Gary Fincke – Consolations

Fincke LE P&W 2 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two November-December 2024

Consolations, poems by Gary Fincke.


Consolations

1
One morning, as if fifteen years of grief
had disoriented him, my father failed
to locate my mother’s grave, and I,
silenced by sympathy, allowed him time
to search, the wind swirling spring flurries
that created a vast, damp pointillism
for where neither of us had walked.

2
A colleague confided that she practiced
“feeling” to prepare for the trauma
of failing students. For months, she had
been rehearsing for her mother’s passing.
To calculate the extent of sorrow
after her own death, she remembered
herself in the third person omniscient.

3
Giraffes, until lately, considered mute,
have had their voices recorded in
a Viennese zoo. They hum to each
other at night, the frequency so low
that no one had suspected. For comfort,
the zookeeper guessed, admitting
uncertainty about their sense of place.

4
When, at last, my father set flowers
beside my mother’s etched name,
he stumbled into silence, the moment
filled by the hum of devotion just out
of reach, a melody for the present
while I bowed my head and waited
for the necessary words to embrace.

5
This has been a week when mosquitoes
have swarmed, their numbers swollen by
record rain, a presence that has prompted
my colleague to say that these pests
choose mates who harmonize perfectly
with them, enhancing the couplings
that bring some small equivalent of joy.

6
Our nerves, I once learned, produce
the greatest pleasure when stroked
four to five centimeters per second,
knowledge I repeated to my wife,
mentioning distance and location,
the body’s mathematics of ecstasy,
the encouragement of desire.

7
The old phrases clasp their hands
and lower their heads. They recall
my mother’s mouth repeating them
throughout each day, how she relied
upon them like selective memory.
Shuffling in place, they say: This language
or none, for you will have no other.


In His Decline

How my mother described men who failed,
allowing for promise or small achievement–
a car engine resuscitated in a driveway,
a radio repaired, a furnace revived.
Her father, for instance, a handyman
who could, despite devotion to alcohol,
reopen a swollen door, patch a porch,
or smoothly lay a coat of paint as failure
swamped the living room. Loss, she said,
is hard, but the more difficult is going on,
the melody of “making do” sung solo.

For months, I’d understood she meant
for me to examine myself. Underfoot,
my promises were coughing up dust as
rust-colored as our slag-surfaced driveway,
“fixing” forgotten, or likely, not yet learned.
For sure, she was trying to alter the angle
of my downhill slide, my decisions, lately,
equations for loss, something exclusive
to men so indiscreet with their advantages
they apologized with home improvements.

At last, she covered the kitchen table
with a map of our township so enlarged
that our house was a rectangle among
hundreds more, where we lived geometry.
Our neighborhood seemed to have died,
those shapes chalked where they’d fallen
like victims of carelessness and neglect,
the largest, nearly square, the hotel that
housed men, for economy, by the month.

“Somebody you know lives there,” she said,
her finger circling as if it could coil and hiss
a warning about awakening, each morning,
closeted under nothing but a ceiling bulb,
lying where you have never imagined
you could live — a small, rented room
furnished only with silence, the odor
of clothes thrown over the chair, the sheets
in the third week of their one-month cycle,
someone moaning early through the wall,
one bathroom six doors down the hall,
the line at the door shoulders and elbows
that have taught you how to hold it.
The return trip is all uphill to lament,
the rest of the day, as limitless as hell.


Unmoored

Last night, explosion in a neighbor’s garage,
The fire consuming the bulk of their house
Before hoses were unspooled. This morning,
The damage visible from our upstairs windows.
Sometimes, we manage weeks without thinking
That what we are is temporary. Have you
Ever sheltered in place, ominous clouds
Tinted bruise-green, the wind carrying what
Has been forecasted as a ruin of heavy rain?
I’m talking about a place where the highway
In and out of danger floods so often that
River sediment seems its surface. Where,
Falling asleep during downpours is like
Leaving active flames in your fireplace
Like my father did, trusting the cheap grate.
There is a story my worst students loved.
A father and son travel by boat to an island
Exposed by low tide. The small skiff, secured
Improperly by the boy, drifts away. Nothing
Can save them, yet none of the students
Ever blamed the boy for his fatal error.
What they loved to talk about was how
The father lifted the boy to his shoulders
And steeled himself as the ocean water rose.
The students, seventeen and often sullen,
Waved their hands to volunteer stories
Of their own about making terrible mistakes.
In that town, years before, a family had made
A fortune manufacturing Jello. Even then,
Two of the dead eyes of its factory windows
Remained unbroken. None of the boys would
Admit to liking Jello, but among those students

Were many children and grandchildren
Of men and women who had once believed
In the longevity of their work with sugar,
Powder, and dye. Even then, years before
The factory became unmoored, they would
Tell themselves that inevitability had not
Already begun. What they made so cheap
And colorful that it would always be boxed
For delivery within their neighborhood.

Now, a museum for what the town has lost
Is housed across from that high school,
As proximate as the fire-ruined house,
Its owners unmoored so catastrophically
That they chorus, “Who could ever imagine?”
As if stupefied, sounding like my father,
The widower, who, for decades, was stunned
To be living alone. Each time I visited,
He sank more deeply into the only chair
He ever used, his eyes sweeping the walls
Of the small living room as he murmured,
“Who would have thought?” Something I said
Aloud, just before sunrise this morning,
As I walked, uneasy, by my neighbors’ yard
Into a dedicated, half hour of solitude.
Though, when I returned home, the low sun,
From a cloudless sky, cast the shadow
Of the undamaged, next-door house over
The scattered debris, accidental as
What remained of the impossible.


© Gary Fincke

Gary Fincke’s newest collection of poetry For Now, We Have Been Spared will be published by Slant Books in early 2025. In May, Press 53 will publish The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems. Among Gary’s fifteen collections are ones that won what is Now the Wheeler Prize (Ohio State), the Wheelbarrow Books Prize (Michigan State), the Jacar Press Prize, and the Arkansas Poetry prize.

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