Withholding Information
My nephew, entering eleventh grade
this fall, says every generation,
once it’s settled in advanced adulthood,
claims that things have never been so bad.
I’m on my fourth strong beer. My powers
of allusion and rebuttal aren’t mustering
the way they ought to if my standing
as a balding elder who’s at least possessed
of ready wisdom is to be maintained
in this punk’s eyes, so I say what he said
is interesting but I have to see a man
about a horse. He squints at me
as though I’ve drifted too far
from the shore of sensibility.
I squint back, ready to explain
how idiomatic threads bind cultures,
how when they get loosened, lost,
you end up bowling by your lonesome,
but I realize I have to concentrate
on standing tall and walking.
The wall art in my sister’s bathroom
makes me wonder how two close relations
can diverge so sharply on important matters.
I flush and watch the water drain
and rise. I wash my hands, splash water
on my face, and ask myself what’s so wrong
with my sister’s choice to hang Be Happy
on the narrow wall above the light switch.
I’m surprised my nephew’s still there
in the kitchen, waiting to resume.
He may be representative of something
I’ve forgotten must stay vital in the world.
His brother’s moving to Kentucky
in the morning, and the younger doesn’t need
to hear me tell him all the water that we have
is all the water that has ever been.
He doesn’t need to hear me tell him
there have never been so many of us
needing and exploiting and polluting it
as though it will keep coming back to us,
which it has no choice but to do,
like some resilient lover biding time
in a dysfunctional relationship
that can’t continue its intense asymmetry forever.
He and his are anxious for a reason,
and a person who is not sure what he is
the elder of, who sways when stepping
into kitchen light, should let who needs
to whistle past the graveyard whistle,
let who needs to be like Beowulf take refuge
in the old days, in a savior with a record
of unparalleled success.
Let me not open for the dragon.
Let me not be like Jim Morrison,
who could have ended album number one
with “Take It As It Comes,” a song
he dedicated to the Maharishi,
yogic, spiritual, enlightened,
but instead decided on “The End.”
Why I Still Tell Myself I Will Say Yes to Ayahuasca Someday
I keep showing up and thinking
this is when the show begins, the frog eyes
peeking from the temporary pools,
the phoebe on the hemlock branch,
her hatchlings huddling in the nest built
on the porch-roof beam three years ago,
all waiting for what I will do.
I clean and fill the feeders
for the hummingbirds and fill
the feeder for the rodents not shy
of the light of day. They dawn on me,
the hemlock saplings, branches
severed at an angle or denuded
almost to their spindly tops.
The gruff man four tenths of a mile
up the discontinued road,
the malcontent who never waves hello,
must know I disapprove
of his philosophy and junk. Who else
would come down here with clippers
and a ladder, snipping, stepping, snipping
so that I would know he knows?
My friend, a Pingree, uses words
like dooryard and has lived
in Garland all his life. He studies
several samples and is sure
the culprit is a porcupine.
“You see he stops each time
right where the tree would start
to bend and moves on to the next one.”
I try to dream when I am elsewhere, home,
of what goes on here, who resides,
who passes through, but all I ever dream of
is a bald spot shaped like Africa,
or sex, if I am lucky, social situations
in which consciousness of self
appears to be the theme.
I have no clan, no totem,
no instruction in the dreamscape,
in the seamless elongation
of experience that I have heard
turns out to be a beautiful circle.
I don’t mention dreams to Ping.
We sit in plastic Adirondack chairs,
one white, one pastel blue, and watch
the forest as we drink.
Then twilight comes and grackles
by the hundreds, by the hundreds,
flying through the shaken hemlocks,
landing on the beeches, marching trunkward
on their branches, pecking systematically,
then flying on. For fifteen minutes
this goes on, and when they’re gone
we hear them still, their susurration,
barometric, pressuring the south.
I don’t ask Pingree if he sees the grackles
in his dreams. I don’t ask if he hears
the beech nuts singing in them,
and I don’t ask what he thinks it means
to lose yourself completely.
Disintegration
What is this incessant need to comment
on what’s passed? Where does it live
and why does it unsettle me, implore me
not to simply let what happened go?
I know, if I go home and tell someone,
I’ll see that person thinking, if the impulse
to be politic and sensitive inheres,
that it was just a bird; okay, a baby
goldfinch with an eye infection,
but you really need to get a life.
The thing is I’ve been reading Barry Lopez,
and two nights ago, my headlamp on, I read that
a Warlpiri man, an Aborigine,
whom Barry asked about the possibility
of wallabies becoming locally extinct,
said “that the body of an animal
might not be visible to someone
traveling through a certain country,
but the animal was still there.”
It may be because my cabin has no power
or because I haven’t seen a person
in a span of days I had to keep recounting
on my fingers, but I thought in darkness
of that worldview, tried to dream about it
but did not succeed. The thing is
in the morning I was going to get water
from the jug inverted in the crock dispenser
and looked out the window of the door
and saw the goldfinch upright on a deck board
and believed that maybe things undreamed of
sometimes land like this,
materializing slightly out of context
on a surface that your feet know very well.
I have inadequacies. Such as
I can’t tell if a plant or animal
is asking for a witness or assistance
with a wound or time and space to be
at peace, alone. I put my cup down
and looked out the window, rooting,
which did not feel like the way of the Warlpiri.
Minutes passed. I took a photograph,
which also did not feel like the Warlpiri way.
The night before, I couldn’t sleep
and then I dreamed until I woke
about a poorly insulated chimney
and my falling, nothing
that would brace me for this bird.
A flash of muted yellow and a flutter, something
in a language I believed I limned the basics of.
The goldfinch on the deck board flew
in the direction of the language.
I went out the door and drank a cup
of water as I scanned the forest for the birds.
I went inside and for the first time
in my life I wrote a paean,
which I tore out when I saw at lunchtime
that the goldfinch was still waiting
on a deck board but now shielded by a bulbous tank.
I went inside to watch the mother,
who returned, returned, with food acute
or flaccid, and I listened to the paean
somewhere in the room, uncrumpling
as though the only thing it needed was more time.
John Popielaski's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Broadkill Review, Clade Song, Roanoke Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig.