Joseph Lease, from "now"

Starcherone Books has long been interested in poetry -- you know, that stuff that breaks lines? Less commercial fiction such as we publish probably has more in common with poetry than with the mega-blockbusters that the commercial fiction marketplace has become nearly entirely about. As a writer myself interested in alternative writing, I've had many long-time friends and fellow-travelers in the poetry world. One whom I've known for more than twenty years, though we've always lived in different cities, is Joseph Lease. Joseph and I met through Bob Creeley and through Joseph's coming to the read, for the first time, in Buffalo in 1983, I believe. I was taking a course with Creeley at SUNY-Buffalo at the time. Since then, over the years, Joseph and I have sent each other work and met up in various cities around the country -- New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Buffalo again, Las Vegas. Sometime after Creeley died a couple of years ago, Joseph came out to Buffalo again to do a reading at Medaille College, and we had a sad drink in a hotel out by the Buffalo Airport. I've always been a fan of Joseph's work -- its lyric beauty, its understanding of sound, its civic engagement. So here is some Starcherone fellow-traveler work, from a new poem by Joseph (with apologies for the clumsy formatting of this medium).


from “now”


you—in the park—

watch them sleeping—

you invented the family, private property, and the state—you did it—

“hey you”—it was you—and gray rain, shadow, mist—

And this is perfect—you are the light and the dark—

And no you don’t and no you don’t—

You don’t want to laugh at them you don’t—

You say take me to Heaven you say take me to Heaven—

Don’t you want to say that—don’t you—

Blue night
Opens
Blue night
Comes
Soft sweet kiss
Dear Mr
Fantasy

We came back to the world: the green world, the fertile world, the corn world, the gun world

We came back to the world and there was nothing there
fine
depression it is

a flying yell and
naked pants—everyone’s

diaspora—

You
Paint

God

Lightning
Spinning

Heat
Lightning
Far

“this sky is your sky this sky is my sky—“and God said let there be gas let there be cash and soft glances

bright
branches

blue side of the mountain, blue side—will I drink, will I laugh, tell me, will I laugh—tell me—will I spark—in this light, expensive light—did you pray—did you beg—for days like these—

so

typing

too late to watch the sunrise

pink and gray violet

bands

hills

there is nothing innocent

nothing more innocent

“I was unspeakable, I was backwash, or a global Marshall Plan to reduce carbon emissions or one from the distant past, elite with shoddy environmental records, spiritual disciplines, treat yourself to tart cherries this summer: new research suggests the juicy fruit could shield your heart health, and a boy in the twilight, a face in light blue, tan, orange, palm trees dark and offices and the sweetness in the air and the light and sleeping pills”—

the lake the
blue
35

clear mini lights,

42 inch animated and lighted

grazing doe (no sneering):

any purple day someone scatters

someone’s ashes,



[to be continued]

Joshua Harmon, "History of Cold Seasons"

"History of Cold Seasons" was published in Chelsea in 1996 and is the title story of a collection of short fiction that "has been looking for a home for some time now." Harmon's Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone Books, 2007) was one of three finalists this year for the Cabell First Novelist Award.

History of Cold Seasons

Where we live: brown weeds lifting from unbroken snow, blown snow rising like smoke. Smoke rising like smoke, thick and white these subzero days, from chimneys. Snow, days-old and packed, squeaks underfoot.

My Mattie’s feet froze in his boots, the leather laces stiff with ice. When they carried him in, I put his feet against the woodstove, watched while ice hissed and steamed, while water pooled on the hearth, knowing not to bother, knowing already that feeling stopped inches short of what are called “extremities.”

Which is not how Mattie would say it.

Dalton, feet under drifted snow and frozen earth, would have said, “Where everything else begins.”

Where we live: words take form as I speak them, hanging in the air for anyone to see—my breath visible the instant I exhale it.

I don’t speak much, generally.

The searchers—men from town, all of them known to me except those Carl Normandeau called up from Deerfield, leading dogs churning through snow shoulder high, sniffing my Mattie’s glove, not barking, as if they knew.

In my kitchen, I scraped frost from the window with a fingernail, watched all the men disappear in blue dusk, spreading apart in a line before they reached the woods. My tea steeped, swirls of color clouding the water. I held the mug in circled hands, warming.

Later, I held those toes in my hands, not warming, the skin blue and under the nails purple. I held them to remember in my hands their shape, to keep with me a feeling he couldn’t feel.

* *

Through February and March I chipped at ice dams along the edges of the roof, watched snow warmed by sun slide off—heavy, soft. Icicles dripped deep holes in packed snow. Mattie sat in his chair by the window, quiet, his eyes flicking from one thing to the next.

His cuticles he chewed raw, bloody.

The old sugar house, below the orchard, was where they found him, huddled inside the door, blanketed by snow blown through the chinks, through the windows hunters shot out.

Two, three hours, one of those Deerfield boys told me.

He said other things into his radio while we waited for the ambulance.

Footprints through snow are not difficult to follow. Carl Normandeau wanted the dogs for the newspaper people, whose trucks skidded along my plowed driveway half an hour past dark.

* *

“Mother,” my Mattie would say, if he could. What he says when he means “mother” is not a sound anyone else would recognize.

Carl Normandeau, that Frenchman blood in his veins, also told me words that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, words his own mother whispered to him when he still slept in her arms.

Most can, I expect—mothers being mothers.

Nights, in bed, this is what I tell myself, saying the words only in my head.

“Fool,” is what Dalton said. “Idiot,” he shouted, slapping the loose leg of his pants. He would sic the dog on him, watching as he stumped thick-legged into the woods.

“Not mine,” is what Dalton said.

Me, I went into the woods after my Mattie, chasing the shape of his broad back, calling off the dog that ran away the same day Dalton died. Mattie: shivering in dry ferns, hiding behind a tall tree, its shadow darkening his face. I held him, the bark pressing its pattern into my skin while he leaned his weight against me. That dog sniffed the ground.

“Shh,” I whispered, patting my Mattie’s back, “hush,” I breathed, stroking the soft flannel of his shirt.

We waited for dark.

We did not move.

This—in summer, any summer it could have been, before Dalton, before Mattie.

I held to Mattie under arching trees. Leaves sifted slanting light.

What I heard in my head were the words he’d murmured the occasion he held me, like this, and the body’s wordless answer, lifting, stretching, warming; taking in what is not its own—a time of year when cold did not give words shape, when water was not yet ice.