Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Pulled from the Wreckage, poems by David Rigsbee.
Pulled from the Wreckage
This month my friends die in a row.
The pines and firs seem to love us,
But they are only trees.
Snow reflects the sunlight but the heat
is left to wane.
I remember how my kind father would give me
twenty bucks to fill up my car with gas
each time I visited him. He insisted on
doing the pumping himself and stood there
proudly, like a toy soldier.
Yesterday my friend told me how he
reached down
to take the hand of another friend
who was about to leave the earth.
He knew it too. I knew it.
It felt good, you said. And then the kiss.
A watering can waits on the terrace table.
A mouse cowers in the humane trap.
The trees stand at attention, bits of snow
resting on the limbs. All in the indicative,
including the forest shadows.
Let’s make a holiday instead, someone said.
From the window I can see the cars,
tanks full, flying to their stations.
Joshua Tree
He found a pair of panties on the floor,
my friend tells me. It was an unusual find in his otherwise
orderly writer’s house. He makes light of it, as he should,
He confesses he’s fallen in love late in life, in France.
Outside my window, a mockingbird issues its invitation
and pretty soon comes a response down the block.
Silence ensues. Song was the form, desire the content.
This we know, as we know even dolts carry it.
Another man’s last transaction took place at Joshua Tree.
It was gas, before storming on across the Mojave,
locked and loaded. By one of those coincidences
I was listening that very album the same day
it was confirmed, and the message began to ripple out.
It was for the first time since the ‘80s, when I was married
to a beautiful woman whose family had escaped
on the last ship out of Hamburg. This is recorded too.
I remembered sitting around the kitchen table
with the girl who would become the other man’s wife,
talking about Paradise Lost the way you would talk about
making a birthday cake, or flora in the heart’s mighty desert.
This friend the novelist thinks about character as such.
Then the mill of plot sends him back to the computer.
I worry about him, surrounded by vineyards and strangers
with little English. I worry about the encounters he dreams up.
“As the woman disrobed on the deck, showing off her
Improved breasts, her husband inquired, ‘Would you like
to take my wife?’ Politely, he declined and climbed up
into the cockpit from which he set out over the night sea.”
There were birds swooping who had no song.
Spring was nothing to them, only a shift in current
and wind, like the moment of hesitation
in Paradise Lost. All this happened in one day.
Rarely do I see people moving around in the cul-du-sac.
When they do there’s a dog involved. Then there are
urgencies, something calling from the desert, the dark sea,
from the window wanting to frame our mortal life.
Second Person
I like the way the wind lifts
the glass twine of the green spiders,
but I save my praise for the switches
to which they are tied, also leaning
into the air. I was thinking of switches
the other day, how you had to go
and select just the right ones
when you had been found guilty
of something shameful, selection itself
being part of the penance and symbol too
of how that might be forgotten
(it never was) in wake of the lashes,
formally laid on to your tiny hide.
And nature is both creepier
and more absorbing than you thought
it would be, coming down to breakfast
in your slippers, the little edemas now
peeking out from your ankles, like you,
bleary to no one in particular.
How you hove off into the morning
again, switching your point of view
into the second person, like a sedan
having rounded a curve at the bottom
of a hill. Momentarily the glass flashes.
Sunlight connects with the windshield
and the oncoming traffic behaves itself.
As I say, the cables lift and hold,
a fine enmeshment easy to look past,
necessary even, in the dappled confusion
of ordinary morning, its grim processing
of nothing special. The mind says “Let…”
and off you go in your fabulous jalopy.
Even the weeds may be said to mean
you well in their nihilistic way,
as you blow past, half in daydream,
baseball cap reversed, shading
those mythic eyes in back.
Blackberry
The dog’s nose is a glistening blackberry,
now laid on the footstool’s floral fabric.
She had her walk, marking the much-marked
grass that garlands the creosote poles.
A call came: a professional voice,
configuring its duty-bound syllables.
As with any mocked-up summons, I
felt no hesitation in dismissing it.
Just so, planes of water wind around
the rocks lying at the bottom of the brook,
tracing an S, edifying the hawk, as it
drives the helix of a thermal, looking for food.
I remember a portly, crazed, bipolar poet
of my youth spinning into the room,
“I would have drunk the maker’s wine
from my own goatskin, but who am I to delve?”
That old aristocracy that makes Athens
of a dentist’s storefront façade. Another voice
on the phone said, “Is this…?” I put it down.
I played sortes vergilianae with Tsvetaeva:
“He loved poetry, conversation, loved
to tell stories himself, only no one
wanted to listen.” Especially poetry, which
was obscure, and no one wanted to listen.
When I asked my oracular uncle what
the talent of my family was, he replied,
”To follow a mule.” But what if he had felt
the inward, already deep, fall away?
The stream is not a well. The hawk’s cry
bears no truth. I hear the bow drawn
across the strings of the double-bass.
Two Shames
I told you I always carried shame that I couldn’t
save my brother from the bullet that took him down.
You replied it wasn’t my place to rescue such a man,
that there was something underneath he was keeping,
his own shame, and the fear of it, that parental curse
that trailed our childhood and darkened the way.
Of course, he had done something. Yet it was always there.
But why, I asked, did he call me so soon before
imploring me to come to dark Ohio, if not to stop him?
I turned him down, and that was the shame. You said
mine was something I fed on, that let me nibble away
over the years. But for him, it was the underlayment
of every step he took. You couldn’t have saved him, you said,
and I just murmured again: So why did he call me?
And why did I not go when I heard the shake in his voice?
You looked a long time at me as he would have. He didn’t
call you for help, you corrected. He called to say goodbye.
© David Rigsbee
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others. In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems, was just published by Black Lawrence Press.
Wonderful poems