by Angela Sorby
The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry
The University of Wisconsin Press
The Sleeve Waves
ANGELA SORBY
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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Copyright © 2014
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sorby, Angela, author.
[Poems. Selections]
The sleeve waves / Angela Sorby.
pages cm — (The Felix Pollak prize in poetry)
ISBN 978-0-299-29964-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-299-29963-7 (e-book)
I. Title. II. Series: Felix Pollak prize in poetry (Series).
PS3619.O73A6 2014
811’.6—dc23
2013027994
In memory of Professor Nelson Bentley, 1918–90
Oaks and garrets lit the falling dusk.
Contents
Acknowledgments
I
Night Vision
Fallout
What Might Happen Might Not
Hard Bop
The Knit
Kochanski’s, Saturday Night
Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening
The Disappearances
Trance Music
Spill
Golden Spike
Close Shave
The Ghost of Meter
Petition
Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment
Boom Town
Blood Relative
Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living
End of the Century
Nonsense
Flatland
Double Neighbor
Errand
Interstate
The Obstruction
Duct Tape
II
Pastoral
III
Thrifting
Paradise, Wisconsin
A Is for Air
Duck/Rabbit
Notes from a Northern State
A Walk across the Ice
The Thorne Rooms
Just Looking
Blush
Thirst
Watson and the Shark
The Schoolteachers
Ink
Doppelzüngig
Fall Forward, Spring Back
Fat
Sacred Grove
Go-Between
Sofia’s Stove
The Second Daguerreotype
Epistle
The Suburban Mysteries
The Sleeve Waves
Sivka-Burka
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt alphabetical-order thanks to those who provided collegial, familial, moral, and/or material support during the writing of this book: Vic and Jan Anderson, Faith Barrett, Jenny Benjamin, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, Matthew Cosby, the Edenfred Foundation, the Fulbright Scholar Program, C.J. Hribal, Catherine Hubbard, Jesse Lee Kercheval, David Kirby, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Maureen McLane, Monica Maniaci, Carla Marolt, Sheila McMahon (and everyone at UW Press), Naomi Shihab Nye, Liana Odrcic, Kris Ratcliffe (and all of my colleagues at Marquette University), Chris Roth, Francesca Roth, Ivan Roth, Jonah Roth, Melissa Schoeffel, Janet and Evan Sorby, Sarah Wadsworth, Ron Wallace, Larry Watson, and Adrianne Wojcik.
Thanks to the editors of the following journals, where versions of some of these poems first appeared:
Babel Fruit (“Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living”)
Barrow Street (“Paradise, Wisconsin”)
Jacket (“The Suburban Mysteries”)
Massachusetts Review (“Thrifting”)
North American Review (“Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening”)
Poets for Living Waters (“Spill”)
Prairie Schooner (“Sivka-Burka,” “Interstate,” “Notes from a Northern State,” “A Is for Air”)
Superstition Review (“Ink,” A Walk across the Ice,” “Golden Spike”)
Verse Wisconsin (“Kochanski’s, Saturday Night,” “Petition,” in a different form)
Zone 3 (“Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment,” “Fallout”)
The line on the dedication page is taken from “Villanelle,” by Nelson Bentley.
The Sleeve Waves
I
A wave is a disturbance that moves through a medium.
—ROBERT L. WEBER, Physics for Science and Engineering
Night Vision
Changsa, 2011
Hunanese babies
wear tiger slippers
to ward off evil,
though of course they’re stronger
than their tiger-protectors,
and more rigorous,
and blunter,
and they know how to roar. Roaring’s key:
it drowns out the philosophers
who drag the river
for texts
but miss
what’s hidden deep
in baskets tied to the backs
of women selling fish
or sweeping streets:
babies who nap all day,
then open their eyes at night.
Living speakers can’t remember
what it’s like to be wordless,
if it’s dull, divine, or both,
like the hundred-odd miniature
Buddhas stuffed
into one cave at Nanputuo.
The monk who wipes them with a rag
survived two famines
and a half-hanging
during the Cultural Revolution,
which thinned his hair
and did something to his ears:
now when the small gods wake in their velvety
toes and soles, he listens.
Fallout
Party at the beach,
but J refuses to go
because he can’t swim.
11 years old. All day
I watch his cuteness
break open and fall away.
He finds Etta James
on YouTube and says,
“When I’m sad, only sad
songs make me better.”
Already a needle
in his heart knows
how to find the chords
for all he’s missing:
direct sunlight, easy listening.
Already the wax
cylinder’s spinning
its old technology of longing,
and I recognize the boys I knew
in the ’80s and ’90s,
who dragged me to Fallout Records
so they could “look for something.”
What? It has no name, this sadness
that feels like happiness.
What Might Happen Might Not
The psychic oboist charges
ten bucks per fortune.
He lodges above Clarke’s Shoes
in Marinette, Wisconsin.
He says he doesn’t know
how he sees what he sees.
He calls himself a cleanser,
a healer—of widows, of adoptees.
pauses between futures
long enough to play
Tomaso Albinoni’s Opus 7,
blowing its pure notes virtuously,
as if they could filter
trash from the Menominee River,
but his oboe knows better—
it floats downstream keening.
Music is beauty consuming
itself. It is loss writ large,
it is an empty factory,
it is night come to clog
the Midwestern heart of the nation,
where the Green Bay Packers
tense and disperse
in random formations.
Hard Bop
The guy at the piano dump
pitches pianos, using a huge
claw to grab—lift—release.
Wippens, hammers, and jacks
scatter. A few wires snap,
and the rest snarl into silence,
the same silence
that snarls girls
who refuse to practice scales,
who sit hunched on the bench
reading Secret of the Old Clock
while the timer, set to one hour,
ticks backward. You’ll regret this,
warn their mothers,
but the girls think the future
is in speeding convertibles,
like Nancy Drew’s roadster,
or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:
top up, top down, wheels retracted,
wings out, over the cliff into the ocean,
and boom—it’s a boat.
They sense
what the dump guy knows:
to draw near the rim of the piano
pit is to witness
the body turn,
the hinge convert,
which is why the dump guy chains
a big ring of keys
outside his pocket.
Most open known doors, but a few,
he’s not sure what they’re for.
Those are his favorites.
The Knit
Honeyboy Edwards,
onstage at 93,
could be my Grandpa Harold’s twin brother,
which makes no sense
since one’s a live blues singer
and one’s a dead Swedish American
asphalt worker,
but Grandpa, cool and silky
into his 90s,
dressed urban smooth,
and if a car hood was open,
no matter whose car,
he stuck his head in,
partly to suss out the engine,
and partly to spark a long
long conversation.
Can loud plaids cross the color line?
Can certain polyesters travel
beyond our peculiar national evil?
God knows nothing’s simple,
but if one shirt could pass
between two strangers,
one living, one dead,
one black, one white,
Honeyboy Edwards is sporting
that shirt tonight. Its double-
knit gleams, so slick,
so inorganic,
it will outlast our muscle memory
of the twentieth century—
how it felt to sweat
under that fabric,
how plastered
against the skin a shirt
could turn timeless.
Unwrinkled. Ecstatic.
Kochanski’s, Saturday Night
One more going-away
bash for a friend,
Afghanistan-bound, and the last thing
he wants is to hear some
peacenik strum. So up I shut,
and stick to seltzer,
as snowflakes fall with neutral
nonchalance
outside the bar. No windows.
Snow’s too soft to cut
the chill, too gentle to kill
the one-armed drunk guy’s engine.
Off he roars.
Oh, Lord.
To say the whole army
is stupid and wrong
is stupid and wrong, surely.
Walt Whitman thought he could heal
amputees with poetry. All I know
is when to leave a party.
Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening
The whole East Coast is buried
in weather we manufactured
indirectly: the carbon-emissions unconscious.
How curious, this sameness.
Kilmer died fighting in France
in 1918. He wrote, “I think that I shall never see
a poem lovely as a tree,”
but was silent on the topic
of rest stops,
how the engine pauses,
and the Starbucks steamer hisses,
and all states feel equidistant
though this is nominally
New Jersey. He exploded
before he could picture a cup of coffee,
dark and complex
like modern poetry (Ezra Pound’s maybe)
which, though stronger than Kilmer’s,
still isn’t cool and stark and pure
as a tree.
Soldier, soldier:
can you tell us where to go
now that we’ve shaken up the glass
globe and brought down the snow?
The Disappearances
The cold is large and pale and everywhere,
and falling on the South Milwaukee trees.
A cardinal moves his heat across the air,
above the clearance sales, the vacancies,
above the locks that fasten as they freeze
key-holders in the act of passing through.
A mortgage is a number no one sees:
a sleight-of-moon, a slip, a coming-due
of obligations tightening the screw.
The neighbor takes her name off every list,
and blows a fog onto the windowpane
to stamp a phony footprint with her fist.
Petite and singular, the print remains,
as if the neighbor walked out of her veins,
and up the glass—and up, and out of sight.
The cold invades the outlets, cracks, and drains.
The cardinal sheds its red coat overnight.
No blood runs deep enough to crack the ice.
Trance Music
Gerund comes from the Latin gerere (future p. p. gerundus) to carry on; it carries on the power or function of the verb.
—JOHN W. WILKINSON, 1895
Do you have 5, 10, 20
thousand dollars in credit card debt?
1-800-398-2067.
Call now! Imagine
walk-
ing the green spring
like a fawn sprung
from its spots.
No need to winter over.
You are the gerund.
The sky aches blue—
no cure, no analgesic.
Your debt is buried
like the skeleton
of a twin born dead.
Your feet trot horn-
hard, so far from human
you can’t remember
how the voices sounded,
or what they wanted.
Spill
First I thought it was my furnace:
a black metallic odor
seeping through the glass-block
window into the yard.
Then I guessed it started
under my car: a shimmery river
of darkness. Then I figured: my lawn-
mower. Did it blow a plug?
What was that weird smell?
Where were the plovers, the sparrows,
the terns? My eco-neighbor,
out watering compost worms,
said, “It’s BP!”
And then I knew.
&nb
sp; It’s not BP. It’s him. It’s me.
We’ve been gushing bullshit
since Earth Day, 1970.
What to do? Make a poem?
Christ.
Rilke beat everyone to it.
He wrote, “You must change your life.”
Golden Spike
It doesn’t pay to try,
All the smart boys know why.
—JOHNNY THUNDERS
i.
To cure insomnia,
don’t try. Pretend
the bed’s a bunk
in a Pullman car,
bolted to the floor,
but moving steadily
from A to B.
The trick’s to picture
neither A nor B
but the space
between characters,
large and yet limited,
like time—
how it elapses
everywhere at once,
despite the zones
fixed by railway
executives in 1883.
Wrong clock,
thought the Chinese
laborers who ached
but could not write.
The pain spread
from their arms
into their spines.
ii.
All the smart transcontinental titans know
vision is motion. To be
is not to be, but to go.
A koan: keeping moving.
An hour lost in Maine
is lost in California.
Close Shave
The perennials flash their steam-
punk violet hues,
daring human
women to lose
the flats, the control-
top hose. My mother
always says, “If I have a stroke,
