Vanishing Point
()
About this ebook
William Trowbridge
William Trowbridge is the author of six full poetry collections and four chapbooks, including the poetry comic book Oldguy (Red Hen Press, 2016). His new collection is Vanishing Point (Red Hen Press, 2017). His awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, a Camber Press Poetry Chapbook Award, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Yaddo, and The Anderson Center. The former Poet Laureate of Missouri (2012–2016), he teaches in the University of Nebraska Low-residency MFA in Writing Program and lives in the Kansas City area.
Read more from William Trowbridge
Old Guy: Superhero: The Complete Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlickers: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsO Paradise: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCall Me Fool Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEnter Dark Stranger: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Vanishing Point
Related ebooks
Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Aurealis Duo: Terrorism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Life As A Spy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Landfall 232: Aotearoa New Zealand Arts and Letters, Autumn 2016 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Baltimore Kid Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHot Summer, Cold Murder Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGold Coast: Stories From A Suburban Shangri-La Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cheaper the Crook, the Gaudier the Patter: Forgotten Hipster Lines, Tough Guy Talk, and Jive Gems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSports Talk: A Journey Inside the World of Sports Talk Radio Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prumont Method Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeath Line Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTexas Fists (Shanghied Mitts) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEarth Prime Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Middle of the Road Reader for Young and Old Alike Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJab Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts From a Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After The Barn: A Brother's Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOakland Noir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Darkest Glare: A True Story of Murder, Blackmail, and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Quaker Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Old Gimlet Eye: The Adventures of Smedley D. Butler Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTriggernometry: A Gallery Of Gunfighters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When the Sacred Ginmill Closes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Against the Wind Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMolly and the Bandit: Or the Disappearance of the Celebrated Stagecoach Robber Black Bart Solved Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIron Curtain Baby Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShadow Hand Blues Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Poetry For You
Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rope: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Letters to a Young Poet (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Better Be Lightning Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (ReadOn Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pillow Thoughts II: Healing the Heart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Vanishing Point
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Vanishing Point - William Trowbridge
I
TILT-A-WHIRL
It speeds you in a circle on a wavy platform
and, at the same time, whips you around
inside that circle: wheel within a wheel,
to quote Ezekiel. Each year I tried to master
its gyrations, only to regurgitate,
with my corn dog and cherry Coke,
my youthful self-assurance. This dated,
wry contraption, I now read, can be
a model for chaos theory, the spins
of that inner circle erratic as the bully
summoned by some butterfly wing
to beat me up three days in a row
on my way home from school. Guess,
he smirked, when I asked why. "I thought
he was a nice man," said killer Perry Smith,
right up to the minute I cut his throat.
In Italy, a guy was killed by a pig
falling from a balcony two stories up.
Neighbors dined on free ham afterwards.
Some zealot plugs an Austrian archduke,
and the world heaves up eight million corpses.
Hang on tight,
the attendant shouts,
as we brace for gravity’s blindside.
WELCOME HOME
Large sign in many American
ports at the end of WW II.
All I have is a black-and-white photo,
taken in our yard, my father holding me,
him still in his khakis, me dwarfed
beneath his service cap, both of us
looking as if the other might bite,
warrior and war baby joined
by biology and chance, him smiling
stiffly for Mother’s camera. He brought
souvenirs—his bayonet, a Nazi pistol—
and a taste for Luckies, bourbon,
and rage. When he hugged, his cheek
scraped like sandpaper, how I thought
a hero’s face should feel; his slaps
could blur my eyes.
They say three months in combat
fractures a normal mind. He’d spent
almost a year, the details of which
would stay off-limits. We must have
looked like aliens, my mother, sister,
and I, so plump and washed and green,
our neighborhood hospitable as Mars.
Welcome home,
one of the Martians
must have said.
FIRING THE M-1 GARAND
In our backyard, my father,
who never talks about the War,
demonstrates the proper way
to use the sling on the .22 rifle
I bought with my allowance
to play soldier with my pals
in the dump off 95th Street—
cans, bottles, maybe a rat or two.
He winds the strap tightly
around his left arm, puts the butt
up to his shoulder, then raises
the rifle to firing position, keeping,
he notes, the right elbow high,
taking a deep breath, then
holding it. When I try to follow,
he adjusts my elbow, tells me,
"Remember: never aim your rifle,
loaded or not, at anyone you’re
not prepared to kill." He lets go
of my arm and, to fill the sudden
hush, adds, "I meant just don’t
point guns at people," then turns
and walks quickly away.
BATTLEGROUND
It showed the War was as my father said:
boredom flanked by terror, a matter of keeping
low and not freezing. "You wore your helmet
square, he said, not
at some stupid angle,
like that draft-dodger Wayne," who died
so photogenically in The Sands of Iwo Jima.
Those nights I heard shouts from the dark
of my parents’ room, he was back down
in his foxhole, barking orders, taking fire
that followed him from France and Germany,
then slipped into the house, where it hunkered
in the rafters and thrived on ambush. We kept
our helmets on, my mother and I,
but there was no cover, and our helmets
always tilted. He’d lump us with the