******
A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. He is the author of twenty-three books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and fourteen poetry collections, most recently Here (Four Way Books, NYC, 2019). A fifteenth book of poems, What Shines?, was published in September this year. in February. In 2021, he was presented with his home state of Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
*****
Sydney has supplied the following introduction to his poems:
As I look at these disparate samples of my poetry, what might I say that would imply my approach to poetry? If that approach exists as a unified urge at all, it never enters my mind as I start to compose. What happens is that some person, object, place, event, or bit of someone’s speech pops into my mind. I trust it’s important merely because it has lodged itself, in some cases for almost all my 80 years. I start to write about that je ne sais quoi and thereafter allow the poem’s language to lead me wherever it will.
To non-practitioners, that vague reference to language as guide may seem strange, even if we’d never question a painter, say, if she claimed that certain patterns or blends of colors had carried her in unexpected directions.We know that the physical properties of paint are her materials.
Yet many, perhaps misled by literature teachers, tend to forget that the physical properties of words are our material: we want to know what the motivating “idea” of the poem was. For my part, if it is determined by an aprioristic idea, my poem will be flat, because it’s the very process of discovery, of finding surprise connections, that is the most satisfying aspect of writing poetry. That process reveals to me, among other things, what I’ve been thinking, usually without knowing it.
Here’s a terse example from the title poem of my new collection, What Shines. My beloved mother-in-law has been dead for a decade, but somehow my wife recently unearthed her childhood sled. Despite its placement later in the final version, that sled provided the poem’s initiating impulse. I suddenly thought of my own sled, a ninth birthday present, which was identical, and suddenly a flurry of physical and emotional associations besieged me, and the poem, so to say, wanted to know how I’d respond.
My childhood was what it was, and is thus, of course, unsusceptible of change, but even as an octogenarian, I can find myself editing, making it either worse or better, depending on mood or context. For no reason that I can logically account for, as I wrote I suddenly recalled another moment with my mother: we sat together beside a Maine lake whose rocky beach shone in the moonlight.
Was that a peaceful, affectionate scene? As the last line implies, I pursue an answer, and suddenly there’s nothing.
Of psychology, Carl Jung said it is not either/or but either/and/or. Was my childhood happy or was it miserable? The Jungian answer is yes. It’s my conviction that lyric’s signal capacity is to keep aloft multiple impulses, emotions, thoughts, etc., even when some contradict the others. All I need do to ratify such a concept to myself is to take up the poetry of my Vermont genius loci, Robert Frost.
*****
Sydney Lea: Eight Poems
DISAPPEARANCES
Rapt, an old man inspects his living room mirror
but not for his image. Instead, its angle
subtly reflects the light of a stub of candle
on the silent piano. He might say the reflection shimmers
but the years, though blessed, have jaded him some.
He’d rather avoid such a hackneyed word
but he’s also abandoned the urge to think up a better.
A train comes to mind, though he doesn’t know why.
He can’t recall when it was he saw it or even
if, but it seems some caboose’s lantern
lodged in his mind a lifetime ago, its glow
growing distant. Was it even then a matter
of things he longed for fading? The rattle and click
on the tracks make a poignant song. He’d rather
ignore its meaning, clearer now than ever.
HIFI, 1952
As yet there was only one sister,
still too young for school.
We three brothers weren’t much older.
I suspect that what I say is
more than a bit sentimental
and may not have a basis
in what was real back then.
So be it but let me keep it,
the four of us hearing the tune,
the strings and horns so alive.
It’s good to be where we are,
near our parents’ new hi-fi,
which spills into every corner.
The fidelity – almost shocking.
They’ve told us about its wonders,
and now at last they own one.
Having adjusted some knob,
they stand stone-still for a moment,
as if in a sort of trance.
Of course, they’re both in the grave now
and of course, they no longer dance,
cheeks touching– or anyhow.
But as long as I say so they do.
Indeed the song I hear now
is precisely “Cheek to Cheek.”
Now why would it talk about swimming
in a river or a creek?
Or maybe it’s actually fishing.
Who cares? Strange bliss pours forth
as long as the record keeps spinning.
Sickness, regret, and death
will all arrive in time.
And rancor. I won’t forget
the rancor. This evening, however,
we siblings sit and watch,
enchanted, four children together
on the couch with the fancy lace
while our faithful parents glide
in what looks like a fond embrace.
WHAT SHINES?
Astonishing, this never-ending effort
to have had a happy childhood. Why does it matter
now, why will yourself into all that forgetting?
She may have been a good mother– at least she tried.
Did she? Once again, you’re the one who’s trying.
You contend you do remember moments that glow:
You picture her standing one day in the snow, her teeth
in a chatter, no doubt, and yet she looked quite cheerful–
or she seemed to be trying. As you are. The teeth at least
were one good feature, radiant to the end.
You were poised at the top of a hill on a Flexible Flyer,
red sled that shone, your Christmas present at nine.
It may have brought you joy. You’re trying to alter
the down-slope rush, to make it shiny too,
to forget the icicles of snot, the raw
fingers, chilblains. Pain. A father was there,
a good man, you’ve always believed, who’s now no more
than a specter, whose presence is no more advantageous
than on that day. Or was it of some avail?
You can’t remember. You honestly can’t remember.
Perhaps you just don’t want to. You’re doing well–
at least you’re trying– with this, your obstinate bid
to winnow the damage and see if there’s anything more
than just the sorrow. Well, there were certain instants.
You say, I remember stones. You say, I saw
a beach by moonlight. And did those pebbles glint
like stars, as you insist? Are you quite sure
clouds never came to eclipse them? You keep on trying.
There’s that pervasive gleam along the shore.
Then you take a step and suddenly there’s nothing
(from his latest collection, What Shines?)
THE OWL AND I
My mother left and went north to have me after a jerry-built cross
Got burned on the lawn. My father was stationed in Gadsden, Alabama
Prior to World War II as commander of so-called Colored Troops,
And he’d invited a few of his men into the house, you know,
A radical thing back then and there in the inmost heart of Jim Crow.
I’m not aware in the slightest why I’m thinking now of all this,
Which of course I learned at second hand many, many years after.
No, I’m not sure why this occurs to me as I watch a barred owl
Coast to a darkening hemlock downhill at dusk from where I am.
One night my mother was certain she heard a human voice in pain
And sat up, wondering if some soldier were being lynched. And so my father
Went out for a look but he found nothing. My relation with my mother
Was vexed, in part, I surmise today, because the two of us had
So much in common. Jews were traveling in cattle cars right then,
But the real evil things in Europe lay months ahead for my dad and his men.
Still that sound of mortal misery stuck with Mom, and it didn’t matter
No signs of violence turned up next morning either, the company
All showing for breakfast mess, Shit on a Shingle, as a G.I. says–
dried beef on toast– and life went on, at least for then, more or less.
It should be a comfort to me that I can sit here, retired and safe, my clan
Ever swelling as sons and daughters keep on having sons and daughters,
And winter, so harsh this year, has ceded to genuine spring, with snowdrops
Aglitter and freshets making their evanescent cascades through woods.
I recall how my mother loved this season. Why, then, this lonesome mood?
It feels as though I were in some tunnel and wouldn’t get out again,
As if this, as the saying goes, were it, and all I had at the end
–Of course I know there’s nothing in it– were the sorrowful eight-note song
Of that one owl, the sound just now having reached my aging head.
I’d be foolish to think that such a cry were meant for me alone.
MY WIFE’S BACK
All naked but for a strap, it traps my gaze
As we paddle: the dear familiar nubs
Of spine-bone punctuating that sun-warmed swath,
The slender muscles that trouble the same sweet surface.
We’ve watched and smiled as green herons flushed
And hopped ahead at every bend, and we’ve looked up
At a redtail tracing open script on a sky
So clear and deep we might believe
It’s autumn, no matter it’s August still. Another fall
Will be on us before we know it. Of course we adore
That commotion of color, but it seems to come
Again as soon as it’s gone away. They all do now.
We’re neither young anymore, to put matters plainly.
My love for you beyond forty years
Extends in all directions, but now to your back as we drift
And paddle down the tranquil Connecticut River.
We’ve seen a mink scratch fleas on a mudflat.
We’ve seen an osprey start to dive but seeing us,
Think better of it. Two phoebes wagged on an ash limb.
Your torso is long. I can’t see your legs
But they’re longer, I know. Phoebe, osprey, heron, hawk:
Marvels under Black Mountain, but I am fixed
On your back, indifferent to other wonders:
Bright minnows that flared in the shallows,
the gleam off that poor mink’s coat,
even the fleas in its fur, the various birds
–the lust of creatures just to survive.
But I watch your back. Never have I wished more not to die.
YOUR FLIGHT
Pure quiet in the room, but for tat-tat-tat–
sparks from your fireplace
against the flue. You imagine
they seek escape, as you did
in yesterday’s early morning vision,
which let you rise high, for instance,
above the frame of that winter-killed deer.
When you chanced upon it on foot last week,
the bones had somehow settled
into a shape that made you think
of your daughter’s most treasured childhood doll.
Crude. Heart-breaking.
You hope it’s lost for good.
You were lifted too above the whips
of new beech at the edge of the big woods
where the doll-like deer bones lay.
You first saw that crowd of saplings as mourners,
then as something less benign.
In fact, once you looked at them more closely,
they seemed predators of a kind.
It struck you the forest wanted back in,
so you yearned to fly higher, believing
that to come down now would mean
endless encagement in grief.
You prayed aloud to the wind in your dream
that it keep command, that it take you
to some fanciful otherworldly garden,
where that daughter cut down by cancer
culls weeds and hoes the soil
so that better new growth may take root and prosper.
But you’ll stay by the fire tonight, eyes clenched,
half-ashamed of your reveries,
and try again and again
to rekindle that hope– a figment, yes,
but better perhaps than none.
(From his 2019 collection, Here)
WRECKAGE
Driving a wire-thin road
on my way back home from a local trout stream,
I braked, no traffic behind me,
in fact not a car in sight.
Backlit by lamplight, her shadow
showed on her cabin’s window blind.
O Lord, how stooped.
O Lord, how ungainly.
A miracle some twenty years since,
it was as if she’d dropped from a cloud
to her place in these back woods,
well after few remembered
–if they ever knew, that is–
what a legend she’d been. I remembered.
I instantly summoned her face
from my red-lacquer LP’s jacket.
Through the winds of December
And the magic of May
Through a million tomorrows
I’ll remember today.
I played that one song again and again
so often that one winter morning
my mother, hoarse and hung-over,
threw the record down and smashed it.
I’ve long forgiven her
for that and for other random explosions
as I strive to pardon my own.
My rage, to be sure, matched the moment.
And so did hers.
But that silhouette on the blind,
no matter how quickly gone,
sent me back to those scattered red shards.
O Lord, what a trail of ruin.
ELEGY FOR PAUL
i. m. Paul Tetreault (1935-2021)
I usually wake up in the role of belated witness…
–Wislawa Szymborska, “Early Hour”
His murmur when he spoke his few words
to a customer in the chair
was perhaps like the brook’s
behind his grandparents’ house
somewhere in a canton de l’est.
Paul once looked out the plate-glass window
and whispered, I remember that sound
when I want to calm down.
Was he ever other than calm?
My barber for decades,
gentlest of men. Here I offer
another poem about or for him.
I suspect it’s not my last.
Our visits got shorter and shorter,
too short in fact as my bald patch broadened.
It’s only now I see
the value of their sameness, sameness:
on the same little table,
same ancient issue of Outdoor Life,
unmoved, unread,
beside some weeks-old paper,
his trophies for horseshoes and dancing
arranged along a shelf
next to creams and tonics
no one had asked for in years and years,
their makers long out of business.
We all need ceremony.
This is my latest poem for him
but I doubt my last.
No barbers are left in the world.
My patient wife
will trim these few spare hairs
for the rest of my days.
(New poems)
The High Window 