Poems by Edward Harkness
|
SAYING
the NECESSARY
Poems by Edward Harkness |
The poems in SAYING THE NECESSARY include evocations of childhood, the rhythms and routines of family life, love for those who are dearest. Poet Edward Harkness set these themes in opposition - often within the same poem -to the darker edges of growing up, the quirks and burdens of history, the violence of our times. In "Black Butterflies," for example, the speaker is just another American on a guided tour in China, visiting a sacred mountain. He and his family break away from thetour and discover a hillside cave whose overgrown entrance leads to total darkness, then a lookout:
Read Judy Lightfoot's review published in the Seattle Weekly
There's a glimmer, a niche,
and beyond - endless blue.
Sentries crouched here, spying
on enemy ships during the occupation.
1930s:The speaker then recalls the horrors of the Japanese invasion of China in the
Old photos show Japanese soldiers
in Nanjing practicing bayonet drills
on bound Chinese prisoners.
The speaker and his family emerge from the cave "like newborns," back to the waiting tour bus, to the world of now, the China of economic reforms and failing memory:
Here, black butterflies whirl
like bits of paper,
harmless, their occupation
of the hill complete,
the small pages of their wings
chronicling the history
of life and death on earth,
in a language lighter than air.
In SAYING THE NECESSARY, the poet strives for an unadorned, understated poetic style. With a few exceptions ("Wild Flowers" and "The Man in the Recreation Room"), he generally writes in open form. But the tone he adopts often has a formal, contemplative quality, a sobriety. Some of the longer poems are narratives but employ standard poetic devices.
The poems in this collection reflect the ephemeral nature of time and memory, and the inevitability of loss. Each poem presents a personal utterance on the one hand and on the other reaches toward something larger - the world beyond the personal, which is the world we all inhabit. Harkness illuminates the elemental, the necessary. Thus the language is characterized by direct statement, clear description and a restrained music. These poems radiate outward from a solid central core, and truly succeed in that regard more often than not.
*This collection includes the poem read by Garrison
Keillor on The Writer's Almanac, Oct. 23, 2000: "Kaylyn, Hermiston Elementary"
Edward Harkness grew up in Seattle's north end and has, with a few
exceptions, including a year's teaching stint in the Peoples Republic of China, never gotten very far away from home. He holds degrees from the University of Washington and the University of Montana; at the latter he earned an MFA and studied with poets Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees. His poems have appeared in many periodicals, including American Review, Poetry Northwest, Seattle Review, Fine Madness, Portland Review, Northwest Review and CutBank. He is also author of several chapbooks, including Fiddle Wrapped in a Gunnysack (Dooryard Press, 1984) and Watercolor Painting of a Bamboo Rake (Brooding Heron Press, 1994). SAYING THE NECESSARY is his first full-length collection. He teaches writing at Shoreline Community College and lives with his family in Shoreline, Washington, which is an easy bike ride from his old north Seattle neighborhood.
Dragon Kite
--Tianjin, China
They gather at the footbridge,
headed to market to buy rice,
a day's potatoes, or
a jin of slick black eels.
He arrives in his ancient
cotton jacket, same dark blue
everyone wears, padded, at least,
against a taut March breeze.
Today he brings his dragon kite.
Three boys carry its bamboo body,
down the canal, gently unfolding
its yellow paper wings. Shouting
commands, he feeds out line.
Stooped old women with lily feet,
young men smoking, coasting
on sleek Flying Pigeon bikes,
mothers hoisting the one baby
the government allows--they all
stop to break a day's routine.
He reels in slack, waves, yells,
and the boys let it catch a gust.
His dragon balks, sags, climbs
above the scummy ditch
glittering with glass,
above wires and a stark, half-
built apartment, same shape,
same red brick as the rest,
drab as a government decree.
High against ribbed clouds,
his dragon, fierce-eyed and
undulant, gives its colors
to a chilly morning, blue-tinged
with coal dust. Carrying our daily
bread, we gasp as his creature
leaps, snaps and gallops
headlong into the dirty wind.
Auden in China
In the '30s I witnessed the depressing dazzle--
the pagodas, the squalor, Shanghai's fetid
Pearl River, and on its banks the rag heaps
of the starved--that stench clings to me still.
Even history reeked, so spiraled, so unwound,
time corkscrewed nowhere, moving and still.
Mao lit out for the tan Yanan Hills,
surviving on conviction and rice gruel.
Later, they called it the Long March--
6000 miles in a single year, one in ten
survived--a retreat so far-flung and complete
it final won the peasants and the war.
I only came to meet Tu Fu and Li Po,
those poets in their T'ang boat,
spluttering their poems on West Lake,
drifting aimless toward dawn's mottled skin,
plum blossoms caught in their beards.
Forever an exile, I settled in America, where
natives are aliens but hate to admit it.
We have jeweled lawns and bread lines.
Everywhere you feel the "quiet desperation";
the young country is ancient, naive to its ruin.
God-fearing men plan wars to end all wars.
What became of those drunks who sang
to the moon and back? Legend says they toppled
overboard, tried to cling to each other,
drowned in a net of stars. Legends lie
in the face of heaven. I saw Li Po and Tu Fu
in a pond-white-bodied, whiskered, nosing the weeds.
Watercolor Painting of a Bamboo Rake
--by Qi Baishi, 1863-1957
Nothing can be this plain:
a bamboo rake leaning
against a tree.
Rice paper, Chinese ink--
took ten minutes tops--
a lifetime of observing.
Mr. Yu, my painting teacher,
calls the technique "dry brush."
White space dominates,
as with a poem framed
in its white window.
The handle's a thick
dark swatch, the tines
gnarled, claw-like,
curled in suggested weeds.
The gardener leaned it
there, having neatened the soil
around flowers, maybe,
or a grave. He has worked
in heat and rain, year
and year, has seen floods,
famine, war, all the debris
of history, and still devotes
himself to chrysanthemums.
There is no grave, no gardener
we can see. We make believe.
Qi painted this at 88.
Paper and ink, rake or poem,
something of ourselves lives
in everyday things.
And for all the things not
included in the painting,
not mentioned here, they too
sing in the mind's choir,
in the white space
we can never hope to fill.
Superman in China
The theater's cold, half full
of kids and their folks
bundled in hats and coats.
Before the lights dim,
we draw the usual stares.
We're foreigners, Nimen de Meiguo
pengyou--"We're your American friends"--
and we've come to see the American
Man of Steel, Chao Ren, and Lois
glide like gods over Miss Liberty
and the decadent city below.
The dubbing's lovely, Brando's Jorell
intoning like a Chinese Moses.
Then, of course, scenes of crime,
essential to any image of the States.
The Big Bomb goes boom, California
comes unglued. Death of Lois.
A grieving Superman reverses
earth's orbit, reverses time,
and saves his secret love
and saves us all from evil.
We stroll out to a sooty afternoon,
streets flowing with cyclists,
manic Chinese cabbies in new Nissans,
and pass an old man who squats
by his dozen geraniums. Nin hao--
"Hello!"--we say to his toothless grin,
his eyes a bright forever in the sun.
And for a moment there's no America,
no Superman, just us waiguo ren,
"outside-country-persons," chatting
in bad Chinese with this lao ren
and his baskets of red flowers,
who's waited for us on his noisy,
tree-lined street in Tianjin
for two thousand years.
Alone on The Great Wall
Slaves built this to keep the barbarians
at bay. Barbaric as the next guy, I want to ask
our Chinese guide, whose English is better
than mine, something historical, polite.
Instead, I spy on a river of tourists jammed
thick as Chinooks running the Puyallup.
The Wall loops forever like ribbon beyond
the farthest ridge. The billion stones
a million workers lugged up these mountain
trails must know some ugly stories.
Long steep climb to a tower away from
the horde. Beyond the crenelated gun sights
rolls the bad guys' country, a valley
where corn sang in people's bones.
Mongolian wind kisses my cheek too roughly.
Straight down, Kodak film paper wrappers
lie strewn among chunks of ancient mortar.
A giggling Korean boy flings his can of Coke.
Chinese graffiti is etched on every brick.
Green soldiers in dark glasses stroll arm in arm--
maybe killers from Tiananmen.
Two thousand winters ago other soldiers
stamped their feet, dusted snow from black fur hats,
studied those same hump-backed hills. They saw
an icy horizon, clouds of their breath in retreat.
Tourists disappear. I'm alone trudging homesick
toward the next tower with a message
for a sentry from Hunan: Light a signal fire,
Tell the guy in the next lookout to hit the sack,
no one's been spotted for days. Tell him we're
all foreigners, all afraid of the dark, and tonight
the only assault will come from an army of stars.
Qin's Clay Army
-Xian, China
We believe artists were slaves.
It took an army of faceless craftsmen
to make these larger-than-life soldiers,
each an individual--general, captain,
swordsman--all with brave eyes,
each as real in most detail as us.
We believe artists worked till they died
for the good of the state. Each decided
at the point of a knife, sword or word
to support the regime, help the emperor
fight the long battle of eternity.
If his soldiers won, he'd live again.
We believe artists had their skulls
bashed in to keep the secret from us
visitors from Chicago and Hiroshima.
Their works are an irony older
than Christ, not as old as dust,
for dust is king of kings.
We believe we're free to believe,
admire Qin or hate his guts.
Here's another man who battled
the barbarians of his dreams.
We believe artists knew what they
were doing. No one considered revolt.
All knew they'd be clubbed in the end,
flung in a pit, their grave diggers
also clubbed and flung. No one would
ever know. We think all artists
were slaves. They loved their Emperor Qin
and died like warriors in one man's war
against the one puny soldier Death.
Music in Tonglou Park
-Tianjin, China
Huddled in June shade, they bang their cymbals,
crack their wooden clackers. One in pith helmet,
gray slacks rolled against the heat, pulls a bow
to make his Chinese violin whine, a sound
so strange locust leaves quiver in pain.
The crowd hems them in--widows, street sweepers,
arthritic heroes of the Long March smoking
long-stemmed pipes, a gape-toothed ice cream vendor
pushing his cart, crying Bingguar yi mao yi mao!--
they come each noon to sit on stone benches,
fan themselves and listen. Their faces shine,
they are world history, lined like fine pale soil.
A slender woman hobbles from the shadows.
Waving her coy fan, she sings, her voice
a humming wire, each word stretched to breaking
in falsetto jingju Peking opera style.
She wails some ancient heroic story--
even the vendor falls silent. The listeners
cheer, their eyes glitter with memory.
To grow old...mei guanxi...it doesn't matter.
Sunlight hangs in streamers through the trees.
The breeze is polite, Confucian. In a corner
of the park, where the singer's tragic voice
doesn't reach, a girl in jeans and print blouse,
her lipstick redder than Mao's red star,
kisses the boy in designer shades, the one
who taught her to waltz. They're not ashamed.
They do not suffer the past which embraces them.
The singer's wailed words die away.
The lovers hear only their quickening hearts,
the far off clack clack cymbal clack clack.
Shanhaiguan: East End of The Great Wall
Here's where stones go back to sand.
Waves assault their flanks and win.
Tourists ignore this place. The Wall
collapses into piles of gray rubble--
nothing for a picture except the plain
pink cherry blossoms on trees below.
Birds I've never seen bank white, cry out
and disappear in the air's blue mirror.
Emperor Qin said build a fortress, one
that never ends. A million prisoners
and working stiffs obeyed the cruel
son-of-a-bitch. Presidents do the same.
Presidents say die for freedom and we do.
They say build bombs to blow the blue earth
away for freedom for America and we do.
Some say the wall is one long tomb.
One day soon the ghosts of workers will rise--
engineers, masons, cutters, haulers--
and walk these stones again
and send tourists fleeing to their buses.
Below this turret a repair crew mixes mortar.
A high school dropout, a hundred pound
block on his back, struggles up a trail.
The guidebook tells the story of Lady Meng.
Her husband, Wan, was a poet with decadent
bourgeois tendencies. Wan, dreamer and free
thinker, lugged those same hard loads
mile on mile, day on stony day. Winter came.
Snow lashed the Wall and still the slaves
obeyed and broke their butts for the Emperor.
Lady Meng made her way to the construction site
with a padded jacket and fur hat for her Wan.
She searched and searched. Ain't seen
your old man in ages, a worker told her.
Every soldier and foreman played dumb.
She wandered the Wall, her tears like acid
etching the granite where they fell,
till she came here where even granite wept.
The Wall burst open and there lay
Wan's white bones. Wild with sorrow,
she leaped from this ledge into the sea.
The guidebook describes her as "a dutiful
wife, a model of devotion." My tourist map
shows a temple built in honor of Lady Meng.
I'm not Wan. I can't find the temple,
only the curved ledge of the Pacific.
America, country of huge, invisible stones,
I want to swim home to you, or to an island
where all walls end in foam,
where lived no emperors and no slaves
on the windswept shore of my cheek.
On the narrow beach below, Chinese school kids
blow up green balloons, let them go bzzzting
toward Pan-gu, the Creator, that scowling
figurehead who rants to himself,
locked in his temple in heaven.
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Read review printed in Seattle Weekly July 20th, 2000