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72 pages

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These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place "where the Ferris Wheel/ was the tallest thing in the valley," where a boy would learn "to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken's neck/ with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel." Looking back, the poet wrestles with the meaning of labor in the apple orchards and "the filthy dollars we'd wad into our pockets," or the rites of passage that included sinking a knife into the flank of a dead chestnut horse. In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties-or because of them-there is also a real tenderness in these poems, the revelations of bliss driving along an empty highway "like opening a heavy book, / letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower." In line after line, poem after poem, there is an immersion in the realm of the senses. The poet has a gift for rendering his world in cinematic images: a ten-gallon hat on his head in the second grade is "an upside down chandelier;" carnival workers "snarl into the darkness on their borrowed Harleys." In short, these poems are the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it. -Martin Espada

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Poetry

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Publié par	University of Akron Press
Date de parution	03 février 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781937378141
Langue	English

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Requiem for the Orchard
A K R O N S E R I E S I N P O E T R Y

Copyright © 2010 by Oliver de la Paz
All rights reserved • First Edition 2010 • Manufactured in the United States of America. • All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher, the University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
de la Paz, Oliver, 1972–
Requiem for the orchard / Oliver de la Paz. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Akron series in poetry)
ISBN 978-1-931968-77-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-931968-74-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS 3554. E 114 R 47 2010
811'.6—dc22
2009043757
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48–1984. ∞
Cover: Detail from “Light II” by Andie deRoux. © 2010 Andie deRoux, licensed by Grand Image, Ltd.
Requiem for the Orchard was designed and typeset by Amy Freels. The typeface, StonePrint, was designed by Sumner Stone. The display type is Avenir.
Requiem for the Orchard was printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by BookMasters of Ashland, Ohio.
Contents
In Defense of Small Towns
Part I
Requiem
At the Time of My Birth
Ablation as the Creation of Adam
Self-Portrait as the Burning Plains of Eastern Oregon
Sticks and Stones
Self-Portrait with a Spillway
The Poet at Ten
Requiem
Self-Portrait with Taxidermy
How I Learned Quiet
Insomnia as Transfiguration
Cussing in the Playground
Self-Portrait in My Mother’s Shoes
Requiem
Eschatology through a Confluence of Trees
At the Time of My Young Adulthood
Self-Portrait beside a Dead Chestnut Horse
Self-Portrait with Schlitz, a Pickup, and the Snake River
By Addition
Highway Towns
Last Days
Eschatology on Interstate 84 at 70 mph
Self-Portrait with a Car Crash
Requiem
No One Sleeps through the Night
Part II
Autumn Scene as Lullaby
How I Learned Bliss
Self-Portrait on Good Friday as an Altar Boy
Once, Love, I Broke a Window
Meditation with Smoke and Flowers
Requiem
Self-Portrait Descending Slowly into the Atlantic
At the Time of My Death
Instead, I’m Here to Tell You Very Softly
How I Learned the Obvious
Requiem
Television as a Tool for Remission
How You Came About in the World Bewilders Me as a Cherry Tree Flowering
If, Given
Self-Portrait as a Small Town
Autumn Song in Four Variations
Ghost Hunting as Physiography
Requiem
Eschatology in Five Acres
Self-Portrait as a Series of Non-Sequential Lessons
The Boy with the Fiddle in a Crowded Square
Colony Collapse Disorder in Honey Bees as Eschatology
Prayer for What Won’t Happen
The Surgical Theater as Spirit Cabinet
By Subtraction
Requiem
Self-Portrait with What Remains
For Meredith and for Lucas
In Defense of Small Towns
When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September, once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells
of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel
as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action
happened on Friday nights where the high school football team gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room
for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that, we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between
brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned
to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.
But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could
ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.
Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam
or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere, staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls
against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now? Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is
I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn, and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks
at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,
to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,
to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though
the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there, rising slightly and just out of reach.

Requiem
The hours there, the spindled limbs and husks
of dead insects. The powders and the unguent
smells. What’s left, now, of the orchards?
What shape and hammer? What clang of apples?
What crease of brown paper sacks with greasy sandwiches?
What salt burned into the brim of my cap?
What spines? What limb-aches from paintbrush
handles? What white acrylics spattered on green
and dense humidity of dew from grass?
Where lies the fruit trees and the hardy stock?
Where lies the open acre where we broke bottles
with pellet guns during break? Where we shot
feral cats and rabbits? Where no animal was safe
from the ferocity of boy?
At the Time of My Birth
I wondered how long I could go on once the rain had stopped. My nerves
were wedged like wings under a hat. Corncobs bobbed in boiling water. I kept
a fist in my mouth. I was strident. The neat house curved like a draining sink.
Hot cars shined outside. Their engines snapped like a chamois. I never
wanted to leave. The streets were suet-thick. The hucksters had tinny voices. They had
swollen drums. They had gravel underfoot and tongues that could peel citrus.
Radios throbbed. The wet hush of my breath flung itself to mother.
The soft dark skin. The sweet curl of the arm. The hum.
Ablation as the Creation of Adam
The world is always beginning. A face sweeps over in the vertigo of anesthesia.
A light gauze or a saline wash . . . something to ease me into this century tells me about the first darkness.
In the beginning, there was a whole me. There was an end I could not see. And there were sounds—a siren
set the hounds off. In between crickets, a radio. And between the radio, the hush of a respirator.
The aurora of the surgical lamp formed blue rings behind shut eyes. Let there be and there was . . . gossamer thin,
the numbed pulse. Pulse, the memory of the heart. Heart, the now-tongue. The here-flower.
Useless is the thing taken out of the body. Little stinkweed. Little broken thrush. What’s left—a socket. A keyhole.
I used to have something to miss; now my neck’s a rattletrap. Thus my body was corrected. A hand moved the waters
and said flesh be done. And it was done. Evening. Morning. The sterile tube shunted into my neck.
And it was good. I rose, fawn-weary. The stun of spiced cleaner cooled the room. Nothing like the clean of a new world
with my new none-body. My “hardly notice.” A new clock is wound behind the curtain.
The cut is now a blush. Apoplectic ravine. Cave scrawl. My zippered nest. Pink ellipsis, I shall name you, my flamingo.
Somewhere, birds rise above the African coast like blown tissue. The volcanic sun silhouettes their wings as they lift off. Then, the dizzy horizon.
Self-Portrait as the Burning Plains of Eastern Oregon
Let me start with fire. A little blaze lit to clear back the scrub brush brought by the winter storms. Let the air ting with each leaf pop as the ash of prairie grasses rise skyward.
And let that fire grow with each gust shot straight out of the Cascades far to the west. The curlicues of smoke fill a sky, void of mountains,
while the corralled horses several hundred yards away pace nervously back and forth. I’m trying to remember how everything settles down
after a fire. How the outcroppings of rock stand out farther in those charred, moonish surfaces. I’m trying to remember the nonchalance of a boy used to such things.
How the seasonal burnings turned the sky umber and how each wind seemed to fill our houses with soot. Springtime meant that everything would burn
and so I, too, would torch my name into every picnic bench, every combustible. A book of matches and a boy was never an accident. Nor was the little recourse I had in those days.
Boredom was an arrow shot straight into the ground. But I’m here now. My name is not a fire. My name is not a story of fire. I’ve got nothing in common with that element, save contempt
for the place of my youth and a hunger for air. I’m watching the horses closely—how they’re starting to canter in circles as the heat from the brush blurs the atmosphere,