Whoever We May Be at Last

By William Bless

The 21 poems in this collection were influenced by the work of many, including Neruda and Tagore, the nature poems of Galway Kinnell and Jim Harrison, and the modernist poets Hart Crane, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. It is perhaps Williams most of all whose imagist aesthetic infuses the poems. I've always liked the Zenlike attention he gives to the real, ordinary things of the world, so that in essence, they become extraordinary, a part of the reader's imagination. The poems can be divided up thematically into Cape Cod poems, fishing poems, New England nature poems, and spiritual pieces. Most of them came quite spontaneously and I let the words arrange themselves on the white tundra of my notebook pages with little thought of form; later, I tried to find the internal music, sense, and rhythm in each, adhering to Williams dictum that a poem is a little universe. In a sense each is an unfinished fragment, not wholeness itself but a search for wholeness and form.

The first story, "Tracks of the Beleaguered" emerged after a two or three year gestation period not unusual for my process. I had been wanting to write a Vermont story for some time, one that would include a veteran of World War II tracking a wounded whitetail deer high up a mountain. I wanted the buck to embody the soul of the Green Mountains wild, primordial unchanged by technology and industry. Elisha represents the wounded modern exile, seeking a higher and more profound sense of identity after the dehumanizing brutality of the Pacific island fighting. I was reading Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology around the same time, and came upon a passage about the Buriat of Siberia and how with shamans there is usually a summons, a calling, which begins with a crisis and a dream of being broken apart physically, the discovery of an extra bone, followed by an interfusion of beingness. In a sense, Elisha and the buck become one, seeking sanctuary from the senseless violence and appearance-driven industrialized world.

"Billie Holiday at the Atlantic House" is less esoteric and has its origins in trips to Provincetown where I frequently go to write, and where the actual Atlantic House exists on Masonic Street. Billie Holiday really did perform two separate engagements there. This one lived in my imagination for a year or so as well, percolating until all of the elements coalesced and resonated. I liked the idea of having Lucas be a Portuguese fisherman who listened and empathized with the blues and Jazz singer; I liked the innocence and naivet of the storyline. To create a fictive Holiday, I listened to the Verve recordings I own, and went online to listen to rare interviews with her. Like Elisha in the first story, Lucas is somewhat out of step with society, and instead lives a vivid and intense inner life. As in the Vermont story and poems, the natural world predominates, always there for sanctuary, solitude, and transcendent experience.

These thematic strands continue in the novella Whoever We May Be At Last whose title comes from The Ninth Duino Elegy by Rilke. The germ of the story came in a dream I had two years ago, and I spent a summer writing the first draft, watching it take on a life of its own. I wanted the setting to be a relatively small rivertown in Connecticut with a history of industry. I liked the idea of the story being told through five narrators, each having a connection to the central figure, Ian, who's about to enlist in the Marines and fight in Afghanistan. It's difficult for me to talk about this one, since it's more visceral than anything I've written before. I'll let the reader decide on interpretations. In some respects its about the nature of sacrifice, the portrayal of a modern American town coming to terms with loss. Artistically, it seems to represent a living process of the imagination, of trying to piece together a semblance of the truth, and not so much a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477141168

William Bless

William Bless's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared most recently in Litchfield Magazine, the Iconoclast, Vermont Literary Review, Hudson Valley Echoes, Lunarosity, Americas Civil War, Lake Effect Magazine, and many other national journals. He has spoken at the Northwestern Connecticut Writer's Group and at Bridgeport Library. In addition, he is an avid outdoorsman and when not writing can be found either fly-fishing, kayaking, hiking, or camping. He lives in Connecticut.

Book preview

Plunge

Consider the heavy skulled dive

of the northern gannet

into the boreal Atlantic,

the gyre of sunboned wings

black eye

transecting panicked

rivers of mackerel and herring

like aerial shamans,

the plunge into cold depths,

shimmering taste of fleshoil

plated scale, sinewy meat.

I think: what have I done with such

reckless abandon? Fear inhibiting

exhilarated soundings.

Give me an afternoon

when I can become

the sea bird at the instant

of descent, when familiar words

and phrases vanish

in ethereal prisms,

when the beak shatters

the surface,

outracing a slender star

of electron.

Echolocation

The elongate snoutbone

of a dolphin among

sassafras, dark privet berries,

mayflower and bear oak,

like an exiled relic

that became lost in the channels

of the winter salt marsh,

hunger driving it to seek

mummichogs and silversides.

A phantom bobwhite

in the pepperbush sings its

earthborne elegy.

The atavistic dance

of chaser and chased,

a quick journey over

sulfurous mud and quaking culch,

through mudbanks of salt hay,

sharp squawks bounding back

like peaty morphemes,

until the moon seizes

the earth from the west

and the fecund sloughs drain.

The pings become sharper, more urgent,

and it finds its self

retracing,

known paths cancelling out

with the certainty of emptiness, until

at last, its belly stirs against the

crustaceous mud,

and all motion

all propulsion is gone.

I think of the forsaken

when I, too, am in turmoil,

disoriented, and roaming in mazelike creeks.

The Dispossessed

We cut the fraser fir

and bring it home, its

resinous loamy spice permeating

the living room.

As I tighten the screws of the stand

stabilizing the bole like a martyr,

out flies a startled leaf that bats

frantically at the window pane.

I capture the moth in a glass

spreading my palm over the top,

take it outside and release it

on top of the woodpile, where it

stands with its dual scalloped wings

mottled with black, chevron, and earthbrown

vermiculations, tremulous

as if in a winter breeze felt

only by the small.

I have transported its home, its winter sanctuary,

the domicile of generations of Callophrys niphon,

and strung it with electrified stars,

where once it had peered out of crevices

and seen only primordial galaxies.

It could have stayed,

I didn’t want to exile it from its home.

It will have to find another conifer for refuge,

imitating a fall leaf,

to avoid the sanguinary beaks

of wren, chicadees, and titmice,

the only defense of the dispossessed.

Inhabitat

What is permanence?

We agilely bridge the instants

not noticing that what we were

has melted away

leaving what we are.

What we can’t accept in ourselves

becomes our greatest teacher.

We live there and in the future

that doesn’t yet exist.

Everything is now.

Sacred tomes

are our words and imaginations.

Imagine the soul

has, as Whitman said (I felt him through his poem),

no circumference.

How will we know when to stop?

There is only boundlessness

and transformation,

and green trees

unfurling

in the morning.

All the potential

of the universe

is the third eye

that lives

in you.

Georgia

There is, Georgia, a 1930 Strand portrait of you

that fascinates me. There is, of course, the dark arched

eyebrows, austere beauty, the fierce inscrutable tenderness

of your expression, squint already prescient of

the Taos sun, to which you would give your being

like the barren adobe churches.

You became, or always were,

only hide and angular bone yourself, Georgia,

eclipsed in the fragrant Abiquiu Hills by

nomadic obsession

while the Park Avenue curious gazed baffled

at the walled bones

licked clean by scavenging wind and sun

and seablue calyx, jimsonweed, orchid, wintry calico rose,

calcified deer, cow, and ram,

the earthly forsaken,

shells of finite things.

I’ve been wanting to ask you, Georgia, what did you mean

in your cerulean distances?

in your solitary windbones?

I was starving then, Georgia, winnowed,

like gutted carrion and fleshed petal,

rivering horns and red amaryllis.

I would sit at your calloused soles,

in the New Mexico desert with its ribbed shapes

until you spoke or your mouth remained still.

Iris, rimed antlers

mauled by scorched noon.

There are wounds. Everyone knows this.

I’d been meaning . . . nomad, listen,

Abiquiu child, tempered into leather and crow’s feet,

before the wind hollows out—about

your pared language.

Empty as a saltscoured shell, I stand before

your pictures, brittle chimes

made lovingly.

I wanted, anyway, to ask you

about the 1930 photograph. Your expression.

Moment

When in pain,

anguished,

nothing seems to comfort,

to calm the turbulence.

Aspirations fall short,

Thai and Vietnamese

Buddhists sit on unreachable

supernal peaks. Emerson’s essays

and Whitman’s cosmic chants

read like the impressions of long dead animalcules

in shale and fail to move.

The daily complaints:

job, money, a bodily malaise,

anxiety, a failed friendship, longings.

I miss my father.

The heart aches.

The mind aches.

I roam the winter woods

for perspective.

Fresh snow weighs the hemlock sprays,

a lone piper thrush sings its reedy arpeggio,

the white creek spills like a dulcimer.

I give up and sit on the riverbank,

surrendering to the simple reality

of being.

For a moment I’ll give it all away.

For a moment I will let gratitude

inhale me into its

omnipresence.

Wellfleet: Great Island

Whether in the growing still heat

of an August morning, or on

an overcast October day with

mackerel clouds scudding in

from the bay,

you have welcomed me back.

The brackish heart

lives with one foot inland,

and the other near the salt marsh.

You have welcomed me back.

Terns and plovers live in the lees

of your pitch pine drumlins

and scoured moraines,

while mummichogs

and fiddler crabs

cluster in the peat-shelved

runnels, lined with culch,

bird ribs, sedge.

You have welcomed me back.

Beneath a shrine of horseshoe crab carapaces,

clam shells, pine cones, oyster shells, pale stones, lies

a Punonakanit princess.

I think of her as the soul of this boreal eden.

You have welcomed me back.

Wellfleet: Newcomb Hollow Schooner

Moonlight catches in the woof

of the alluvial strand, as if

the sand and sediments are still

sliding outward in the wake

of the last glacier.

In the heave of the surf,

the clatter and grind of

gutted shellfish.

Shapeless reefs and sandbars

river the nightblue tide

in long enfilades of breakers.

Cold shimmers dance on

dark oaken bones

partly submerged in the outer beach,

like the vertabrae of an extinct plesiosaur.

Upthrust ribs and nailheads blackened by

a century beneath the floor,

until a winter storm

tore it up and

deposited it

on the coast,

a relic saturated

in a roseate spume.

Wellfleet: February

On this day the sand

is hard-packed, the branches

of bayberry and beachplum

gnarl in

the lee of rooty dunes.

The bay resembles

the Wisconsin glacier

or the Bering Sea,

a million plates and reefs

of sun-burnished floes

glazed clean by the Atlantic

gusts and blueblack chop.

It’s so cold kneecaps do not

bend easily, the neck is stiff,

the eyes water

as if they too might freeze over

like startled kettle ponds. Herring gulls

gather in tight ragged bands

against the arctic blasts.

Against the beach,

the crunch, crack, concussions

of ice cakes mashed

by the languid heave.

On the whitened northern horizon

Provincetown reposes

like the dream of an

ancient city.

Wellfleet: Atlantic White Cedar Swamp

in the lee glade of oak woods

grow white cedars centuries old

effervescent with cool resin,

brownness and maritime salt

it is stillness and shadow,

warped trunks rising out of tannic pools

in a nest of snaking branches

one can rest

in the primeval

silence and shadow

like a critter

sick of craving

Wild Cranberry Bog

It lies in a secluded recess

of the Provincelands,

surrounded by warped

pitch pines.

Today it is frozen

with a lucid pane.

Below, the leaflets are

dark red, each pettle

a waxen puddle of

winter.

As we walk across,

light snow falls,

and everywhere

are tangled constellations

of blood tinged berries,

concentrated droplets

encased in winter

ice.

We leave the bog

traipsing over grey boles,

snow thickening

on the winter sand.

There are in-curving

prints where deer

have come down to

drink

and forage on

the tart fruit.

Herring River

Since the Pleistocene

alewives and blueback herring

have returned to this

brackish meander,

chancing striped bass

and osprey, following

the narrowing tidal run

through swamps to

natal grounds, beneath

the columnar shaped leaves

of pickerel weed, over

the sandy outwash bottom,

into the kettle ponds

where planets of glacier

melted into the

quintessence of themselves.

This vernal impulse, this elemental

rite of egg and milt,

belies every roadway

and every wiggle in cyberspace.

The moon illumines

thousands of erratic fins.

Provincetown in Blue

Blue water, flock of sand pipers,

the cartilaginous shore,

I came here for words

bony prints in the glacial sand

scampering for mole crabs

you left your three-clawed tracks across my belly as I slept

blue water, transparent words, sand pipers

regal sea woman

run your salt tongue over my ear

so I may hear

genius loci of strewn hulls

and howling ghosts

traipsing the midnight beaches

finding words in salt-gnashed splinters

and swales and blue water

and buoy music

O’Neill, Williams, Mailer, Dos Passos,

blue water shining, flock of sand pipers

bank as one,

poor Katy demolished off Cape

in the car accident,

her remains beneath pitch pine needles

on a knoll above the blue Pamet estuary

I remember your name, Katybird

Katyday, Katywas, Katyis,

Katynight Katydid

blue water rising

over ribbed sand like

a blue mind

flowering quince, tidal spartina

and words clustered like blue mussel larvae

when I woke

there was a chip of green seaglass, a gull’s wingbone,

and nothing else on my pillow

Autumn Flounder

A primeval flatfish,

that takes its wordless life

from the mud bottom,

small toothed mouth,

variegated brown with

dark spots,

smooth pearl underside,

drops of beryl for eyes,

predatory intelligence in them.

Caught at the mouth of

a tidal creek

in the silt and shellfish

channel,

it fell for a hooked killifish.

As I fished,

fall touched a row of beech and maples,

and beyond the marsh plains

a half moon appeared

in a candescent dark blue sky,

throwing into bony silhouette

foraging egrets on

the peat banks.

The flounder seemed

to be all of these things,

a monad of

the fall cosmos,

the tidal river,

the rising tide,

and the baitfish that

came unbidden

with lunar gravity.

Shepaug River Browns

Thanksgiving morning

I stand in the cold current

mending and stripping line,

flouncing a streamer against

alluvial stones,

and imagine heavy brown trout

rooting among the rocks

for crayfish.

Hemlocks, some in their sixth decade,

loom over the river’s

calligraphy and shadowed eddies,

while vapors of leaf sediment

emanate like the river’s second self,

its genius loci.

There are no takers:

a merganser with his

quilled brown crest

and wild eyes sidles past me,

as if to say, I have seen the

dusky tracks of crustaceans

and the black lunges of leopards

below.

The dark current

slides over marl, culch, and till.

In winter’s deep stillness

I dream of

drowsy Shepaug browns

who dream

of bottom dwellers.

Brook Versus Brown

In the scheme of things

I would rather catch

a brook trout

than a brown trout.

Salmo Trutta, that

Black Forest import,

is gold as the Rhine,

and wears its black spots

like a Nazi—militant, fascist, territorial,

throwing its weight around.

Salvelinus Fontinalis is

a rare hue, ferngreen,

the wild markings,

like a hieroglyphic of the cosmos

by the ancients,

to fool kingfishers and heron.

The orange spots each with a nightblue halo.

North American soul, char,

a cold boreal ember,

precious essence