A Little World Made Cunningly

By George Klawitter

A Little World Made Cunningly brings together the author's best poems written over the past ten years in free-form verse and traditional forms, including the sonnet. Many of the poems rely on classroom experiences garnered from a teaching career of fifty-seven years. Family memories account for other poems, and the author's reactions to artistic creations, especially paintings and ceramics, inspired many of the pieces. An undercurrent of religious sensibility is rarely far from the poems, but creed and doctrine never comprise subject matter. This is a collection for multiple readers, an audience not far from ordinary experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Mar 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385212071

George Klawitter

George Klawitter, CSC, retired in 2012 from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where he taught for eighteen years and chaired the Department of English Literature for eight years. He now teaches at Holy Cross College, Notre Dame. He published a life of Brother Gatian (After Holy Cross, Only Notre Dame) and the lives of early religious Brothers (Early Men of Holy Cross). He has also published two books of Holy Cross missionary letters: Adapted to the Lake and Holy Cross in Algeria.

Book preview

His Lake

It’s proximity that shapes us

more than we care to admit.

I know a man-boy, lives

by a lake, brings the lake

with him wherever he goes,

the same quiet depth of water,

the same night creatures

to mumble and slither along

the reedy edges looking for food.

When he walks, he walks

like the lake, sure-footed,

lapping the land cock-sure.

Were there not a fire down

inside his growing soul, I’d swear

he is unknowable, a mystery

begging understanding, no more

a cricket than the angel that protects

whatever lives along, within, above.

If I could lie beside the lake,

I could watch the mystery unfold,

night after night, sometimes

under stars, sometimes

left in the cool of black,

insignificant against the flush

of innocents, able-footed

or finned, skimming the surface,

venturing into the pool,

lost in the wonder of new,

no more a part of understanding

than the broken cattail stems

anchoring the shoreline,

inviting serious study,

quiet repose, agonizing touch,

curious to find the self in water

where the answers lie waiting

for fulfillment, ecstasy, and peace,

dissolution the only finale

worth ample consideration.

So says the sky. So says the lake.

The Lady and the Birds

Instead of working on her novel, she’s lugging

fifty-pound sacks of bird seed out of her trunk

into the garage where they’ll wait

for her daily scoops. The birds she feeds

incessantly have become her life,

and it’s worth the show: the dozen feeders,

the suet balls, the apples on nails,

the ears of corn festooning every tree.

While the blue jays and the cardinals

go about their feast of sunflower seed

and thistle, the squirrels romp

silent for the leavings on the ground.

Least favorite is the roadrunner

who camps ivory-legged all summer and eats

the finches—grabs a finch each noon,

rips it apart, and downs it for his lunch.

Then at night the sweepers come:

the tense raccoons with their ritual washings,

a fox intent on sulky rendezvous,

and a family of naked possum.

They peer into the darkness of her house

and tap the panes to scare the cats

who’d love the chance to go outside

for fricassee of furry this and that.

Meanwhile the grandmother has padded

off to bed to sleep in moonlight

filtering through her avian dreams

where everybody gets along with everybody.

Homage to John Malcolm Wallace

Coon Valley, Wisconsin, a brown October day

when he was propped up at the altar

in a Lutheran church no bigger

than your living room. Mahogany, that box,

closed, of course, against the public he avoided,

and banked with yellow roses.

Away from Chicago, away from books,

his reluctant classroom, and the students

he tolerated with a distant love,

he closed himself away for the last time,

defying us to break his open secrets

or air them in his defiant world.

He knew the sweat of scholarship

and consigned it to a corner

where it belonged in a dusty room,

something to be stroked now and then

in memory of whatever energies

he had as a younger man.

In his silver years he preferred

long summers in the northern wilderness,

close to the Mississippi but far enough away

not to be bothered by it. In a cabin

I imagine comfortable but rude,

he breathed among the wild critters.

He said he’d go to town only once

each summer: to visit K-Mart.

That was it. I don’t know what he thought

or what he ate, if anything. Maybe he thrived

on roots and berries. I doubt he had a radio.

I know he had no books or papers.

He existed more than lived,

except for the excitement of hours spent

watching the birds red, yellow, tan,

flitting in the pines and crooning their tunes

to the aging scholar in a wooden chair.

Weeks passed without a human soul.

All the tedious lore he ranged so carefully

in his Chicago office was out of sight.

He joyed among the wrens and whatever

visited his cabin nightly

prowling for scraps or simply there

out of forest curiosity.

Then when he died of city cancer,

they brought him here to a miniscule church.

After a somewhat-service and no talks,

six husky farmers lifted that bulk,

carried it down the steps to the cemetery

off to the right of the stoop.

A bagpiper droned some tunes:

Amazing Grace and Comin’ Thru the Rye.

Suddenly a wind from nowhere

swirled down among the autumn leaves,

lifting them in a whirl skyward, then was gone

as suddenly as it appeared. So too John.

Abuse

for Don Cellini

A poet’s soul is delicate.

Like spider phlegm it breaks easily,

snapped by an errant bird or deer

or human. Poets spawn their specialty,

spin their meter soft and gentle

when they write of daffodils and spring.

But they have winter in them too,

lash out from time