Wild Track: New and Selected Poems

By Kevin Hart

The poems of Kevin Hart have nurtured international poetry audiences for nearly four decades. Translations of Hart’s work have appeared in Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Vietnamese, among other languages, and bear witness to the growing interest in Hart’s poetry both in the United States and abroad. This volume performs a valuable service by bringing together the best of Hart’s work from seven published collections, some of them now out of print, and from his forthcoming book, Barefoot. Wild Track reveals a poet capable of articulating genuine feeling and considerable philosophical depth. This volume confirms Hart’s standing as one of the most sophisticated poets writing today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780268081805

Kevin Hart

Kevin Hart is an award-winning actor and comedian. His films, including Kevin Hart: What Now?, Central Intelligence, Think Like a Man, Get Hard, Ride Along, The Wedding Ringer, and The Secret Life of Pets have earned over $3.5 billion at the box office. His stand-up comedy tours, including Let Me Explain, Laugh at My Pain, and What Now?, have sold out arenas and football stadiums, leading Forbes to name him the “king of comedy.” He is also the first comedian with a Nike sneaker line; a television producer, creating the BET show Real Husbands of Hollywood and the Laugh Out Loud Network; and CEO of Hartbeat Productions. Hart currently lives in Los Angeles with his family.

Book preview

WILD

New and Selected Poems

TRACK

KEVIN HART

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2015 by Kevin Hart

Published by the University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

All Rights Reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-268-08180-5

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

for Sarah and Claire

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

The Stone’s Prayer

The Twenty-First Century

The Horizon

Prague, 1968

The Day Shift: Ford Works, London

Three Prayers

The Ten Thousand Things

This Day

Midwinter Summer

Your Shadow

For Marion, My Sister

The Hammer

Sunlight in a Room

The Members of the Orchestra

Your Shadow

Come Back

Your Shadow’s Songs

Summers

The Companion

The Last Day

Poem to the Sun

Gypsophila

Gacela

Approaching Sleep

The Ship

That Bad Summer

Haranguing Death

Facing the Pacific at Night

The Map

This Stone Is Thinking of Vienna

The Present King of France Is Bald

The Letter

Peniel

Making a Rat

The Historian of Silence

The Black Telephone

The Gift

Her Name

No Easy Thing

The Great Explorers

The Letter

The Room

The Book

Dark Angel

Thinking of David Campbell

The Fragrance of Summer Grass

Brisbane

The Voice of Brisbane

My Mother’s Brisbane

Those White, Ancient Birds

The River

The Calm

Rain

The Word

Beneath the Ode

Wimmera Songs

Nights

Nineteen Songs

How Hast Thou Counselled Him . . .

The Bird Is Close

The Little Air

Prayer

My Name

That Life

Snow

Yes

Nights

Amo Te Solo

Here

The Past

Night Music

A Tree

The Mouse

Summer

Birdsong

Colloquies

Next Year

No Guide

March

Prayer

Afternoon

Dark Bird

With You

The Museum of Shadows

Nights

Morning Knowledge

Eurydice

Descartes

Dominique

Fall

Lullaby

Hell Songs

Late Questions in Winter

Winter

Father

Father

Grief

Apart

My Daughters

Tarrawarra

Your Kiss

Sugar

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Poems in this collection have been drawn from The Lines of the Hand (1981), Your Shadow (1984), Peniel (1991), Wicked Heat (1999), Flame Tree: Selected Poems (2002), Young Rain (2008), Morning Knowledge (2011), and a forthcoming book, Barefoot. Some earlier poems have been revised, almost always very lightly. Previously uncollected poems have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Humanities Australia, The Sun Herald, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

THE STONE’S PRAYER

Father, I praise you

For the wideness of this your earth, and for the sky

Arched forever over me,

For the sharp rain and the scraping wind

That have carved me from the mountain

And made me smooth as a child’s face.

Accept my praise

For my color, a starless night,

That my width is that between the first two stars of evening

Reflected in the water,

That my quartz flashes like lightning

And reflects the glory of your creation,

That you have seen fit

To place me near a stream and thus to contemplate

The passing of time;

For all that is around me I sing your praise,

For the fierce concentration of ants, their laws,

For all that they tell me about you.

Keep me, I pray, whole,

Unlike the terrible dust and pieces of bone

Cast about in the wind’s great breath, unlike men

Who must suffer change,

Their endless footprints deep as graves;

Keep me in truth, in solitude,

Until the day when you will burst into my heavy soul

And I will shout your name.

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

When we arrive there

With our guns, our machinery, our heavy books,

There will be so much to say,

And we will sit down

Over cigars and cognac, and tell our stories

Of minor battles, mirages, times when it seemed

That no one would survive.

And we will talk only about ourselves,

Forgetting our fathers

And all they did, their belief that the future

Was only as good

As their plans for it,

And that we grew to be the same.

Then we can finish our stories in peace,

When the wars

Are no longer ours to fight,

When we no longer have the clenched fists

Of our youth, and our children have inherited

The terrible certainty

That we have ruined all we have been given,

And our hands will be empty,

We will have nothing to give, only our stories

Of how everything we should have held before us

Like a candle

Was lost, forgotten, as we made our way

Across the fields of sadness, walking to the horizon.

THE HORIZON

Whenever you take a step

I am with you leading you meeting your eyes.

I am here at dawn watching

The old priest hurrying to mass

Ready to greet him with my gift of blood.

How easily I shed the clothing

You try to give me

You who cannot bear to see me as I truly am

Your trees mountains buildings I have no time for them.

I was here

Before the world received its hardness,

This entire world could not be conceived

Before the thought of me.

You comfort yourselves,

You say I am only a line never reached

That I do not exist as you do

But none of this is true:

You see only the top line of my head

Beneath that I have the world

With all its fields sun moonlight and rain.

You who hate departures,

You who forever try to shut me out

Listen to me:

Whenever you think of death,

Whenever you enter the room of someone gone from you,

I will be peering through the window.

I will catch you

Even though my net has just one string.

You have no need for mirrors

Who lie to you until it is too late,

Look at me and see the only truth

Your past what you are now

All your future and your only blessing.

PRAGUE, 1968

1

As if the entire population but you

Slipped off the globe at night: so you wake

To find the house empty, the kind of silence

That broods in abandoned aerodromes,

And quicken outside, hoping to find someone

But feel a rifle thrust in your back,

A burst of rapid consonants from behind . . .

It must have come while dreaming. He leads

You off, across the city, past mounds of things

Still burning, tanks blundering down streets

Much faster than you’d think, until the distant

Thunder of orders, tanks, guns, contracts

To a crowded Square where soldiers raise their flag,

Divide men from their meals, open trucks,

Slowly collect your first row, then your second . . .

2

As if you somehow slipped off the globe

During the night: you wake a little early

In a foreign room, your clothes are here

And next door someone is eating noisily.

Terrible things have happened. Outside,

Men are walking to work, sullen as pewter,

You hope no one thinks you different

And quicken past the soldiers at the corner

Fingering their guns that seem so big,

Speaking grudgingly, a winter guttural.

It is too cold for a dream: your breath

Hangs like the clouding smoke from the nearby tank

That points you, with the rest, to the Square.

What is happening? The old man beside you

Is trembling like the edge of a