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83 pages

English

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FROM TASMANIA TO COLORADO SPRINGS: Nature and travel poems ranging from the wild rangelands of Australia, and the island of Tasmania, to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado!
FOR FANS of Seamus Heaney, Dana Gioia, Kim Stafford, and more!
WHERE DO YOU BELONG? These are poems of identity, immigration, love, and nature.

Sujets

Immigration

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Publié par	Red Hen Press
Date de parution	23 août 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781636280585
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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ALSO BY DAVID MASON
POETRY
The Sound: New and Selected Poems
Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade
Ludlow: A Verse Novel
Arrivals
The Country I Remember
The Buried Houses
FOR CHILDREN
Davey McGravy: Tales to Be Read Aloud to Children and Adult Children
ESSAYS
Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us?
Voices, Places
Two Minds of a Western Poet
The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry
MEMOIR
News from the Village
LIBRETTI
The Parting (Opera by Tom Cipullo)
After Life (Opera by Tom Cipullo)
The Scarlet Letter (Opera by Lori Laitman)
Vedem (Oratorio by Lori Laitman)
EDITED
Contemporary American Poems (in China)
Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (with John Frederick Nims)
Twentieth Century American Poetry (with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke)
Twentieth Century American Poetics (with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke)
Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (with Mark Jarman)

Pacific Light
Copyright 2022 by David Mason
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book design by Mark E. Cull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mason, David, 1954- author.
Title: Pacific light: poems / David Mason.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022026226 (print) | LCCN 2022026227 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636280578 (trade paper) | ISBN 9781636280585 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3563.A7879 P33 2022 (print) | LCC PS3563.A7879 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54-dc23/eng/20220606
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026226
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026227
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following periodicals and websites where these poems first appeared:
American Life in Poetry, Arena, The Australian, The Australian Book Review, Bristlecone Canberra Times, Connotation, The Dark Horse, Forty South, Hamam, The Hopkins Review , The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, Quadrant, Rattle, Rosebud, Smartish Pace, The Times Literary Supplement .
For Chrissy
C ONTENTS
On the Shelf
The Air in Tasmania
The Lion on My Roof
Strange Creature That I Am
The Storm Coast
Crossing the Line
The Voices
Quantum of Light
A Word
The Work
Long Haul
The Lover Making Tea
Lives of an Immigrant
Pacific Light
The Condition of Music
Table Mountain
The First Sea Was a Sound
The Written Snow
H. M. S. Discovery
The End of Stories
Barra de Potosi
New Geography
Letter to My Right Foot
An Anniversary
Pine Needles in Snow
Salvaged Lines
To the Other Planets
The Solitude of Work
A Cabbie in America
Rhapsody in Blue
The Birthday Boy
His Prison
The Widow at 102
The Suicide’s House
From a Russian Proverb
A Killing
Every Sailor in Homer
The Glowing
Afternoon Going Nowhere
One Day
Grandmother Song
The Mud Room
Are We Still Here?
A Wren’s Weight
Wood
Under the Peppermint Gums
Love Poem
Words for Hermes
Painting the Shed
The Garden and the Library
Starting with Anonymous
Written in the Sky
Last Flight In
From a Passage in Melville
New Zealand Letter
Antipodes
Biographia Literaria
Note to Self
And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
—Herman Melville
O N THE S HELF
On the kitchen shelf a huntsman spider has left
its skin, which looks so much like itself
I thought twice before touching it. It was still.
The body left and left behind the soul,
feather-light and eight-legged, able to frighten
even when all it wanted was new life.
Perhaps you’ll come upon my own shed skins
in houses where my name has been removed,
the habitations I once thought were home,
or find some words of mine in an old book.
I meant them. The words. Every one of them,
but left them on the shelf to go on living.
T HE A IR IN T ASMANIA
This green heart, afloat
in Earth’s more-watery half,
bears like everywhere else
its lacerations, but the land
takes flying lessons from the air
and the air’s great cleanser, the sea.
That cry in the near-dark
has yet to be identified.
Open the window and listen.
It comes to us
like the earliest memory
when we lay with no name
at creation. But the world is not
dew-wet and new. The continents
are islands too, dividing like cells
in a microscope.
Between here and Patagonia
titanic volumes of air,
the whorls and currents
cover the distances
known to the whales
and migrating birds.
We share it with bush,
the lizards, the fish, the green
rosellas coasting up to a limb—
from person to bird and back
to a person writing late at night
when the light of extinguished stars,
having crossed an even vaster sea,
can still be seen winking
in the same abundance
we are given to breathe.
T HE L ION ON M Y R OOF
Precarious days, vulnerable like me,
those months in a cabin in Colorado,
the thin walls, the windows leaking heat.
One night a lion leapt on the roof—I felt
the frail studs shudder at its weight.
Next morning half a dead deer lay in the yard.
A man’s life is not a country’s life
but I was broken open, losing weight,
and like America I was unsound.
Some days I was like that gutted deer,
a hungover face in the spotted bathroom mirror,
and when I hiked for relief in the dry hills
I was hardly surprised by the small arms fire
sputtering nearby. It was only practice,
but the sound of it, rapid and echoing, was all bile,
nightmare America shooting the light out,
so many weapons bent on killing time.
Give me the lion, I thought, hunting at night
from the height of a cabin roof, keeping herself
out of sight in the day, abiding the quiet.
Give me the wound I know I can endure.
S TRANGE C REATURE T HAT I A M
•
I cannot remember boredom,
though must have felt it
on long summer days,
kicking the stones between
railroad ties, finding
the burnt lumps of coal.
Perhaps I was bored waiting
to be driven to movies
on huge outdoor screens,
movies too boring to watch
about men in cars or the lost
technicolor patrol—
one by one they were picked off
like minutes in a day
that went on and on
until the movie stopped it,
putting them all to sleep,
or I reached for the girl beside me,
strange creature, the fear
of going too far,
the fear too that she might be bored,
as the young are bored
on long days we never
wanted to end.
• •
Perhaps I was never bored,
but I knew betrayal,
my own and others’,
and the absence of joy
that seemed of all things
most unnatural,
that I was becoming a block
worn down by the words of others,
the looks of others at work,
the judgment of others
known only too well
like the smell of exhaust
over the highway
exhausting the senses
days at a time.
I knew the dream-boss: