Poetry is the life of a voice; the "business" of poetry is often an axe
singing for the trees. The most profound encouragement I can offer is that
this poem has undergone ten years of submission & rejection, with
no "renovation" of its own, and has only now found its home.
- Larry Bradley |
mechanical almost, lifting its eaves
to the flies, picking the jellied grubs
from joist to joist, rifling through nests
of insulation so the wings of this house
seem folded over each window,
to delay the sun, that curable thing,
and as the plumage warms itself,
it grows cool where you stand
on the first floor landing, separating
the truth from lies, knowing those stairs
can climb up and up, up and out. The croon of a handsaw sweeps you inside,
into what the men are doing here
to the old bathroom, every plank of wood
measured and set, the nails beaten into wall
with the rhythm of ark-builders,
and the pairs of hands, so many Noahs
rough hewn or manicured,
sailing from wall to window,
from each outlet to a hole in the floor
gagged with an old T-shirt,
where the sewage pipe
opens its mouth to breathe, from the dry vac snorting the dust
of plaster like an addict, taking
the life of each shed particle into itself,
to where you remain, dumb, the nasal life
of the vacuum becoming your own,
your tongue washing its low sounds,
the taste of soup can in your mouth,
almost as though you're in the middle
of an essential food-chain,
the human machine absorbing
the hysterics of a cleaning machine
that picks dead remains of skin dry matter. They're changing this house, your whole past,
the walls you'd torn down with a mallet
and steel gloves, gutting the shell
like open heart surgery, the chips of dry wall
and tile ribbing through your body; you had
destroyed what had stood so long, but no matter
how hard you chiseled to work a crooked nail
from its hole or hammered a fist against stone
walls, to tear this all down for good,
there was someone waiting to rebuild around you,
some doctor outside to save this life
with a keen fishhook stitch.
Larry Bradley's manuscript The Spirit Of Gravity was a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and Walt Whitman Award. Recent work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, and Western Humanities Review.