Songs of my Father: Poems by Larsen Bowker

By Larsen Bowker

Larsen Bowker’s three Chapbooks and seven books of poetry, take images and metaphors come from a childhood in a small Prairie town in Nebraska with more trees, hills and rivers than massive fields of grain, and found his narrative style growing up in resilient synchronicity of his parents’ polar opposite personalities—physical vigor of his Father’s inventive silence and his Mother’s lubricious loquacity, making it easy for him to believe all lives grow out of myths and physical images shaping who we are and seek to become.

Both athlete and poet, he believes Faith in Body, Mind and Soul forms the character best-suited to avoid discipleship to one of the three…while “our best chance to connect all three to who we are and what we want to become is that elusive, mystical, charismatic state of being we can never quite define, but know for sure when they are in synch, as if they were as distinct as the line of our nose in three way mirrors, or the memory of our first kiss.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823010795

Larsen Bowker

These are poems of a storyteller, his tone largely elegiac as he probes for balance in the thought/action and faith/doubt systems that give meaning to his life, searching as he says, “for the whole person I’ve always wanted to be.” In memories always threatening to become a vision, he searches for that sense of self etched on his soul by his Mother’s ‘love affair with words”, and his Father’s belief that “words are never as important as they seem to be. One critic suggests “reading his poems makes you feel as if you’re walking in radiant grace of afternoon light in autumn.” They are thought-inspired poems seeking to reclaim that slow drama and deeper texture of life lived before the 24 hour news cycles in their endless drone of words that work mightily to take the individual voice from our lives. This poet grew up in the part of Nebraska that has more limestone hills, rivers and trees than flat farmland, place his Mother made into Arcadian Myth and legend, initiating mystery into slow daily lives lived within their commitment to work, family and friends, lives lived celebrating the self as well as affirmation of others, helping to shape the character without rules. Another critic writing of poems in this author’s book “Flowers from a Deeper Soil”, called them “elegies from an unsung Master: honest, elemental and durable.” And another called them “’word journeys seeking to renew our Faith in a life greater than our immediate experience of it.”

Book preview

2023 Larsen Bowker. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  07/19/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1080-1 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1079-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023911507

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover Painting by Jeanette Bowker

BOOKS ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

POETRY

Prairie Wind and Light

Something Higher

Summering Into Autumn

Between Two Rivers

Flowers from a Deeper Soil

In the Shadow of Her Grace

Elegiac Dialogues

Spring and Autumn

Shadows of the Heart

In the Diamond Light of Morning

Body and Soul

PROSE

Women in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill

Pursuit of Permanence in John Updike’s novels

TO JAZZ…

"That beautiful but sassy love affair with freedom

and constant desire to improvise…offering

the language of emotion to those who

try to think their words into feeling.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

EPILOGUE

I. TAKE THE A TRAIN.…

Cliff Hawk

The Sound of Light in Spring

White Bird Living at the River’s Edge

Green Words and Bright Orange Shoes

Willing to Give All The Heart *

In The Flourish of Weeds

Thoughts on an Anniversary:

A Spaulding Boy

Stripped Down

Free Movies

In The Music of Her Silence

Re-Entry

II. BYE, BYE BLACKBIRD….

Raven Black Birds and the Cry of the Moon

Flowers on the Mall

Obelisks

Places Toward Which We Surge

Altering the Motion of a Landscape

Choctaw Blues

In the Dry Silence of Family Farms

I Hear My Father

A Boogie Woogie Search for Truth

First Betrayals

My Don Quixote and His Rocinante

Old Steam Trains, Pyramids and Great White Sailing Ships on the Ocean

III. ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT’

Lizzie Pete

On the Curve of Southern Light

Silence Striped with Lightning

Plains Song

Oodles

Eddy’s Pool Hall and Tavern Beneath the Old Opera House

Homeplace

When Root and Flower are One

Tabula Rasa, Les Caux and an Unknowable God

Looking for the Real Morning

Tangled Branches and Apple Afternoons

IV. ‘STORMY WEATHER’

In the Mirror of the Heart

Hymn to the Father in Us All

My Night Riders

Meditation on a Love Song

Nightlife

Family Politics

Under A White November Moon

Afternoons without Angels

By Land or Sea

Early Morning in San Francisco before the Sun Rises

In the Mystery of Friendship’s Promise,

In Mists of Stone

One Degree of Separation

V. IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK…

A Public Burning

Suddenly

Portrait of a Soul in Motion

Blue Moon

Where Sweet Birds Sang Last Summer

Still Listening for the Tune

Iron Rails and Water Dreams

A Candle in the Darkness

Prairie Dialogue

While Witty Scholars are Proving there was No City of Atlantis

African Drums and a Burlwood Flute

My Mother’s Words

Indian Summer

VI. AUTUMN LEAVES…

Prairie Wind

Comin’ Home

Under Pressure

Tapestry of the Flesh

Woman in a Blue Bathrobe

Wind Dance

Limning the Hunter’s Moon

Another Anniversary Poem

Under the Willow Branches

Whisper Dream Holding Back the Night

Living in Silverlight of his Shaving Mirror

Christmas Bicycle

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the editors of the following poetry magazines

upon whose pages some of these poems first appeared.

POET LORE

CONNECTICUT RIVER REVIEW

SUNSTONE

IODINE POETRY JOURNAL

CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY

THE LISTENING EYE

NEW LAUREL REVIEW

POEM

PENWOOD REVIEW

PLAINSONGS

GREEN HILLS LANTERN REVIEW

POETALK

SULPHUR SPRINGS LITERARY REVIEW

BELLOWING ARK

BARNWOOD REVIEW

CAPE ROCK REVIEW

HIDDEN OAK REVIEW

BARBARIC YAWP

MAINSTREET RAG

SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW

CHRYSALLIS REVIEW

ICONOCLAST REVIEW

PREFACE

The poet must look unsparingly into himself, and at the same time look away, intently away from himself, in order never to lose sight of the ubiquity of the special things around him. He must fling the emptiness out of his arms and keep close contact with those thoughts that tremble inside him, the way the leaf waits for the wind to let it know it exists. He seeks the voice that can urge him away from the indulgent loyalty to habit, and intently toward some small effort of the heroic that waits for him inside spinning tendrils of an active inner life he’s dealt with all his life.

I’ve selected poems from previous books of mine that had poems about my Father, written new ones and included poems that even if they are not about him, share something in sense or sensibility that allow me to see him—in this my ninth decade—as he was, or as I see him now, for there was nothing careless about his thought nor in his life. His sense of duty was as sacred as my Mother’s daily reading of the Bible. I never knew him to set foot inside a church, but if you came to his ‘workshop’ behind the house, needing something he didn’t have, he’d try to make one, if he couldn’t make one, he’d try to find one, and if he couldn’t find one, he’d teach you how to live without it.

He lived within the soft mysteries of a music that made his children feel fortunate to call him Father. A man of few words, he left it to others to write the words to his songs, songs celebrating melodies and harmonies of an almost ‘holy’ commitment to others. With quiet grace he lived a life the Roman poet Vergil described as one of moral character that comes with the miracle of birth and feels a mystical force deepening the soul…with reverence for all things greater than self.

In this book of poems I’ll walk again the country roads I walked when I first imagined a voice as singular as the long curve of a Meadowlark’s two note trill into the ‘psithering’ perfection of soft summer winds, hoping to leave my reader with a few literary conceits trying to express the complexity awaiting all of us between memories of a life lived and the words they depend on.

PROLOGUE

My Father’s Gloves

Bone yellow cowhide on the back, axel grease dark where

knuckles bend and the work is done, where the holes began

and the gloves held the shape of your hands, like scabbards

I wanted to fill with my ten year old hands, pulling

them on and off, imitating the way you flexed gnarled joints

of hammer stung fingers to get sweat-shrunk gloves over

work-thick hands—ugly and beautiful in their strangeness—

having to be coaxed into gloves rolled down one

cocky inch like Randolph Scott’s. I entered their smell of

mystery as if a cave, wanting to feel the warrior courage

of Raven black hair and Indian dark eyes of a Town Marshal

‘who kept the peace’ in a Dustbowl town where bitter

men who’d lost crops or farms, brought their impotence

to Eddy’s Pool Hall under the Old Opera House, steadying

them with wisdom not found in books…could because you

too knew the dark blame of failure on the farm.

On your own time in a workshop beneath White Mulberry Tree

in our backyard, you collected broken things others threw

away,