About the Dead: Poems

Foreword

F O r e W O r D Judging the May Swenson Poetry Competition is a fine way to make yourself a hundred enemies—poets who cut off a slice of their heart and handed it to you in an envelope and you looked at it, nodded, turned away—but that’s just how life is and that’s why we guard our hearts. May Swenson guarded hers. She wrote beautiful descriptive poems about bronco riding, the Museum of Modern Art, and the A train (the same train that Duke ellington took), but she was guarded about her fleeing Utah for new york City, and she had her reasons. i was invited to judge the contest, i suppose, because, like most readers , i am exasperated by so much poetry i read and exhilarated by some, and my reactions have little to do with schools or styles. Books of poetry with bewildering blurbs on the back (“she shows an eclectic intelligence combined with forensic lyricism and digressive intensity”)—and you plow through a few poems and they are so unrewarding: Spilled perfections linger near the legendary lipstick blinking As she chews the burrito Of anonymity. And you say, “Oh give me a break,” and the next book is Blurred Undulations of Fevered Sobriety (“compellingly intense with an almost rapturous phenomenology”) and the first poem begins: how perfect the spillage of burrito On your lipstick. i blink. you don’t know me. how convenient. And so it goes. Travis Mossotti’s About the Dead struck me on first reading as an adventurous book grounded in real places and real people, and reading it was like following the poet up a steep climb on a rocky slope as he improvised his route, and at every step i was struck by the rightness of his choices, surprised by so many odd words that seemed so exactly right. it’s not a slope i would ever climb myself, not language i would use, which makes the book astonishing, lively, fresh and worth repeated reading. The drunken boys in “Decampment” leaving the quarry— [x] A train of empty boxcars slugged by before dawn and carried us back to Aynor like kings defeated. The dream about the girl Grace—“i wanted to open her like a mason jar / from the cellar hold.” The contrition for having paid Marcy $50 to have sex with him and his friend. Forgive me, when she pulled me under the sheets her eyes went somewhere else. Outside, the heat lightning kept drawing its thread across the horizon. And then: Our house sank two inches the day after my father died. i could, if forced at gunpoint, write a decent term paper about Mr. Mossotti’s book—i really could—and get into the gender trajectories of interbeing, but i am older now and what i am grateful for is the simple pleasure of narrative by a writer inspired to take chances. So when i read, Try asking ernie Watts, a local bricklayer, to explain how after a long day of work and league night at the Lucky Strike he can glide across the kitchen floor, Old Style hovering like a ghost on his breath, bowling shoes slung over one shoulder, singing fly me to the moon to his wife Cheryl. i am in a real kitchen, tuned in to a beautiful story i think i already know, all the way to the blessed thump of the last line: “there is no other life but this.” The dead armadillos; the spirit of the trucker left behind in the walls of the red roof inn; the boxcar riding through the country [xi] of forgotten languages; the locust waving to the man looking for his keys; the wild perfection of “Getting Arrested” (“i know i’m not the only drunk in the tank”); Angela dancing with her castanets while henry is “humming whiskey / through a harmonica”; the ghost frying chicken in a cast iron skillet; van Gogh searching for the right shade of yellow; the little gator toothing open his shell. The becoming humility of “Float Trip” about the poet and his fellow writers and artists going to Sullivan, Missouri, to float on inner tubes down the Meramec river— weekend philosophers bent on solidifying our contempt for the local stock whose imagination carries them back to a leather sofa in the den and a nascar Sunday . . . i apologize for our unwelcome intrusion. We...