Tom Driscoll Writing
I hear her stir the small jar
of paint she’s mixed and know
she’s found the quiet needed to work.
Snow hasn’t yet fallen this winter.
I pick at this.
That poem about the green tomato
was supposed to be the new start
I’d promised myself, to step away from the dark.
That poem about the green tomato
was supposed to change things,
loose my loving tongue on its voluptuous
surface—simple music—
To Hannah
after L. Cohen
It’s early in the morning, the last days
of April. I write you now that
the weather’s improving.
Spring’s seeming late this year,
the skies have been darker.
You’ll not come back here, I know.
Those songs I collected
that insulted California,
they were never intended
to change your mind.
I’m told that you wept last time you called.
Another courageous decision you made.
What can I tell you that you don’t already know?
Courage is rough on the brave.
I see you there with the flowers and light
that you’ve found, your drive across the desert
your lover beside you — what more could I wish for you?
— what more could I give?
I’m thinking of another song right now
born out of a more complicated love than mine.
It’s just that sometimes it’s easier
to misappropriate a line
even as it guesses wrong colors
how I — miss and — forgive you,
can confess of my faults,
how with that off my chest I could send this
without the slightest grain of salt.
Those songs I collected
that insulted California,
they were never intended
to change your mind.
Sincerely,
your father.
•
“To Hannah” appears in April: 30 Poems
In ours, though it’s early yet, wildflowers
from last year’s seed have begun.
It’s agreed we’re wiser going with started
plants this season: basil, sage, thyme
—a half dozen of each in small plastic pots
and a bag of new soil. You’re not to handle
any of this and so you’ve set up a folding chair,
watch and coach as I lift each root-bound
brick from its brittle green container, place it
in the black loam I’ve spread. I break the edges
of these store-bought blocks with my thumb
rake the surrounding soil with my fingers.
We water the whole bed next—a good soaking,
you say —but gentle. The trick is to take the time.
The porcelain cup
fallen to the floor
and shattered there
—my clumsiness.
Sudden noise scattered
shards. She was never one
for such gestures
her hands always
at the quiet task; her voice
the silence.
I find the broom
and dustpan, sweep
my painted concrete floor.
It’s quiet work for a while.
That part of the year so perfect
arrives, the longest day, the nights
cooling from summer heat.
We don’t yet know the name of a child
about to be born. We’ve not forgotten
the last hours of another loved one’s life.
That old line about hope and history’s
rhyme comes to mind and it’s less the easy
slogan some would take it to be, as everything
is there in the music of language, each and every
utterance all the color and none that way
they say that light is comprised, composed.
We’ve come to mark the birth and death
of what we loved —and love, grieving, thankful.
Poet Tom Driscoll shares a collection of ekphrastic poems together with images of the art that inspired them. The poetry and imagery are drawn from several recent Art and Poetry Convergence events held each year in Lowell, Massachusetts at Western Avenue Studios Loading Dock Gallery.
Available from lulu.com
Strange how that song became an anthem
of ache and of yearning, or anyway
about some such sentiment.
It irks me, to be honest, how it seems to borrow
its cloudy meaning —pretend a depth of feeling.
The guitar hook: without question a knockout —killer.
Yet, I think it’s about there one stops actually attending
to the lyrics. Though the voice is heart-felt, convincing
somehow, parse the words, do your damnedest to follow
the syntax, establish some semantic sense and you’ll see.
It’s like you’ve come upon the scene of a child’s game,
one played with disparate dangerous playthings.
A kid’s toy cap pistol, a fifth of bourbon, book of matches
a name written on its folded-back cover.
That one dried rose.
Hold a perfect stone, find
its shape in the closing
of your fist around it,
its bruise blue color a match
for the cloud coming in
that day of the summer storm
that never quite materialized.
Be reminded every word
should be chosen
as carefully as this
in hand.
Recall the lyric
of a song unto god
you sang, believing or not.
The sea seeming over full, two miles walked
one toward our past, the other back again.
As I think of it now there’s hardly a sound
or maybe it’s my mind supplies a tangle
of nothing against the ocean noise.
I see houses where we used to stay
—sweet memory, then the sting
of sunlight, this burning salt
closing my eyes as it did then.
I’d pretend to be sleeping beside you
and not to notice when you left
for the water where you were always at home
and gone further than fear would ever allow me.
They shuffle in wearing ill-fitted shoes
polished to a mirror like sheen.
black laces pulled tight as they can be pulled
still leave their feet loose within;
folded inside, otherwise useless, documents
tucked as wadding in around the ankle:
maybe that memo no one wanted to read
or would ever admit to reading, even seeing,
a projection of death tolls and popularity
across the horizontal axis of time.
One sits, crosses his legs such that skin shows above
his thin black socks, wiry hair on his shin. That joke
about the indolent tailor and his hapless client
comes to mind —poor man, but doesn’t the suit fit nice?
The puzzle’s large enough —the image
that of a sweet, sunny summer afternoon: a man lazes
in a hammock wearing a paper hat and drinking
a pint glass of Guinness Stout,
an advertisement from 1960.
When was it? —just the other day we found ourselves
explaining the same thing
to each other about that balance one needs to strike
between aching for that one piece you need to find,
convincing yourself it’s lost or doesn’t exist,
then go-finding some other fitting shape
given up on previously,
how you claim finding —that— your due reward
for genius not luck—how ten more pieces
then fall into place so effortlessly.
The art of this process: pressing
then not pressing for result.
Soon we’ll likely finish; might leave the thing
out a day or two.
Then it will be put back in the box, broken down again
into a thousand pieces.
I mention this at breakfast and, before I can tell her
I’ve made the same connection, she compares this
to the way those Buddhist monks regathered the sand
painting they’d done: an intricately patterned mandala
composed, grain by colored grain.
Weeks of work; we’d watched them at it
then the ritual when finished: sand swept into a bucket,
carried in solemn procession across the college campus
to the edge of a pond.
Unintelligible prayer-chants, then silence.
The sand thrown in clouds over the water.
A whispering sound as each particle struck
the water’s surface.
—kiss—kiss—kiss—
My mother’s old wry line comes to mind.
“Kiss it up to God,” she’d say.
—kiss—kiss—kiss—
It was advice about disappointment, I think,
about letting it go, or accepting it, usually meant
more as humor than wisdom.
“Kiss it up to God.”
I hear her voice and wonder
if I’ll find the place for that to fit.
We’d’ve come stumbling from our beds,
your boys, half naked and shivering
to brave that slick steep stair in stocking feet
knowing you waited below
by that folding metal ironing board
with its worn silver-cloth cover,
the padding torn, the surface scorched
in places, blackened, burned through.
For each of us it was the same:
that humid gasp and sigh
as the iron was turned upright
weight of it placed in precarious balance;
you’d hand us the scalded grey flannel trousers
we were to wear that day
and each knew that pleasure as his own:
the warm cloth on cool skin—
each received this sensual gift
no matter his particular sin or history.
Tom Driscoll Writing 