Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Before I Awake, poems by Daniel Lusk.
Before I Wake
“There was no logical reason to ever walk a high wire
in the first place. That was what he liked about it.”
Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
(Voice-over) “These fishermen sew
their bait to the underside of the docks.”
Waves of fog on screen. Sounds of clogs
on wood. Shadowy faces begin to emerge.
He is neither Shelley nor Rimbaud
so could not imagine Mad Tom speaking
to his King in French.
And now cannot recall what Ma said
with uncustomary erudition at the last.
She was disappointed he abandoned
the pulpit and the blue serge suit,
the humble-bumble confessional tune.
So he never issued the lowing call,
the come-on down. For he didn’t belove
the Christ was white. A meager
sacrament after all—juice and crumbs.
Now this scene, pretending the Bard
never dropped a saucy line to catch an audience
off-balance in mid-expectation—there’s
another shoe to drop but don’t look down.
These hawks of morning: gorgeous
isn’t it, John O’Dreams?
Daydreams Off Vicars’ Close
What big sister bird, traveling northward
through this valley just at dusk,
is calling: Timmy, Timmy, Timmy?
Old Poet is roaming free
one long, untethered moment…
Everyone he meets is dressed
like a drugstore cowboy or an extra
in a spaghetti western with Terry Thomas.
Alone on the porch with a pipe
and a drop of Irish to soothe the bite.
Waiting for the sleepwalker who came
naked to his door last week. The fox…
Wasn’t he confiding how Wm. Faulkner
came to him in a dream after his father died
to tell him how to write a novel.
Raven negotiates a landing, skidding sideways
to a stop.
Soft voices in the midnight room as women
come and go. Aries holding the left hand
of reclining Sagittarius in party undress,
heels in shining stirrups, speaking of Astrology.
Her Cleo lashes glisten.
This is his own private holy well.
When he asked the children
how they would explain to strangers
who had no religion what is meant by “Holy”:
“I think Joey’s laugh is holy.”
“Shoelaces are holy,” Joey might have said.
“Lace.” “A breeze, you can see through it.”
“Yes, like icicles.”
Things he used to think nothing of
now lie in wait like saboteurs.
Didn’t he write a letter to the son
who had kept him from falling
from Mt. Evans into the glistering necklace
of cascading lakes…what he meant to say
was “Sorry.”
Sky is awash with shearwaters and terns.
Blame It on Krakatoa
“He has, by now, the look of a man who was waiting
for something which had happened long before”
Wm Gaddis, The Recognitions
Fog of morning, the gas fire panting…
an unhurried not quite syncopated pace… his heart
the listener continuing to listen, aware
the beats but slow and late—maybe jazz
or blues—a trace slow like the faded singer’s pulse,
and a trace shy of pitch.
Or the precision so it appears on the ear
of Suite #1 in C Major by Bach.
The sky-borne miasma of an eruption in 1883:
another island continent and century settles
on what we perceive as “the present,” dawning
on a new generation with only slightly altered DNA
was here already when he came in.
The way cigar smoke or dense Latakia from tavern
Meerschaums of the fathers and clay dúidíns
of grandmothers, is redolent on the curtains
of a house long abandoned.
What of the auras of saints and whores
visible to the old painters and lingering
in words and phrases of the poets
Beauty. And What of It?
Lingering scent of rosemary on him
where he brushed the bush of it,
raising the curtain to his cold morning
and spitting snow.
Faded russet where yesterday the fox,
the strutting raven. Empty now.
Leaving the restaurant,
a wall of roses on a dark side street
so beautiful no one ever stopped
to look at them.
And why in the morning
when he goes with the others
to the day room to collect his blanket
does a woman tell him “thank you”
and for what…?
Garlands etc. Choirs…
Cascades of crinoline and lace.
Beauty & what of it?
Now—juncos
in pink galoshes on the snow.
© Daniel Lusk
Daniel Lusk is author of eight poetry collections and other books, most recently Every Slow Thing, poetry (Kelsay Books 2022) and Farthings, eBook (Yavanika Press 2022). Well-known for his teaching and widely published in literary journals, his genre-bending essay, “Bomb” (New Letters) was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Native of the prairie Midwest and a former commentator on books for NPR, Daniel and his wife, Irish poet Angela Patten, live in Vermont (USA).