C. Wade Bentley

February 10, 2024

“Storytelling” by C. Wade BentleyPosted by

C. Wade Bentley

STORYTELLING

The morning they saw the body in the river
on the way to school was also the day Jessica
said how she’d known all along that Seth
was gay and she was perfectly fine with it
and Kaylie said well me too but if you knew
why didn’t you say something before we went out
for two months but just before Jessica could answer
was when Jared said what the hell? and pointed
down along the banks of the river where half hidden
in the grass was what they would soon know was the naked
body of a young woman maybe a few years older
than they were and where for a still and silent minute
they just looked at the way her hair had woven
itself into the weeds the way her head would nudge
gently against the shore and then retreat
how the little ripples in this quiet section of water
would splash onto her right hip all purple and grey
shiny and taut with a look on her face
and her wide eyes that said nothing at all
that said I have no opinion I will have nothing to say
on that matter and it’s no use waiting for it you will
tell the police your story now and play it up big
for your mates at school later but you won’t hear it
from me that story that love story that fantasy
I had hoped to tell had begun to tell has now moved
to mid-stream and will be out to sea sooner or later
where old couples who are even now walking
along the shore will pause from time to time
their faces into the wind, listening.

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

C. Wade Bentley: “There are three things I can count on to make me happy: playing with my grandsons, hiking in the mountains, and writing poetry. Even when the end result of my poetic effort is crap—as it often is—I am never quite so happy as when lost and wallowing in the mud of a possible poem, trying to write my way out. And when the alchemy actually works, that’s a bonus. That’s magic.” (web)

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December 29, 2023

“Waiting and Watching” by C. Wade BentleyPosted by

C. Wade Bentley

WAITING AND WATCHING

what we are to do, however,
with our hearts
waiting and watching—truly
I do not know.
—Mary Oliver

We are allowed some tasks at the edges
of the estate: puttering in the potting
sheds; deadheading hollyhocks, petunias,
delphiniums; gathering windfall apples
for the horses and goats. In return,
there are sandwiches and tea, soft seats
near a warm fire. We are not barred
from the ballroom or the fine dining
rooms, of course—“wander where you
will, father”—but perhaps there is
a subtle herding, an unseen dog working
us, under orders to “walk on.” Meanwhile,
our language is no longer taught
in the schools, so we only smile and blink
in the bright noise of children on the pitch,
wave as they hurry past. They will not
have noticed the owl stirring in the dark
line of trees, waking for the night, but
lord love them, look at them run.
 

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

__________

C. Wade Bentley: “A few years ago, for a number of good reasons, I stepped away from the poetry biz and social media. It’s been a healthy break, for me, but my poems have become increasingly unhappy with their lot, languishing away in my Poems folder, occasionally foisted upon a few family members. They wanted to see the world, however much I warned them about life outside. But I’m very happy that this one, which (don’t tell the others) has always been a favorite of mine, has found a good home among good friends.”

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June 10, 2019

“Recalculating” by C. Wade BentleyPosted by

C. Wade Bentley

RECALCULATING

So Google Maps has me somewhere west of Evanston,
Wyoming, telling me that to get to the gas station where
my daughter and her broken-down Subaru are waiting
for me, I need to go straight for two miles through a quarter-
mile dead-end trailer park. This is the young woman
with whom, some Sunday mornings, I have coffee
and a game of chess as an excuse to get caught up
on her life and the status of her sobriety. It’s not much
of a game. I’m a reactive and distracted player and more
interested in the new medicine she has found in an online
Russian pharmacy than the fact that her horsey has me
in a rook-king fork because I failed to castle while the castling
was good. After asking the tall man in a short kilt
who comes up to my car with barbecue tongs in one hand
how to get to town or at least get back to a paved street
and a street sign with which the GPS has a passing familiarity,
I am heading in a promising direction, once again, a brace
of pronghorns racing me along the fence line. I slow
to let the lesser mammals win, this time, and then come
to a complete stop in the middle of a road that has likely
not seen another car since morning, so no one is there
to wonder at an old man with his head on the steering
wheel, his shoulders jerking now and then, to wonder
whether it’s some sort of a medical condition or whether
years of worry and more recent frustrations with mapping
apps are being siphoned off. It is in fact a release, relief
that she is safe after her mindfulness retreat in the mountains
of Colorado where, as she later tells me on our trip home
along I-80, the words spilling out of her after her week-long
fast so that, for once, I can drink my fill—where an owl sat
all night one night on the sill of the tiny window of her cell-like
room and where she left an offering of fireweed and granola
bars at the Great Stupa shrine on her last morning, along with
a bouquet garni, as she called it, of her addictions, before the hours
of empty miles across Wyoming, before the Check Engine
light began blinking wildly, before she coasted into the Sinclair
station, closed on this Sunday, before she called her dad
with the last of her cell phone battery and sat, meditating,
she said, on the green fiberglass dinosaur, knowing I would come.

—from Rattle #63, Spring 2019

__________

C. Wade Bentley: “While I remain an incorrigible introvert, poetry has become the language form that works for me when I want to try to say something real to the other humans. It has saved me from a life of atrophy, muteness, and isolation. While I’ve never felt that poetry is up to saving the world, it can sometimes save the poet.” (web)

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March 22, 2017

“Spin” by C. Wade BentleyPosted by

C. Wade Bentley

SPIN

One of those nights when I wake with a start,
thinking I have heard my daughter calling my name,

though she is many miles away and many years
from sleeping in my home. I would like to believe

that via some unbroken remnant of a father-
daughter psychic bond, she is sitting upright

in her own bed at this very moment, thinking of me,
thinking how she would ask me to check the closet

for monsters or bring her a glass of water or find
a way to get rid of the blind date she has caught

a glimpse of as he waits in the front foyer. The world
should have this kind of magic, I think. It should not

be some burble of apnea that has me wide awake
now, wide aware of all the trucks or boulders,

bad hearts or sadnesses that have pinned my children
beneath them, all the times I could not summon

that freakish, parental adrenaline that should have
set them free. I’ve heard how Einstein struggled

to believe in god, to explain the magic that allows
two entangled photons to respond to each other

almost simultaneously, even reaching back to the past,
so that from great distances they keep on responding

somehow, even when one, or the other, has gone.

—from Rattle #54, Winter 2016
2016 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

[download audio]

__________

C. Wade Bentley: “Over the past year or so, I have several times decided to be done submitting poems, maybe even to be done writing poems. And it’s not because I’m bitter or discouraged or convinced that poetry can do nothing to improve the world (although I am convinced of this). I think it’s because I sometimes can’t answer the big questions: why are you doing this? what do you hope the outcome will be? so what? and then what? But then I read a poem by someone else that opens up my chest cavity and applies the defibrillator paddles directly to my flat-lining heart, and so I decide I should keep writing, for another month or two, at least, just on the off chance that I can discover how such a thing is done.” (website)

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March 1, 2015

“Perfidious Under Fire” by C. Wade BentleyPosted by

C. Wade Bentley

PERFIDIOUS UNDER FIRE

We like to imagine our doughty news
anchors in military helicopters taking fire
over foreign battlefields, our Secretaries
of Veterans Affairs all butched-up
in black ops and Special Forces.
Our former presidents are the sort
who tell the truth about cherry trees
or semen stains, who single-handedly
take San Juan Hill. Our parents, paragons
of honesty, laid out for us precisely
what would happen when a man
and a woman came to love each other
very much. Our lives are seventy-five
years of finding out the lies and the liars,
though we know the truth in a fraction
of that, spinning new anchor threads
whenever a fat crow flies through the old
one. Mary Oliver catches me as I plummet
from the misanthropy of Robert Frost,
but only if I avoid listening to her read
“Wild Geese” on the radio—is that
her voice? I don’t want to know
if Elizabeth Warren has offshore accounts
or if C. S. Lewis yelled at the man who cleaned
his shirts. In my world, quinoa is the super
food that will end hunger. A unified
field theory will soon be explainable by power-
point and cardboard diorama. Shakespeare
not only wrote all his own plays, but did so
while taking shrapnel in the Falklands.

—Poets Respond
March 1, 2015

[download audio]

__________

C. Wade Bentley: “This poem is responding to the recent revelations that Brian Williams, Robert McDonald, and Bill O’Reilly have been less than accurate in recounting their battlefield experiences. I am amused by how aghast and condemnatory we seem to be when this sort of thing happens, knowing, as we must by now, that they happen all the damn time. For me, it connected to the broader myths we tell ourselves, our virtual realities that we must constantly adjust to account for actual reality.” (website)

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December 9, 2013

“Storytelling” by C. Wade BentleyPosted by

C. Wade Bentley

STORYTELLING

The morning they saw the body in the river
on the way to school was also the day Jessica
said how she’d known all along that Seth
was gay and she was perfectly fine with it
and Kaylie said well me too but if you knew
why didn’t you say something before we went out
for two months but just before Jessica could answer
was when Jared said what the hell? and pointed
down along the banks of the river where half hidden
in the grass was what they would soon know was the naked
body of a young woman maybe a few years older
than they were and where for a still and silent minute
they just looked at the way her hair had woven
itself into the weeds the way her head would nudge
gently against the shore and then retreat
how the little ripples in this quiet section of water
would splash onto her right hip all purple and grey
shiny and taut with a look on her face
and her wide eyes that said nothing at all
that said I have no opinion I will have nothing to say
on that matter and it’s no use waiting for it you will
tell the police your story now and play it up big
for your mates at school later but you won’t hear it
from me that story that love story that fantasy
I had hoped to tell had begun to tell has now moved
to mid-stream and will be out to sea sooner or later
where old couples who are even now walking
along the shore will pause from time to time
their faces into the wind, listening.

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

[download audio]

__________

C. Wade Bentley: “There are three things I can count on to make me happy: playing with my grandsons, hiking in the mountains, and writing poetry. Even when the end result of my poetic effort is crap—as it often is—I am never quite so happy as when lost and wallowing in the mud of a possible poem, trying to write my way out. And when the alchemy actually works, that’s a bonus. That’s magic.” (website)

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