Poems by Sydney Lea
Featured poet, January 2016, Issue XII
Introduction to the Poet: Sydney Lea
Sydney Lea
Sydney Lea’s twelfth volume of poems, No Doubt the Nameless, will appear in March. He has recently published his fourth volume of personal essays, What’s the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long. A former Pulitzer finalist, recipient of The Poets’ Prize, and founder of New England Review, he lives in the state of Vermont in the USA. He is also the poet laureate of Vermont.
Metaphor
The skins of maple florets have burst
and scaled to ground to sprawl
on the season’s bright new shock of green.
A man out walking thinks red snow.
Each May this scene’s the same
but scenery’s not what he’s after.
No he’s come out as much for invention as air.
He’s glad for what the eye can impose
even on nature less comely than this is.
The walker pauses
searching for illustration.
Ah watercolors of Venice by Turner.
Coal from old furnaces smogs their skies
so their sunsets weep and shimmer.
The paintings invite a conclusion —
Beauty will find its way.
What a mere museum-goer might call
repugnant the artist exploits.
His creations thus show a kind of transcendence.
In the middle distance
a sharpshin hawk skims the ridge of his roof
to stab a perching sparrow.
The man stops walking to watch
frail feathers hover where bird had been.
Then they’re broadcast by chill spring wind.
He’d like to make something of the scarlet stream
that must trickle from peak to eaves-trough.
He compares a moment years back
amid lush islands under clouds that were doubled
in a green sea’s panels
and appeared the more lovely for that.
Some predator fish had made a kill.
Stains drifted rosy by his rented rowboat.
They were lovelier still than the clouds.
Old memories too of a friend’s dying words —
but after all what were they?
And why think now of their long-gone speaker?
It’s not really speech he conjures:
chemotherapy had made fine dark tattoos
of vein and bruise.
Beauty will find its way.
He knows full well he should challenge that motto
as he strolls here in perfect health.
He knows his tropes make his scenery.
Metaphor is will.
Still he clings to obliging figures
like that gemlike blizzard under waking maples.
Beyond the maples there’s factory smoke
which the man on his walk can’t see.
At the end of their day
workmen fling steel hats into lockers.
Metal rattles and clangs on metal.
The walker hears nothing of that
but will head for home like the workers.
The splendid sun has guttered.
Real bullets savage body and bone.
Real blood stains real snow.
Somewhere. Somewhere. Somewhere.
Blood there scents the actual air.
He won’t let himself smell or hear,
he won’t entertain that mode of vision
for fear of meeting it here.
You of the Mottoes
Near Mount Etna, it was, where ruin appeared
a thing of the past: each stela shining
in the Latin evening, its motto eroded,
quick swifts breasting the sun in flight.
He ground his teeth,
his young mind arcing
age to age, from Vergil’s Mars
to the astronauts’. He was always impatient,
always wanted more. Obscurely.
She watched harpoonists pursue a swordfish
out on the bay and breathed, How lovely,
and sipped her wine. Breeze tousled the blazing
gorse, and sculpted fragments waved
in her rounded eyes. A mumbling monk
swished past, head canted, as if he were hanging
on the Virgin’s words.
Years later today.
Breeze ruffles this blanket of New England clover
and there’s no one with him except his dog.
The ruin, he thinks, is now after all,
is always now, as if he had failed
to mortar one of a building’s walls
for winds to topple. The bachelor won’t have her
back, nor the swifts, nor the statuary
in those red-brown eyes, nor olive smoke,
nor that street musician ineptly crooning
Caro mio ben’.
He’s more than weary
of the nine that one stitch might have saved,
of repeating ruin, devoid of quaintness.
He squints at a starling and mumbles, A bird
in the hand is worth… He sees it’s true:
He’s the bald rolling stone of that other proverb,
the You of the ancient warnings, You
of the mottoes — old, and now, and new.
Small Jeremiad
I killed a catbird once when I was young.
I’ll claim to this day I didn’t really mean to,
Just noticed him and flung a thoughtless stone.
I’ve done much worse, so why would this live on?
My cracked LP is Mulligan Meets Getz.
I killed a catbird once when I was young
but why, awake at dawn, should I have turned
from husky saxes chanting “That Old Feeling”
to some poor bird at whom I flung a stone?
There seems reason enough: a catbird dropped to our lawn
As I chose my old-fashioned record, a rare bird here
in northern New England, and though I’ve cast no stone,
I’m sunk in lamentation. Things I have done.
Ones I have left undone. And that old feeling….
I killed a catbird once when I was young.
My life’s the only life I’ll ever own.
I own it all when memory flies in.
I killed a catbird once when I was young.
I noticed him and flung a thoughtless stone.
Mahayana in Vermont
My objectives this morning were vague.
As always I’d hike these hills —
a way to keep going
against the odds age deals,
a way to keep body and soul
together, and not so much thinking
as letting things steal into mind —
but I started counting
from the very first step I took.
I wore rank old boots, ill-laced,
and patchwork pants.
Around my neck hung the frayed
lanyard of a whistle I use
to summon our trio of dogs,
who capered and yelped their pleasure
at one of our walks,
and more miraculous still,
at having me for a master.
It’s true in a sense
that I always count as I wander,
though it’s usually the beats of a tune
(Thelonious Monk’s “Brilliant Corners”
a favorite) that mark my time.
These counts felt odder,
better. We scattered a brood
of grouse at step 91.
The deerflies strafed us.
At 500 a late trillium
glowed by a ledge like a lotus.
Right along the rain kept pounding.
I was mindful of all these things
but I never stopped counting.
Life was good, and more.
It was worthy of better response.
At 1000 I thought,
Enough — and counted on.
Nothing was coming to mind.
Nothing is coming again
from my hike half the day ago
with three dogs through rain
but a mystic sense of well-being
in quietly chanted numbers.
Whatever this trance,
I treasured it as a wonder
not to be wrenched into meaning,
as in Every second counts,
as in You should count your blessings,
though of those there seems no doubt.