Isn’t it clear? I am writing about this house and its property because I want you to be here to see that what I saw in the way you fed ducks at Holmdel Park became me, finally, before winded years, that you can meet my wife, give us over dinner your quick tongue, and stammer away into the circle-eyed diabetic coma you didn’t seem to mind. I would give you a Kenya Tatu Estate AA coffee and with it kill you a little closer to me.
*
Marissa made a bourbon peach crisp last night. I was looking around inside for a way to mention you. It had a thick oat crust and cinnamon brown sugar drawn on the top. Late August meeting October on the tongue. The seasons are dizzied by our having moved too many consecutive summers.
*
Dad, I want to tell you the most horrible thing happened to us this winter, but I’m not sure I should, even in this privacy. The idea of a ghost renders my sentiments free of the insulating fact of loss. It is the summer heat that compels me to speak at all. That I am finally warm as if by your ghost. You will know what I mean when I say many things that in draft can baffle, even though song. That poetry at the maximum of information lets free sacred feeling. The process of returning inward to sentiment is what keeps the breathing machine going. More to speak of your impatience for style than your broad intelligence, I know for you it would not be too complicating to introduce the idea of a wet hay bale spontaneously combusting because of the rapid heating of internal decomposition. The whole thing puts me on a mad winter’s diet of words plain as tubers, waiting for the sky at dawn to turn into lager.
*
The story of Emily Dickinson growing a Celeste fig tree (closed eye when ripe) in the nursery nook outside between the library and living room makes me wish for a line of ruby blush outside mine. “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet,” she says.
*
The ablation is our distance, the communicative secret among the sacred texts, the dead and me, here, sitting. The nervous bouncing of the knee is the articulation of the thinking that causes the next walk around the yard. I think I will have to stop the poem once I believe that my actions are for the poem. I should not build a home merely to better the poem.
*
A trip to Vermont to get the property off the mind is to the mind what the shears are to lilacs, what the nose is to lovers, after bloom. There though, there is nothing. We take a whiskey and have swordfish on the deck and talk plainly, the little talkings-over. “Evenings in Vermont” from Schyuler’s “Hymn to Life” makes sense to us here. Where you go to process the day’s intake.
*
At night past the point of process where the poet wishes to dwell and die, an owl I will have to look up by its call appears. Two of them, the repeating one farther away, which draws the listener to the edge of the midnight bed, the call of the probably female closer. Marissa sleeps and I don’t wake her for the listening because she isn’t having a nightmare. The parliament of owls is a solitude of thoughts and suddenly it is important to return to Loudville.
David Bartone is the author of Practice on Mountains (Sawtooth Poetry Prize, Ahsahta Press, 2014) and Spring Logic (H_NGM_N, 2010). Recent poems and translations have appeared at Pleaides, Hotel Amerika, and Mass Poetry. He lives in Easthampton, Mass.