stand static until tomorrow night’s
75 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019 ritual. Now set the gun down. As you rise to turn the lights out, dip your finger in the bowl of ink. Make a mark on the white refrigerator. A family of tallies, dark and dripping toward the floor.
Thirty-five nights. A season changed— summer to fall—the lawns graying, and autumn wreathes mark every door in the neighborhood but yours. When the house is dark, sleep. Fall through the inky milk of dreams. Think of hours passing swiftly waiting for night.
You will not drink.
Repeat:
You will not drink.
76 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
The Landlocked Lighthouse
I see its signal swing above the trees, while driving through a storm in Tennessee. It slices sideways, turning in the night, and lends to someone, somewhere sense of sight. Where does it lead? I doubt I’ll ever know. But I suspect it's where lost people go. I would not follow if I knew the source. I've marked my map and shouldn't change my course. Though, I'll admit I find a certain charm in parking the car and putting on my warm blue coat, then drifting off into the green, like a fisherman for fish he's never seen— who finds himself adrift, alone; his chart wet from the rain, the only thing apart from all the dark: the swinging of a lamp. Though here there is no sea, just leaves and damp soil, musky, smelling of mushrooms and mold, like something living, fresh, but very old. And out there, calling, is the tower's swinging light, calling clearly as a siren’s singing. I'd like to climb those tightly spiraled stairs and find the one who tends to the affairs of wanderers turned searchers in the dark, present my map, and have him make the mark.
77 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Love Poem with Desert and Stars
We are discovering new constellations, naming, re-naming, the shape of the stars.
Sitting by firelight, watching the clouds drift— wraiths on the breath of a long Texas night.
This one’s the Boy who Jumped Over the Nebulae. See where the seat of his pants are on fire?
Here is the Snickers bar (south of the Milky Way) melting as though it were left in the sun.
Shadows stretched over an ocean of desert flicker with every lick of the wind.
Hungry and cool, coyotes are howling filling the air with immutable song.
What if our love were as lasting as star shine, rather than coals on a lone desert fire?
Somewhere between this blue smoke of the sky loves such as ours get born and die.
78 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
On the Dred Ranch Road Just Off 283
Stars are fired up like scattershot. The howls of wolves that saunter near extinction echo across the plains until they’re not. All of them are headed one direction.
My father was a drinker. So am I— an echo of a tune in drunken time. The bottle is an instrument, and rye the amber music spilling over. I’m thinking about the rhythm of decline: he measured his in knuckles, hookers, drinks. I start to wonder how I’ll measure mine, the ballad of the triple-whisky jinx, but the wind begins to sigh of tired things. I pull the bottle from the bag. It sings.
79 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
Hometown Knowledge
And back home, someone else has killed herself— dropped her kids at school, then killed herself. She took her husband’s war gun off the shelf but put it back. Upstairs, she had some pills (It’ll probably be cleaner with the pills). She smiled at how they used to soothe her ills, and swallowed down a handful with apple juice. She finished off the glass (I forgot to buy juice) then ran a bath. Her limbs already loose, she crept out of her clothes like shedding skin (It feels so nice to shed this heavy skin) and let the steaming water pull her in.
She settled against the marble, into sleep— that’s the word they always say, “sleep,” as if this one word manages to keep the panicked, thrashing body calm and still, the sputtering and choking calm and still, as if it happened, somehow, beyond her will.
The whispers claim she was bound to go that way. Her daddy and little brother went that way. She probably waited on the day.
That’s the way the stories tend to go— They catch up with you everywhere you go. Though you’ve escaped, you cannot help but know.
80 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
The Phone
There are things you can’t learn over the phone, like how each day your mother’s losing weight. Her hug has turned to a burlap sack of bones. You imagine it sharp and cold. Her heart beats jaggedly. There’s dark beneath her eyes. You know she cooks herself three meals a day, but over the phone you cannot see what lies behind her silence: she throws the food away.
She yawns and says she is a little tired, while exhaustion settles ashen on her face. You can’t see how the neatness you admired— the dishes clean, everything in its place— has disappeared. The kitchen’s out of order. She doesn’t make her bed. Her clothes smell bad. And you keep moving further, moving forward (after dad left, you thought she’d drive you mad): first Tennessee, then Arkansas, now Texas. She’s back home in the Carolina foothills while the tumor near her cardiac plexus grows. You can’t see her refuse the pills, but you hear it in each hesitation, in every sick quiet hanging on the line. So when she says she’s “feeling better, very,” it sends the worry ringing up your spine.
After the dial tone dies away, you stand in the sunlight of your own kitchen. You know she’s dying, that she’ll never say. You know you will never be forgiven.
81 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
The Last Visit
I see his face as through a frosted glass, or tears—a smearing of his present self. I shut my eyes and wait for it to pass.
It does. These days I’m drinking less by half, but he’s stopped taking water with his rye. He asks for something stiff from the shelf and I begrudgingly oblige. His eyes are red like Southern skies on August nights, and Mother says he’s started his goodbyes.
He slouches on the couch, then says outright: “The world has gone as flat as day old beers. So how about we drink instead of fight?”
“As father and son?” I hurl those words like spears, and if they break the skin, he shows no pain. “As men,” he says. Then the whisky disappears.
82 Texas Tech University, Chad Abushanab, May 2019
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