S1, Bonus 5 - Poems by Washburn and Gibson

Transcript

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This is episode 24 of Ed Falco on the air. In this episode, I'll be reading Brit Washburn's poem, Dear Dad, and my own poem, Coy, and we'll listen to Steve Gibson reading his poem, The Crown for My Father on Memorial Day. Regular listeners may wonder how we've come around to reading poetry from where we started, listening to The Strangers, a serialized science fiction novel. The circuitous route by which we've arrived here begins after the completion of The Strangers in episode 19, when I started trying to answer a reader's question, where do your ideas come from? Which I generalized to one of the most common questions all writers hear, which is, where do you get the ideas for your stories, poems, plays, screenplays, etc. In episodes 20 through 23, I suggested some answers to that question, arguing basically that writers ideas emerge in the act of writing and are grounded in the writer's unique and particular deep sources, those intellectual, spiritual, cultural, or personal matters that trouble them, whether that troubling, is destructive or constructive, a source of despair or elation. In the three poems I've chosen for this episode, each of the speakers address their fathers, either directly, as in Gibson's and Washburn's poems, or indirectly, in a third person narrative, as I do in Coy. In all three of these poems, the speakers relationships to their fathers is the deep source of the writing, a source that everyone who has ever wrestled with a relationship to a parent, which is all of us, should recognize. Here's Brit Washburn's poem, Dear Dad. Dear Dad, Yesterday, on the drive home from work, I heard a piece on monarch butterflies, how they're rapidly disappearing, 80 percent gone in the East, 95 in the West. Such small fractions left, left, left. He had only threatened, not endangered, not technically. At dusk, a silent explosion of fuchsia and marigold bloomed behind the city's strip malls and smokestacks. And this morning, peeling an orange in bed, I was struck again by the absurdity of what grows on trees, such elaborate and delicious vehicles for seeds. The color, the sweetness, the way the rind opens and falls away like the wrapping of a gift in my hands. Out the window, a cardinal in the rain gutter cocks its head, bright red. Against the grey of late November. I tell you all of this to say there remains insects, sunsets, citrus, birds, flickers and flashes of magic amid the wreckage. That was Dear Dad, by Britt Washburn. On one level, Dear Dad is a poem offering consolation to a parent, proposing the beauty of the physical world, the sensual world that remains, as an antidote to despair over the ongoing loss of that world referenced in the first stanza, the near extinction of monarch butterflies. The poem works as a thoughtful address to the speaker's father, arguing that yes, We are destroying our world, but there is still beauty to console us. For me at least, on another level, I feel embedded in the poem an acceptance of death, an acceptance even of extinction. The reader assumes the father's death, if not imminent, will precede the death of the speaker. And so, the poem's idea, that the beauty of this world is consolation for our mortality, arises out of the deeper source of the poem, which is the speaker's loving relationship to her father. My poem, Koi, is a little story. In it, I merge and reconstruct a couple of memories. In one memory, the speaker places a koi in a backyard pond, while his aged mother watches, bound in a wheelchair, barely able to speak. In another memory, while the mother watches, a heron lands on the edge of the pond and steals the koi, which is white, with a flash of bright red between its eyes. Mixed and merged with these two memories is a dip into the mother's consciousness as she recalls her life with her husband, the speaker's father. Koi. A blue heron dips its beak into the backyard pond and lifts from beneath dark water a foot long koi, the white one with bright red Like an ink spill between its eyes, back to the dorsal fin. Her husband built the pond with slate and cement, added, at her wish, a waterfall. Recirculated water trickles down stones and drops into the pond. There were goldfish in it then, scores of them breaking the surface when she dropped the flaked food in. She thought the koi looked bloodstained and said so before her son slipped it into the pool. Koya knelt at her feet in front of the wheelchair, rested his head a moment in her lap. He said, it's all right, mom, in a voice so like his father's that she managed to lift a gnarled hand and rested on his gray hair. It was almost as if he were a boy again, come to her with a skinned knee or a child's small heartbreak to be stroked and comforted. She tried again to say that the Koya's red stain looked like blood, and again he said, it's all right, mom. Before he called for his sister, who came out of the house and into the sunlight, carrying a tray of medicines. The heron tilts its beak up to secure the koi, which is curiously still. Forty five years in the same house, so that everywhere she looks, she sees him. On his knees with the trowels, smoothing the freshly poured cement of the patio. Shirtless in the yard. A shovel in his grimed hands, Digging this or that, always digging something. She sees him in the plants and flowers, Especially in the plants and flowers, In the bleeding hearts and salvia, In the crowded hostas and clustering hen and chicks, In the showy pink hibiscus, Which shouldn't grow here, But do and come back year after year, Their roots deep under the foundation, Where they huddle in a pocket of warmth. All those years, home, from eight hours in the shop, and then out in the yard, digging in the garden, planting something new, working on this or that project, while she tended the kids, before the kids were all grown, and she tended only him. Today, she's sitting in the sun, her daughter in the house, on the phone. She wants to speak, but she long ago lost words. Her body has shriveled and crumpled into itself. The heron's great wings open in a magnificent show of blue. It rises into the air, carrying in its beak the blood stained koi. She watches as long as she can, and feels herself growing smaller as the blue of the bird is swallowed by the blue of the sky, till for an instant it's only that ink spill blood stain that remains, the bright speck of it on the air, a momentary spark or flame. About to disappear. Koi is a story about a son, mother and father sandwiched between the moments when a heron lands on a pond, steals a koi and flies off with it in its final image of the herrin disappearing into the blue sky. With the koi in its grasp, I hope the reader feels the sense of all our mortality seen through the mother's eyes. As she recalls the speaker's father. Steve Gibson is a poet who often uses the tight restraints of formal constructions to contain powerful emotions, as he does here in A Crown for My Father on Memorial Day. A sonnet defined broadly. is a poem of 14 lines that uses a regular rhyme scheme. And a crown of sonnets is a sequence of 7 sonnets linked by repeating the last line of each sonnet as the first line of the next, while the first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the last line of the final sonnet. The crown in the title of his poem then has the double meaning of naming the formal construction of the poem as a crown of sonnets, and also the conferring to the speaker's father a symbol of honor and power, a crown. This poem was originally published in the journal Rattle with the audio of Steve Gibson reading the poem, and that's what we'll listen to here. Steve Gibson reading his poem, A Crown for My Father on Memorial Day. A crown for my father on Memorial Day. One, I have often told stories about you as a kid I promised not to forget, like the photo I kept in my wallet when you were in boot camp in World War II, posing outside your tent. Everyone knew the future would happen, but didn't let themselves think too much, only to regret what was in the past they could not undo. I'd look at that photo and promise you thoughts of the Bronx River Housing Project with you home, like that pic in my wallet, would remain with me forever. That photo, which had serrated edges, was lost long ago, so much for pledges. Lost long ago, so much for the pledges to a dead father in a photograph, who stands outside a tent, and almost laughs. The smile is hard around the edges, and the photo in memory dredges up memories after the photograph. An adult, I want to cut time in half, and remember only a boy's pledges. But how can you forget what you still know? Cut time in half. And remember before, but not ever, what will happen later. It's not like tearing in half a photo and pretending you didn't go to war. Or what you did later to my mother. Three. And what you did later to my mother, a child should never see. Court photos document the violence blow by blow to justify each restraining order, which you would comply with and then ignore. It must have been, I didn't want to know, and turned my mind off as two shadows entered the bedroom and closed the door. The cops would come as they had come before, and ask your wife if she wanted to go with them to the hospital, and she'd say no. When the door opened, This was in the Bronx River Housing Project. Images not in the photo in my wallet. Four. Images not in the photo in my wallet. No, the image of you in your boxer shorts, cops helping you with your pants. Their reports included the weapons, German war helmet, Nazi flag, and the letters you would let the cops pretend to read, pretend to sort, then return to the shoe boxes. You were caught trying to make sense of what you couldn't forget. Hence, the war trophies on the bed, and letters, and you going over each one again and again, and never recalling what you'd done to her, after you promised it would never happen, after what you had experienced in war. Your gravestone marker reads, Tank Destroyer. 5. Your gravestone marker reads, Tank Destroyer. I took my wife and kids there on vacation. At Bay Pines, they gave me a map of the section, and circled in blue, your row with the number. I went there because I had promised her. I have a wife, a daughter, and a son. The visit was a side trip on the vacation. By chance, in another section was a bagpiper. I took a photograph of your grave marker. It gives your name, rank and division. You passed away when you were 37, the war over. But a casualty of the war. And as a casualty, I include my mother. After convulsive shock and pneumonia. Six. After convulsive shock and pneumonia, you died. Buried in Bay Pines in Florida. I went to visit as I promised her. Before your wife died of liver cancer. I have the map, with section, row, number, circled in blue ink. I keep in a drawer with batteries, flashlight, if we lose power in the next hurricane. I live in Florida. I'm retired. I was a college professor. My wife of 50 years, also a teacher, retired. Plans trips to our son and daughter, and daughter's boyfriend in Seattle each summer. I don't live in the Bronx River Housing Project. I don't have that photo of you in my wallet. 7. I don't have that photo of you in my wallet because I lost it a long time ago. But I do have the cemetery photo. It's on my bookcase. I don't want to forget that at City College, you wanted to get your CPA. The war came. You had to go. That's you outside that tent in the photo. And the future hasn't happened, not yet, and nothing is lost. The photo, the wallet, the you almost smiling, because you know that's how she needs to see you as you go off to a future neither of you could expect. The past is past, what's done we can't undo. I have often told stories about you. That was Steve Gibson reading A Crown for My Father on Memorial Day. The poem, in one sense, is a story about the speaker's father and the father's relationship to him and his mother. It tells us, in the formal language of poetry, Though this is a formal language, made skillfully to sound colloquial, about the difficulties he and his family faced upon his father's return from fighting in World War II. It is simultaneously a poem of forgiveness for his father and respect for his father, and at the same time it is an anti war poem, for the damage done to the family. is the result of the damage done to the man by the war he fought in. All three of the poems in today's episode were catalyzed in part or entirely by the poets relationships to their fathers. I've been making the argument in the past few episodes that a writer's ideas are grounded in the deep sources that motivate the writing, and perhaps there is no deeper source than our relationship to our parents. The ideas in these poems are various. They may be about mortality or forgiveness, or sorrow at the damage wrought by wars, or about the ongoing damage to the planet and its species. But these ideas all emerged, at least in part, out of the writer's relationships with his That was episode 24 of Ed Falco On The Air, featuring poems by Brit Washburn, Steve Gibson, and myself. Brit Washburn's poem is recent, and I want to thank her for giving me permission to read it here. She is the author of the poetry collections Notwithstanding and What Is Given, both from Wet Cement Press, and of the essay collection Homing In. Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose, Alexandria Quarterly Press. My poem, Coy, was first published in the Southern Review and later included in my 2024 poetry collection from LSU Press, X in the Tick Seat. Steve Gibson's poem was published in the journal Rattle and is available online as is his reading of the poem. He's the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Frida Kahlo and Fort Lauderdale from Able Muse Press. Other collections include Self Portrait in a Door Length Mirror. That was the Miller Williams Prize winner from the University of Arkansas Press. The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Gazals from Texas Review Press. Rorschach Art II, which won the Donald Justice Prize from Storyline Press and was later reprinted by Red Hand Press. From University of Arkansas Press Fresco's, which won the Lost Horse Press book Prize Massa's Expulsion, which won the Margie Intuit House book Prize and Roshak Art from Red Hand Press. I'm Ed Falco and I hope you'll come back next Monday for episode 25, which will be the final episode in season one of Ed Falcon on the Air. If you have a question you'd like me to answer in that final episode, you can email me directly at falco. ed at gmail. com. In any event, thanks for listening, and do come back next Monday for episode 25.