Poet’s Tree (Entering New World) (Also Learning Of John Updike)
I don’t know that I’d ever actually been
in such a house before, the ceilings tall
between thick walls, a measured leisure dappling the halls
like sun through leaves–one could imagine an Intellect sitting
in a Georgian chair–the pink sponge of brain oddly suited to
dark varnished slats–as in, not oozing–and on the brick veranda, a woman
(my friend’s mom) her waved hair parted
like a woodcut of a classical sea, sighting some bird
of jeweled plumage, her fingers raised
as if to stop its flight, time too–
and in the little breakfast nook, painted yellow
as a stamen or a yolk, where green shone
through a warp of bright glass antique enough
to have run, sat
a slender book of poetry,
on the counter where we drank tea, itself
a new experience–at least, for me–having
grown up in a working-class suburb drinking
I don’t know what–
in which the poet wrote
of telephone poles.
Of course, I knew that poetry was not all unrequited love, fates’s
vagaries–but up till then
only Romeo and Juliet and Robert Frost
had been sandwiched in–you know–
between the Get Smart and Bewitched, Mr. Ed
and smidgeons
of Clark Gable–
and somehow I’d never thought
about telephone poles.
“What other tree can you climb,” the poet wrote,
“where the birds twitter/unscrambled,
in English?”
I was already pretty sure that no out-sized ceilings would ever
house me, nor Georgian chair seat
my sponge, but this song–homage
to a plebian totem–found in me
some resonating hum, vibrating with almost the same
unnoticed stolidity as those dark lines overhead,
and, later, the blue ones on the blank page
I myself would try to perch upon
as a translated sparrow.
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First poem (draft!) for April 2015–written for Magaly Guerrero’s prompt on Real Toads to write of our first poetic sources. The poet I quote here is John Updike.
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