Between a Rock and a Heart Place
1st Edition
Published on 1. January 1987
75 pages
978-0-916379-51-3 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the David Lloyd Kreeger Creativity Award (1988) and the George Mason University Poetry Prize (1976), Brother Rick Wilson, T.O.R., presents here a collection of his finest creative writing-poems of family, love, suffering and memory. His poems are vivid, intelligent, musical, and intimate.
“Sound is wonderfully wedded to sense here... This is a book which yields up in richness what I most long for when I pick up a book of poems: vision, experience, travel in the world as another soul views it.”-Richard Bausch. O. Henry Award, PEN/ Faulkner Award Citation.
More details
Content
1 - CONTENTS [Seite 8]
2 - FOREWORD [Seite 10]
3 - I. BENEDICTIONS [Seite 14]
3.1 - Benediction [Seite 16]
3.2 - Beercannus americanus [Seite 17]
3.3 - Scarecrow's Dream [Seite 18]
3.4 - 32° [Seite 20]
3.5 - Winter Prelude [Seite 21]
3.6 - Quiet Cave Poem [Seite 22]
3.7 - Quarry [Seite 23]
3.8 - Sun Dance [Seite 24]
3.9 - Nocturnal Benison [Seite 25]
3.10 - The Gourd Dipper [Seite 26]
3.11 - De Profundis [Seite 28]
4 - II. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HEART PLACE [Seite 30]
4.1 - Saul [Seite 32]
4.2 - Between a Rock and a Heart Place [Seite 33]
4.3 - Compline [Seite 35]
4.4 - Granuloma [Seite 36]
4.5 - The Alchemy of Pain [Seite 38]
4.6 - Dr. Schram's List [Seite 41]
4.7 - Time On Its Side [Seite 42]
4.8 - Poem, Little Tavern [Seite 43]
4.9 - Exeunt [Seite 45]
4.10 - Act of Contrition [Seite 47]
4.11 - I.C.U. [Seite 48]
5 - III. HOMING IN [Seite 50]
5.1 - Dowser [Seite 52]
5.2 - Relief Map [Seite 53]
5.3 - Off The Backroads [Seite 54]
5.4 - Search Party [Seite 56]
5.5 - Back Tracking [Seite 57]
5.6 - Love Poem [Seite 59]
5.7 - Broken Sleep [Seite 61]
5.8 - Poem at 2:17 P.M. [Seite 63]
5.9 - Far From Home [Seite 64]
5.10 - The Archtypal Classroom [Seite 65]
5.11 - August Night Qualms [Seite 66]
5.12 - Homing In [Seite 68]
6 - NOTES [Seite 70]
2 - FOREWORD [Seite 10]
3 - I. BENEDICTIONS [Seite 14]
3.1 - Benediction [Seite 16]
3.2 - Beercannus americanus [Seite 17]
3.3 - Scarecrow's Dream [Seite 18]
3.4 - 32° [Seite 20]
3.5 - Winter Prelude [Seite 21]
3.6 - Quiet Cave Poem [Seite 22]
3.7 - Quarry [Seite 23]
3.8 - Sun Dance [Seite 24]
3.9 - Nocturnal Benison [Seite 25]
3.10 - The Gourd Dipper [Seite 26]
3.11 - De Profundis [Seite 28]
4 - II. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HEART PLACE [Seite 30]
4.1 - Saul [Seite 32]
4.2 - Between a Rock and a Heart Place [Seite 33]
4.3 - Compline [Seite 35]
4.4 - Granuloma [Seite 36]
4.5 - The Alchemy of Pain [Seite 38]
4.6 - Dr. Schram's List [Seite 41]
4.7 - Time On Its Side [Seite 42]
4.8 - Poem, Little Tavern [Seite 43]
4.9 - Exeunt [Seite 45]
4.10 - Act of Contrition [Seite 47]
4.11 - I.C.U. [Seite 48]
5 - III. HOMING IN [Seite 50]
5.1 - Dowser [Seite 52]
5.2 - Relief Map [Seite 53]
5.3 - Off The Backroads [Seite 54]
5.4 - Search Party [Seite 56]
5.5 - Back Tracking [Seite 57]
5.6 - Love Poem [Seite 59]
5.7 - Broken Sleep [Seite 61]
5.8 - Poem at 2:17 P.M. [Seite 63]
5.9 - Far From Home [Seite 64]
5.10 - The Archtypal Classroom [Seite 65]
5.11 - August Night Qualms [Seite 66]
5.12 - Homing In [Seite 68]
6 - NOTES [Seite 70]
BENEDICTION (p. 7)
("St. Anthony went to the mouth of the river by the sea, and began to call the fishes in God`s name.")
Little Flowers of St. Francis
Evening genuflects,
While I kneel at the creek`s edge
Watching bluegill rise to tossed petals,
Wanting to write words, right as rain
Smooth as skipped stones-
And release them when the aim
And balance are right.
Fish rising to the rings of forever
As they must have done
To the poor man of Padua`s blessing,
While gathering prayers in the dark.
BEERCANNUS americanus
You can find it
where the pocked faces
of NO HUNTING signs
stare dimly
from the fenceposts
leaning into autumnal shadow,
where a boy with a .22
once skittered
a Schlitz can up
the path,
his only kill
bullet-ridden
and bent,
hardly noticed now
amid the oak leaf litter,
so rich with loam
and the dark power
of moist duff
that mushrooms emerge,
fashioned like ears
pressed to the cool
forest canopy.
Listening closely,
they might hear
a chamber being loaded,
the silence
taking aim.
Pointblank.
Dead center.
SCARECROW`S DREAM
A burlap vision
of fallow stalks
that spear and
stubble the furrows
now rusted
huddled hayricks,
whispering intimations.
Smashed pumpkins
puckered to
cruel air,
even the sky
corncrib dry,
where a seedless
wind snags
like barbed wire
and from the field`s
frayed edge: a 12
gauge blast.
A crow
caws
caws
caws
its wings sweeping
at the sunset
with the scythe of song.
Frost etching
your paned landscape
(boundaried by splitrail
fences)
then a warm handprint
melting it to clarity,
twilight`s kneeling
shadow nuzzles
the cold glass
and reflected back
is a daguerreotype
plate of your face.
Smoke whisps
from a woodburning
cookstove:
slow vapor-breath
of grazing Herefords
curls.
Impaled upon a bent nail:
swatches of denim
sleeve flail
wildly with every
gust: bits of broom
and newsprint are winnowed
to the earth
heaved clods
and while calling
the tassel-haired
young ones home,
his broomstick spine
shivers
right down
to the grain.
32° AND DROPPING
my pockets
empty milkweed pods
wind-ridge eyes
red as sumac...
("St. Anthony went to the mouth of the river by the sea, and began to call the fishes in God`s name.")
Little Flowers of St. Francis
Evening genuflects,
While I kneel at the creek`s edge
Watching bluegill rise to tossed petals,
Wanting to write words, right as rain
Smooth as skipped stones-
And release them when the aim
And balance are right.
Fish rising to the rings of forever
As they must have done
To the poor man of Padua`s blessing,
While gathering prayers in the dark.
BEERCANNUS americanus
You can find it
where the pocked faces
of NO HUNTING signs
stare dimly
from the fenceposts
leaning into autumnal shadow,
where a boy with a .22
once skittered
a Schlitz can up
the path,
his only kill
bullet-ridden
and bent,
hardly noticed now
amid the oak leaf litter,
so rich with loam
and the dark power
of moist duff
that mushrooms emerge,
fashioned like ears
pressed to the cool
forest canopy.
Listening closely,
they might hear
a chamber being loaded,
the silence
taking aim.
Pointblank.
Dead center.
SCARECROW`S DREAM
A burlap vision
of fallow stalks
that spear and
stubble the furrows
now rusted
huddled hayricks,
whispering intimations.
Smashed pumpkins
puckered to
cruel air,
even the sky
corncrib dry,
where a seedless
wind snags
like barbed wire
and from the field`s
frayed edge: a 12
gauge blast.
A crow
caws
caws
caws
its wings sweeping
at the sunset
with the scythe of song.
Frost etching
your paned landscape
(boundaried by splitrail
fences)
then a warm handprint
melting it to clarity,
twilight`s kneeling
shadow nuzzles
the cold glass
and reflected back
is a daguerreotype
plate of your face.
Smoke whisps
from a woodburning
cookstove:
slow vapor-breath
of grazing Herefords
curls.
Impaled upon a bent nail:
swatches of denim
sleeve flail
wildly with every
gust: bits of broom
and newsprint are winnowed
to the earth
heaved clods
and while calling
the tassel-haired
young ones home,
his broomstick spine
shivers
right down
to the grain.
32° AND DROPPING
my pockets
empty milkweed pods
wind-ridge eyes
red as sumac...
