Waters of the Recluse

By Bruce Merritt

Asked what the book Waters of the Recluse is about, the author replied, Simply, the title alludes to the context in which the poems were written. Writing, apparently, is a lonely pursuit. The premise is that these poems were composed in solitude. As a result, the poems are, perhaps, introspective, even when addressed to or involving others [we and our are conventions referring to company]. The poems were written, recited, and now exist in isolation.

The presence of water denotes this introspection. Water as an image visits each piece. It predominates as a motif in its various states: rain, ice, seas, lakes, etc. Water is protean, so it informs the relationship the poems have with dreams. These poems, in terms of composition and imagery, strive to capture the characteristics of water: fluency, mutability, and adaptability to whatever form it occupies. The virtues of water are essential to the art/craft of poetry.

So reclusion and waterfluidityare the context in which these poems thrive. In that sense, these poems are exploratory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514404409

Bruce Merritt

Bruce Merritt, born in Port Chester, New York, was educated at SUNY–Purchase and Iona College. He holds a bachelor’s degree in science and a master’s degree in literature. He is no stranger to the tristate poetry culture. Over the years, he has organized, hosted, and participated in numerous readings and open-poetry events in Westchester, Connecticut, and New York City. He was the publisher of the short-lived literary journal Stigmatic Star and has written columns, feature stories, and op-ed pieces for several Southern Westchester newspapers, including the Sound Shore Review, based in Port Chester, New York, where he also served as editor. Aside from the pages of this book, Bruce Merritt’s poetry has appeared throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France in journals, anthologies, and literary reviews. He is the author of a prior book of poetry entitled Sentry the Horizon (011) and has just completed his third book of WSC, Route Nine: A Narrative, and is presently hard at work on a collection of prose sketches, tentatively entitled Prose and Other Preoccupations, scheduled to be finished within the year.

Book preview

Waters of the Recluse

Bruce Merritt

Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Merritt.

Cover Artist: Carol Nelson, June 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/30/2015

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CONTENTS

Part One

Fishing Buddy

Season of Clammers

River Journey

Reliquary

Rebirth

Part Two

Night Flight

Fruits of Storm

By the Window

Day Care

Rumor of Voles

Part Three

Cowed View

Edgewater

Flipper Cove

Casting into the Breach

Snow on Vaudeville

Part Four

Almost Jonah

East of Sumbawa

Low Rent Deluge

Meeting Aesop

Waterfronts

Acknowledgments

For my nephews and best friends,

Luke and Nino.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea

That rose, or even colored by many waves;

If it was only the outer voice of the sky

And cloud, of the sunken coral, water-walled,

However clear, it would have been deep air,

The heaving speech of air.

The Idea of Order at Key West

—Wallace Stevens

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were. I have not seen

As others saw

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alone.

—Edgar Allan Poe

Part One

Fishing Buddy

Our hands were shaky, but our tight

lines held fast, fine as laser beams,

piercing the pond’s tin-foil sheen,

tugged into strain by the split-shot

we strung, like beads, above the bait,

weighted in the precision holes

burned through a sieve of weeds, which smoked;

lines that vibrated ripple rings,

like radio waves, to broadcast

alerts, tom-tom the pond’s drum

to signal trespass. The ripples

would radiate from their axis,

like potter’s clay, spun into grooved

expanding disks, edging to shore

on a wheel that confirmed the pond’s

refreshed rotation; that its mold

would be sculpted to match events,

contain the nubs of tensile nerves

in the hollow heart-shaped vessel,

which labored to retain its shape.

We hardly fished before that day,

clumsy and shy, but an old-timer

coached us, my brother and myself,

shared weathered advice, fish stories.

Our casts could barely reach the reeds

as anxious poles arched above depths,

mustered by a stream that flooded

its yewed banks in a brutal storm

decades ago, to overflow

waterfalls into the quarry,

forsaken since the Depression,

plumbed into a bottomless tarn.

Mosquitoes somehow ignored us,

but our poles, magic wands, summoned

dragonflies to a benign berth,

as forms complement their like,

though these were unalike—our poles

did not darn the fabric of time,

even if the wisp of their mean

was pearled graphite, sensitive, lithe,

quaked with mercurial action,

configured, as if in tribute,

as they perched on the curving tips.

Eyes, eyes, and eyes, epicentral

ringlets, gradations of plurals,

their eyes, the pond’s and poles’, no snares

of tackle posed them a problem;

the guise of invisibility,

the intrigue of monofilament,

fooled them with no designed effect,

their presence elsewise, or aloof.

Dragonflies whirled the wire frames

of nylon wings, dispelled static,

basked in the sun, bolt straight, supine,

mocked the impotence of our poles,

then pushily presumed to snooze,

and hanger sky-idle whirly birds.

Our lines tensed… We fished often by then,

would joke about the trophy fish

our friend had promised to show us.

Yet still gullible and tone-deaf,

we tried to hear him but instead

began to hear plaints in the woods,

the sunset bass jumping for bugs,

warped streams trickling out of taps

and construction of big-box stores.

Our lines tensed… Our world went quiet,

caught in the radius of a splash:

The strike! The slap that awakens

fishermen, who doze in their beer,

wets them with dreams of overkill.

The strike! Instant strain on his back.

The pole dipped and doubled over.

Yanked, he slipped on stones, almost sank

in the concussive suck of mud.

Disbelief wrangled with tall tales

in the way he wrestled his reel

against what appeared a mammoth

manhole cover when the gridiron

print flipped over skewed to showcase

a clawed beak and peaked carapace,

parts of a Kraken, but no myth.

The thick tail of bathic boils

splashed and thrashed like a bathtub toy,

like a rubber monster, rough-heeled,

in the weedy muck, which it churned

with talons keener than pronged hoes,

as the squares of its shell puzzled

marbled panels into portraits

of wanton warfare, enameled

like dinosaur eggs, the dome inlaid

like the underside of a lute.

Our lines tensed… They obtained thresholds

we could not recross or erase,

as pain tore through his bad back

as quickly as shock gaffed our minds;

his back, like his expensive pole,

arched as he fought for a foothold

on a bank of barbaric stone.

The hook, a savage fang, cruelly

stabbed in the turtle’s flank, snafus

of agony entailed futile

attempts at odd angles to coax

or coerce it loose from maimed flesh.

Both were tortured, opposed in pain,

as they labored to pull apart,

sever their diaphanous bond.

On that shore, before the turtle

was freed, our friend’s pole snapped, splintered,

followed by the withering pluck

of tight line stretched far too tautly,

split at a hairline fault somewhere

in its spool of microfibers—

Much too ornery, far too ancient,

to be thusly perturbed, the turtle

clambered to regain mud and goop

our fake-baited casts had disturbed,

as the pond reclaimed composure,

healed by a turtle’s resilience,

which wryly compromised our friend,

whose contest with antique toughness

confined his last years to a bed,

unable to move, like a trophy.

Season of Clammers

Summer has always, for me,

faced inward, as it reeled

in brazen, hulking waves,

as it does now, in those modalities

cohered in the slant of sun,

the mizzling dust

of corpuscles that revolve in the shafts

of light, that dissemble

into quavers of pointilist atoms,

that reassemble, like oil,

once passed through the grates

of screen that screens the patio, blanched

with recurrent seasons

of routine hot contact. Early this year,

the monolith dune of sand poured

cascades over my shoulders,

squeezed, like jinn, into the scope

of bottled months that hourglass their heat grain

by grain. But months when pretty skin,

coated with olive oil, shows as well,

slicked into a smooth bronze,

as the skin of gods was said to appear,

at least, along the sun-drenched shores

of the Adriatic, beatitudes of tan,

or paleness or sunburns, each phase

enlivened by being lived,

undergone, suffered through, enjoyed,

each professing a faith of shade sought below

awnings, as the swelter

yawns for pure relief, cool touch of stone,

after hours of sweaty toil,

broiled to blister on the grill of long,

barbecued noons, a mordant midday sun, for siestas

taken without guilt for rest,

a nap soon turned into an orison.

Months when kernels of bugs

emerge from the dirt to popcorn-burst

into an avowed pestiness, or go giddy in dregs

of chalice flowers, wineglasses left sticky

on the outside tables.

All invoke the sun, Toltec

creeds sworn in blood, a sun that threads

into eyelashes to garland those things we squint

upon with ardor, revere, in a gaseous

haze. Drowsy, rag-dusty,

putzy moths escaped cocoons

of spit-glued cotton wads on muggy, aromatic nights,

in vigils of monkish vainglory, no sleep

that keenly exaggerate those sweet

garden odors, distilled into perfumes,

potent spirits, potable nectars

of the olfactory. Season of blue-grass, humming,

strummed by a breeze, as the blades steam-snake

into fibers of rubbery floor mats,

appointed with pliable bristles,

like those appendices

on new bicycle tires, extended from mold points,

teased from the mold, released at the intervals

those appendices index into three

quantifiable dimensions and one imprecise

that eludes a spatial label,

tribute to globe-piercing ley lines,

to starshine, tactless and clean,

whose elasticity of light adheres to all

it alights upon then curtly

slides off with no oily

residual into a night’s watch-cog rotations.

I feel complete, totally at home,

on the sprawl of the lawn. I nearly

nest in its woven bed, as my fingers comb

through vegetal cilia,

like piles of full-bodied head hair,

playfully yanked, tamped with a friendly pat.

Ductile strands, as nubile kelp is,

flotsam polyps just prior to roasting

on the beach, that burp gobs

of brine when they pop when one’s fingers

squeeze, clenching their knotted tufts

of beard, a senseless act,

too irresistible to justify,

electing refrains of intimacy

this image demands… The grass, now scorched,

like kelp, like the reams of it

harvested by storm pickers, who scour

heaps for salvage to sell,

for food to survive on;

grass that spontaneously combusts,

bubble, like a baby’s lips with spittle,

as on the diapered pair

who toddle nearby, smeared sunscreen

on chubby, flushed cheeks,

scrambling on grassy patches, tripping

on the rubble of shovels and pails, playthings,

before they ultimately plop

into a crater in the sand,

into a rabbit hole,

clad in matching, sand-stuck,

white-and-blue-striped sailor-suits, nephews

of Neptune, mermen, who cavort coyly quiet

until they start in a shrill

fit of teary hysterics,

as an excavation unearthed a strange,

aggressive, thorny terror—quite frightened,

yet not entirely aware, of course,

of the reason why they should be,

the potential for harm

they escaped, sided by time, an enviable

lack of context. Though cute, even dear,

their panic is quantifiable,

a clumsy dash for parents