A Walk in the Dark

In "Blind Rain," the title poem of Bruce Bond's remarkable sixth volume of poetry, we meet an old man become blind, his "eyes gone dark, / white with age," listening to a litany of delicate sounds that the "blacklash of rain" (recalling "many rains") creates. In those few lines, one catches Bond's intricate lyricism: the eyes are dark, as well as light, and the rain not only from a current downpour but also rain remembered, perhaps as a punishing "backlash," through the fog of dementia. We're brought into dream territory and up against the devastating reality of old age. Allusions to gardens background Bond's poems in childhood or to that mythic time before "the fall," when world and self were one. In the foreground, however, Bond imagines human beings who stand like trees thrashing in a storm, their branches caught in the "teeth" of stars. Bond's work is a walk in the dark, both delicate and searing, and deeply personal without becoming confessional. His beautifully crafted, allusive poetry asks a great deal of a reader—but it returns even more.

Dedicated to the memory of Bond's parents, this book considers the price human beings pay for consciousness. "Afterlife," which ironically, begins the volume, invites readers into the story. It begins,

If you find yourself staring in your sleepthe way a boy stares into a campfireon a lake of ice, his head lit, eyes closed

if how you come to love this placeis how you leave it.

The boy with his life ahead and the man who knows he must soon leave his are destined to change places: "If fathers in their frustration, their pride, / become the sons we cannot console," then "here where the dark opens the graves of books," we kneel "to read, repeating, repeating," struggling to parse out the meaning of what we create, and what we are.

It's hard to understand ourselves, much less another. The narrator of "Wake" feels the distance between himself and his students; they "look up and wait / for my first questions, knowing so little / of my life, just as I know so little of theirs." In another room, a dying man struggles to remember language. His son leans in to listen, hears only the "far surf / where life first sprouted its legs and crawled / ashore to dry its tail in the morning sun." It's a funny, surprising image. The animal body carries an ancient sea within but dearly loves those moments in the sun. That inner void is invoked again when we hear the sighs "of buses expelling little flocks // of coats." A sense of their own anonymity propels the "coats" toward

that brief sensation, uninvitedsmall in voice and staturethough not without its hunger.................................the physical greedof being, here, ever morehelplessly here, hereor so the moment wants to believe.

Few want the moment to end.

Bond, who holds an MA in music performance, pays homage to the work of musical artists. They include Bud Powell, the probably schizophrenic jazz pianist, and Glen Gould, the reclusive concert pianist. Concerned friends once locked the manic Powell inside a room where "the only open door was the lid to his baby grand." Powell played out his inner panic, shedding "such grace, / such jeweled and horizontal showers" you'd think you felt "a bright wind thrown from the rock of the skull." His groaning voice was "a great / branch sweeping the broken glass of rain." In "North," Bond portrays the Canadian Gould as mesmerized by the emptiness outside: "What he loved in the cold white meadow / of this, his northern province" was "a falling open," in which he could hear "the slightest wind at the valley's rim, the quietest branch, the deepest pulse." "Blue Instrument," the final poem in this set (recalling Wallace Stevens's "Man with a Blue Guitar"), returns us to the central narrative, repeating and extending images from preceding poems. A boy's hands rest upon his mother...