Search Results for: the gray man

March 24, 2020

“The Gray Man” by Jimmy PappasPosted by

Jimmy Pappas

THE GRAY MAN

Part I: The Visit

I visited my father one Saturday at the nursing home
where we had put him against his will because he had
become too much work for us, he who had worked hard
all of his life, worked hard to make other people rich,
richer than he could ever hope to be. He was a gray man
now like a character in an Ingmar Bergman movie, so I
looked for the translation of what this all meant, but it
got lost in the white sheets; and I tried to figure it all
out by myself, but I too got lost in the white sheets that
covered his sleeping body. I decided not to wake him,
this gray man who had once been a stark man, who had
once been a man filled with action and life, and I sat in
a chair by his side, sat and looked down at my gray man,
my gray child, I who had become the father and he who had
become the child, our role reversals making the movie even
more complex, more difficult to translate, and I looked again
at the white sheets and saw only white sheets that smelled
of shit and piss. There were no English words, words that
I could understand, words that could explain all of this,
words that could explain him, words that could explain me,
words that could explain all of the things that have happened
between us, words that could explain why we behaved the way
we did. Even Bergman was never fully understandable,
even his words got lost in white shirts and a white background,
but at least he had words, at least there was an attempt at
translation. Here there was nothing, only my gray man, my gray
child, lying there sleeping on his back, waiting for my arrival.

 

Part II: An Earlier Incident

One day I approached
the nurse at the desk,
I’d like to take my Dad out
for an ice cream cone.

The nurse responded,
I’m sorry but … No.
I’m worried about him.
He could fall out of the car
or get hurt in some way.

For a few seconds
I could not speak.

I wanted to say
like Clint Eastwood
in Dirty Harry:
Go ahead, make my day,
tell me I can’t take my father
out for an ice cream.

I wanted to say
like Jack Nicholson
in Five Easy Pieces:
Why don’t you just
take this sign-out sheet
and stuff it between your legs, and …

I wanted to say
like Clark Gable
in Gone with the Wind:
Frankly, my dear,
I don’t give a damn;
I’m taking him out
for an ice cream cone.

But what I really wanted to say was,
What’s the worst that could happen to him?
He could die? Look at him!
He’s dying now! It doesn’t fucking matter!
He just wants an ice cream cone with his son!

Instead,
I said
nothing.

I acted the way
my gray man
taught
me to act,
respect authority
and do what I’m told,
so I did what I was told.

 

Part III: The Gray Man’s Arrival

There is something,
something I
want to tell you,
no
I need to tell you,
about
his arrival here.

He did not want to come.
He screamed when he arrived.
He screamed when they put him in his room.
He screamed and begged us to please not do this to him,

but we,
his children,
did it anyway,
did it
and turned our backs on him
both literally and figuratively.

We turned our backs on this gray man.
We left him there.

And now I beg him
(in my mind only)
to forgive me.

But that is not what I wanted
to tell you
about his
arrival.

What I wanted to tell you

what I really wanted to tell you

is that I

I was busy

so
I
was
not
there

no not I.

 

Part IV: Another Earlier Incident (of Little Importance)

I waited so long for this moment.

I wanted to tell him
that I loved him,
so I waited
and waited
and finally
I said it,
I love you, Dad.

And he said
nothing.

 

Part V: The Grand Finale

For my own selfish reasons,
I did not wake him on my visit.
I waited until he woke up on his own.

I sat there for almost an hour,
reliving our lives together
while studying the sheets,
and when he finally
woke up,
he smiled at me.

My gray man smiled at me.

—from Falling off the Empire State Building
2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

__________

Jimmy Pappas: “My Dad told me before he died about a creative idea he had to make ‘mythology cards.’ They would be like baseball cards. He would draw a figure from Greek mythology on one side, and on the back of the card would be a story about the drawing. I realized he was sharing with me an artistic dream of his that he could never do now. I promised him that I would finish my first book of poetry and get it published because that was my artistic dream. We all have in us this godlike desire to create.” (web)

 

Jimmy Pappas is the guest on episode #34 for the Rattlecast. Click here to watch live or archived!

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September 1, 2024

“That’s My Dad” by D.A. GrayPosted by

D.A. Gray

“THAT’S MY DAD”

for Gus

Ours was often a wordless language,
Whole conversations shared in the space
Between the hook flying from the rod,
To the splashdown in the water,
And in the waiting for the pull from some
Invisible place beneath the surface, or
Maybe the realization it wouldn’t happen.
 
Not always deep—sometimes anger tore
Through the mind like the hook’s barb;
Other times gratitude slapped one awake.
 
Or, like now, resting my hand on the glassy
Arm of an old rocking chair he’d worked
Nights sanding and smoothing,
Caning and coating,
And when this heirloom was passed down,
My few words, “I’ll take care of it”
Were all that broke the surface.
 
That memory shook me watching a father on stage,
Talking tirelessly of building a team,
The hands of the son pointing, shaking,
In the audience sobbing, three words pushing
Past the hard glass surface of men,
A whole universe on the other side.
 

—from Poets Respond

__________

D.A. Gray: “Gus Walz’s outpouring of emotion during his father’s speech at the DNC convention touched a lot of hearts but it also caused many adults to reflect on the repressed emotions in their own experience, and to see a stark contrast in the choices facing us—fearless caring, or a culture of fear shaped by toxic masculinity.”

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August 1, 2024

“The Book of the Dead Man (Peacetime)” by Marvin BellPosted by

Marvin Bell

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD MAN (PEACETIME)

Live as if you were already dead.
—Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man in Peacetime, If and When

If and when the war is over, the dead man’s days will seem longer.
When the ammo is spent, the funds discharged, when the fields have shut down and the flares fallen, an hour will take an hour.
Time for the dead man lengthens when the shooting stops.
The waiting for the next war to begin can seem endless, though it take but a week, a month or a year.
The low intensity conflicts, the raids and assassinations, the deployments and
withdrawals, the coups and revolutions, the precursors and aftermaths—it’s a lifetime of keeping track.
It’s as if the sun fell and fizzled—somewhere.
Then the black, white and gray propaganda, the documents planted on corpses, the reading of tea leaves and bones …
The dead man takes stock in the darkness of peacetime.
The Judas goats stand waiting in the corrals.
We are the sheep that gambol through dreamless nights.
A quietude hangs in the air, an expectancy, the shimmer that some believe presages alien life forms.
The calm before the stampede.
It was wartime when love arrived, yes, love.
It was wartime when the virtuosi performed, standing on their heads, as it were, for peace time is our upside-down time.

 

2. More About the Dead Man In Peacetime, If and When

On a field of armed conflict, in the midst of rushing water, at the lip of a canyon, by the border of a fire-torched desert, in the overdark of a where else was there ever but here?
Do you think poetry is for the pretty?
Look up and down, then, avoiding the hillocks that hold the remains.
The dead man, too, sees the puffy good nature of the clouds.
He welcomes, too, the spring blooming that even the grass salutes.
The dead man has made peace with temporary residence and the eternal Diaspora.
Oh, to live in between, off the target, blipless on the radar, silent on the sonar.
To keep one’s head down when the satellites swoop over.
Not even to know when the last war is reincarnated and the next one conceived.
The dead man sings of a romantic evening in the eerie flickering of the last candle.
He whistles, he dances, he writes on the air as the music passes.
It was in wartime that the dead man conceived sons.
The dead man lifts a glass to the beauties of ruin.
The dead man is rapt, he is enveloped, he is keen to be held.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

__________

Marvin Bell: “It’s true that, no matter what, the literary world is full of insult. When you put yourself out to the public, you’re going to get some negative stuff. But writing just feels wonderful. I mean, I love the discovery aspect of writing. I love that. I love saying what I didn’t know I knew, not knowing where I’m headed, abandoning myself to the materials to figure out where I’m going. Of course your personality is going to come out of it, of course your obsessions are going to make themselves known, of course if you have a philosophic mind a matrix of philosophy will be behind things; everyone has a stance, an attitude, a vision, a viewpoint. All that will come out. But in the meantime, you’re just dog-paddling like mad. And that’s fun. That’s what I always liked about every art.”

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March 10, 2024

“Man with Birds and Bread” by Erin MurphyPosted by

Erin Murphy

MAN WITH BIRDS AND BREAD

a cento

On the edges of the afternoon
we lie on the beach, gray waves
 
the only language,
the gun-gray curlings of salt-tongue.
 
A man slogs through the soft sand
with an expired loaf of bread.
 
Look how he kneels,
holding out his palms as if catching snow.
 
Seagulls peep like Erinyes wearing
white linen suits, sky-jockeying
 
into a swinging web of flying sound
on their parameter of hunger.
 
A cacophony of needs—
synonym for human, perhaps.
 
His home is an ocean away.
 
There / the moon hangs like a golden mango.
There / the beach is the wind’s body
 
flecked with violet
where the light, aflame,
 
used to hum in the siesta’s honey,
donde la luz zumbaba enardecida
 
en la miel de la siesta,
There / a song curls inside you,
 
songs of children, songs of birds,
cantos de niños y de aves.
 
All of a sudden:
a call, loud and mean, while flashes of light
 
rise just over the beach grass at our backs.
A four-wheeler.
 
Birds scatter
like fireworks on el Cuatro de Julio.
 
Hatred glosses
in the cave of the mouth—
 
a mouth as a cold wind.
Above, in the yellow sky, a phrase drifts
 
to us like smoke from distant fires.
The breeze isn’t silent.
 
Look how he kneels,
face toward the light,
 
a man who tilts his bread in the sun,
the bag of bones:
 
I am I am still here still here.
How bitter is the bread of bitterness.
 
If I burn the world around me—
el mundo que me rodea—
 
until it shines beautiful and brown,
how does one undrown?
 

Cento credits: John Hoffman, Pia Täavila-Borsheim, Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Linda Bierds, Peter Makuck, Rodney Jones, Dana Levin, Jennifer Foerster, Garrett Hongo, John Ciardi, Eva Alice Counsell, Reginald Shepherd, Julie Marie Wade, Michael Broder, Lola Ridge, Huascar Medina, Jonathan Wells, H.D., Olga Orozco (trans. from Spanish by Mary Crow), BrandonLee Cruz, Gabriela Mistral (trans. from Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin), Juan Felipe Herrera, Lily Darling, Noelle Kocot, Ron Silliman, Emanual Xavier, Cynthia Hogue, Ellen Bass, Canisia Lubrin, Alexandra Peary, Marilyn Nelson, Myronn Hardy, Forrest Gander, Chase Berggrun, Joseph Fasano, Chim Sher Ting, Mahogany L. Browne, Khaled Mattawa, Ashley M. Jones, Niki Herd

—from Poets Respond
March 10, 2024

__________

Erin Murphy: “Whenever I visit the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I see a Latino man feeding seagulls on the beach after work. He speaks Spanish to the birds, gesturing with his hands for them to come down to eat. The birds seem to recognize him and swarm around him for bread. This week, I witnessed a vehicle speeding along the beach and coming dangerously close to the man. The driver and passenger were yelling at the man and pumping their fists. The birds dispersed. I don’t think it’s an accident that this happened the same week that Axios reported that Latino activists are concerned about increasing hate crimes against immigrants. I chose the cento form for this poem because the experience called for a multiplicity of voices.” (web)

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August 14, 2022

“Salman, Bombay” by Karan KapoorPosted by

Karan Kapoor

SALMAN, BOMBAY

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it’s the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
—Salman Rushdie

I have spent almost a month in Bombay with
Midnight’s Children on my bookstack, taunting
me. Each time I think let me open the first page,
I remember another place I have to be. You called
it your love letter to India. Being from Delhi, I don’t
understand why anyone would write a love letter
to India. Sky, a tarpit of cancer. Yamuna, more
akin to a block of frozen sewage than waving black
water. Each small street bloated with buildings
and people like a starving child’s belly
sick with kwashiorkor. Bombay is more
polluted than Delhi but it boasts an ocean.
Is Bombay rain different from Delhi rain?
It is a question of lily or acid. The sun appears
here like answered prayers—unpredictable,
infrequent, and always more beautiful falling
on your face through a veil than stitched into skin.
Outside my window, above your book, the clouds are
compliant, smoothening through the grayblue sky
like children off to school. Wind bulldozes through
a banyan’s dreadlocks. Isn’t it funny how telling
the truth often feels the most like lying, like doing
something wrong? Here, it is midnight and I am
awake because in New York you have been stabbed
they-aren’t-sure-how-many times. I glance again
outside the window and think of water think
of thirst think of opening my mouth think
of moths think how could anything
as birdlight as music make one a criminal.
A child, blue beneath half-aglow streetlight
is trying to stretch a blanket over his body
in the hopes that it might become fire, engulf
his cold. His father snores nearby. No mother
in sight. I refresh my screen. Ghost a hand
into the sticky air, feel pinpricks of light salt rain.
Wonder, are you allowed back in India?
Please, come back with your eyes open.
 

—from Poets Respond
August 14, 2022

__________

Karan Kapoor: “As of now, 2:31 a.m. in Bombay and 5:01 p.m. in New York, Salman Rushdie’s condition is unclear. Last month, I brought his book with me to a Bombay visit, thinking his hometown would be an excellent place to enter into his most prized fictional world. While here, I have amassed even more of his books. My partner and I recently studied his Masterclass, eagerly discussing his wisdom and wit. The many articles and statements coming out at present about this deplorable attack speak volumes. I am sitting here and have only my sadness and this poem to offer. Without Salman Rushdie, the literary canon would have been a monochromatic field of bright stars. His works, and the works they inspired, and the diverse works that he endorsed, have shone the sun on the South Asian literary world. We cannot lose him.” (web)

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December 29, 2020

“Birdwoman” by Lexi PellePosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2020: Editor’s Choice

 

Photograph of a crane leaping at another crane behind its back

Image: “Leaping Crane” by Kim Sosin. “Birdwoman” was written by Lexi Pelle for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2020, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

__________

Lexi Pelle

BIRDWOMAN

I hurried myself into this new life like it was a bullet
train that could leave without me. Violent. The steel
wool of an inner child’s drawing
of a rain gray cloud come to life
to tear the rest
of your T.V. dinner off your plate.

Turns out everything I imagined we could be
is not enough to scrub who we are

from the second stomach of my chest.
Turns out you really can’t change people
and now every romantic comedy is sighing
its Splenda-ed happy ending in my wake.

Some days I wash the windows so you will see
how clear the outside of our home has become

while it waits for me. Fold
your socks so that it always
looks like one is eating the other. Leave
the white shell shards in your eggs
so you won’t ever forget how much had to break
inside me to become
the kind of girl
that would fear you enough
to always make you breakfast. I am no cook.

I am just a bird married to a bird
thinking that is enough to stop this sad,

splendid sky
from falling us
out of this godless blue.
It is the anniversary of the day
I stopped talking
about going back to school.
Started learning how to love
trying
to make you love me
and the daughters trapped
in all the pickles jars I was too weak

to open on my own.
How green this drowning has become.

How navy the nights
you came in
and I pretended to be asleep.
I was
knocking on the doors
of every pink dream and begging
them not to see me as a wolf.

The arguments
about traffic
and date night
and sex and bedtimes
and my family
and your family
and our family
and the chores
and the chore of discussing the chores
and the chore of keeping quiet over keeping clean
all fragranced in my hands like the discarded pith of an orange.

The delicate palmistry of a future
we to-do listed into a past

that would become the fight most travelled by.
The days that got us here
equal parts dull
and deli meated
and holy.
Memories such martyrs
for sacrificing themselves into a wide
and out of focus sea.

If forgetting is the only thing that can save us
then I will tear up every love poem I ever wrote to you.

The stanzas made out of Christmas cards
and sitcom laugh tracks.
A sliced,
but smiling soundtrack
to distort the silence.

See how my happiness backgrounds for you?
See how we are becoming those warnings about wildlife

with bottlecaps cupped
in their bellies?
How little
difference there is,
to a woman in love,
between danger and hope?

Those kisses that glitter like litter
does long after it’s been digested.

The silent photograph
our first daughter took of us
fighting at the family picnic.
The one that I framed
and then hid
so that the birdwoman inside it
could never get out.

In it, I am screaming,
screaming

at you.
My mouth opened so wide
that if she hadn’t been there,
if she hadn’t taken it,
I would have displayed it
on the mantelpiece
and told everyone
I was singing.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
November 2020, Editor’s Choice

__________

Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “From the first line break, this poem is engaging—like a bullet train not a bullet. It grabs me, and for three pages never lets go, with as many twists and turns along the way as the first lines promise, traveling farther from the original image than seems possible. It’s a bit of a cliché to call a poem a journey, but this one truly is, and there’s something honest and intimate to find once we reach its powerful destination.”

 

Tonight’s guest on the Rattlecast is Skye Jackson! Join us live here …

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October 1, 2020

“The Man with the Corpse on His Shoulders” by James CushingPosted by

James Cushing

THE MAN WITH THE CORPSE ON HIS SHOULDERS

I know a man who carries a corpse on his shoulders.
Yesterday, at sunset, I thought I saw
a lump of what had been a foot, or a smear of what
maybe was a face, just to the side of my friend’s pant leg
down by the unshined toes of his brown saddle shoes.
It was the dead, gray, mortal thing, beautiful and real
in some way no one can explain—the corpse he carries
and the way he carries it—so much so that
when I hear a bossa nova, I think of him, and when
I try to write a poem, sure and frank and flashing
with sex and wisdom and all the things I want to include,
like my friend and the corpse he carries, I think of him again.
Today he told me “Stay away from me, I’m sick.”
I told him his shoes were in a poem I was writing,
but that’s not true: the shoes escaped me
while he hoisted his corpse. Back home,
he props it in its chair for the night, so it may watch
him dreaming.

I carry a corpse, too.
Here it is, in my black-and-tan book bag, next to my green
Plato. Look at it. His face, uncorrupted, has lost what rage
it ever had. His white hair, grown past his shoulders,
feels so delicate; strands show up on tabletops, sweaters,
bowls of soup. His veiny hands, covered in loose,
translucent skin, clasp one another as though he were
meeting himself and felt on fire with the need
to touch. Some trouble with his belt: it keeps unbuckling,
catching my book bag, scraping my right ear
as I force his body into it. The bag-weight hurts my shoulder,
pulls me to the right as I try walking a straight line.
I love the work I make when carrying him, love
the hurt of his buckle on my ear, the chafing of my
shoulder, the ache in my arm, my full bladder, sleep-amoebas
swimming in front of all I see.

Through this nest of floating
shapeless things, I see my friend walking to his car, stopping
to adjust the corpse’s feet so they don’t kick him every step.
I see him the way I sometimes see haloes a few inches above
the heads of strangers, or statues making tiny movements
with their eyes. I think I’ll ask him if I may sleep tonight
in his back yard. The radio predicted comets, shooting stars,
and it’s dark enough out there for them to seem real.

—from Rattle #29, Summer 2008

__________

James Cushing: “The question ‘who you are and why you write poetry’ is quite relevant to this poem. I wrote this poem for, and about, a dear friend and fellow-poet who teaches with me in the English Dept. at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. His name is Kevin Clark, and he also has a poem in this issue. I think we are wounded into poetry. Something unexpected rocks our developing world, and we (some of us) find language as the healing, strengthening tool. Kevin Clark has told me that the death of his father, Allan was the starting-point for his poetry—that loss, at age twelve—and that this loss has been a factor in his career as a poet. When I learned that describing his response to that loss was also describing myself, the poem took shape.”

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