Monday Poems: "The Book of Failed Descriptions" -- by Tod Marshall

Myth is prison, a palace,

truth without fact.

Myth is birth and pleasure, teeth and death,

              sharp shiver of that which is broken.

Myth is patriarchal and worn,

              full of fratricide and rape.

Myth is a garden, makes good television,

              memoir,

              the scandal of animals

              and people

              coupling beneath the stars.

Myth is crow eating roadkill and dodging the occasional cars,

              a pile of guts and bones.

Myth is carrying the body back to the den.

                            –Close your eyes and count to ten.

1.

   

“In language, there are always two.”

The Iliad

stolen from Thoreau’s cabin,

the only thing taken

during those years.

Remember, too, The Aenied

(we all have lived

through times of war)

and that passage

a friend said to know well,

“Learn fortitude and toil from me, my son,

Ache of true toil. Good fortune learn from others.”

2.

Ultrasound images of my heart.

That it moves and moves

and then moves again,

plump muscle

shuddering, laboring

to make up for one bad valve.

Spots in the ocean

where nothing lives

and yet there is movement,

water moving.

I stand in the river

fishing and watching an osprey

slide through the air

ten feet above the water.

I hear those wings.

3.

Eleven years of loving

can’t just vanish. I have photographs.

I have facts. “Hapy Birthday

Dady” scribbled on a card.

              How easy to sit at a desk

              and not see the full moon

              through the window.

              Roy Sullivan, Virginia Park Ranger,

              struck by lightning seven times,

              kills himself after being dumped by a lover.

              “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.”

A friend asks, “Why are you hiding in myth?”

4.

I gather a lock of his hair,

a scrap of T-shirt, a baby tooth,

his tiny spoon, a diaper pin with a blue plastic stork,

the quilted blanket, his first steps,

hands clutching my fingers, the long night

when his fever rose to 104˚,

his split lip at age six when he jumped with outspread

arms, the first shoe, a locket with a toddler photo,

first day of school, first finger painting,

the green cardboard sculpture

like something shaped by Breton, T-ball

games, the flopping trout he squeezed too hard,

his first broken bone, his fear when he felt

my trembling hands trying to tell him

something about the sun.

5.

Trout with a slashed back

where talons tore dorsal flesh

and the flesh slipped

from an osprey’s grip

to a lucky landing

in the creek’s waiting water,

thrashing and calming,

lingering beneath a deep cutbank,

and weeks later,

taking my elk hair caddis

and leaping

completely out of the water.

On the far bank, a muskrat

struggles and does a melodramatic gangster fall

into the creek where it splashes

and sinks. “Rattlesnake,”

my friend says, and I nod

and stare at where the ripple

swirls into the current

and think about sinking bones.

6.

The court acknowledges the petitioner’s long involvement with

____________’s like and sincerely hopes that the parties involved

will have the generosity and wisdom to honor that relationship.

Do not blame the wind

that scatters apple blossoms

ruthlessly. Allow that flowers

desire farewell blessings

before their time has come. 

7.

Fishing in the desert creek

a few days after the hearing,

I find bones, steer skulls

with round sockets for horns,

and step near three rattlesnakes,

almost grab a fourth

when climbing a steep bank.

The snakes were sluggish, though,

late spring when the temperatures

in the desert dipped into the thirties

at night. Only one rattled,

and the rain of the previous days

made the fishing terrible, water brown

and swift. I didn’t get a bite

and drove home, bought

a bucket of fried chicken,

and ate in front of the television

his clothes still hanging in a closet.

8.

There is no

end to the hours

when cedars and peaks

scratch the sky’s belly.

No garden,

but sometimes, wildflowers.

Sometimes, fish hold against

the river’s current

then dart with a silvery

flash downstream.

Sometimes, deer

on the other shore

stand still

for a moment,

then hunch toward

their grazing.

9.

A birthday party and he’ll have nothing to do with the inflatable  castles rented and set up on the lawn, only wants to run all afternoon, playing chase, tag-like game where I growl and laugh and lumber around the playground, his giggling, both of us laughing and roaring, and I catch him and he gets away and climbs to the top of the jungle gym where he looks at me with worry, and I know that the game is on break, that this is real, and I walk beneath him and he doesn’t pause. He jumps into my arms, and I catch him.

10.

Ready or not

                here I come—

A feather floats downstream,

the rings of a ripple smooth.

Love is possible. The heron

hunts in the shallows with slow

deliberate steps, startles

from the creek, and rises.

Sunlight warms basalt walls

fields of sage, and Hawthorne

groves, here, where tumble-

weeds rove for home.

*     *     *     *     *

Poet Tod Marshall is the author of two collections—Dare Say (2002) and The Tangled Line (2009)—as well as editor of a collection of interviews with contemporary poets called Range of the Possible and an anthology of poems from those poets, Range of Voices (2005). He lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches at Gonzaga University.