Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2025
The Dead Man Visits in a Dream, poems by John Philip Drury.
The Dead Man Visits in a Dream
1. About the Dead Man Giving Me Advice
I was browsing in a backwoods convenience store, with coolers of
fishing bait by the counter.
Around a corner, there were coin-operated washers and dryers.
Then Marvin Bell showed up, although he had just died of cancer.
He was wearing a slicker and a cold-weather cap with flaps.
But I recognized the grin behind his beard and the twinkly
investigating eyes.
He said something, but it flutters just beyond memory in daylight.
It might have been advice, maybe “Don’t forget to dress for the
weather.”
Maybe “Be sure to get the right kind of bait—but anything could be
the right kind.”
Something Delphic, some Yiddish koan.
He was always generous with double-edged suggestions.
In class one afternoon, I read aloud “The Flooded Quarry.”
At the bottom of the quarry lurked a catfish “big as a circus
strongman.”
I was thinking of rumors that they grew to six feet in length.
I was thinking of the muscle-bound show-off’s handlebar mustache
like the barbels curling from the fish’s snout.
After I finished, he grinned and quipped, “That sounds like Charlie the
Tuna.”
So the draft descended to the limbo of a file folder in a basement
drawer.
He gauged what level of criticism a student could take.
I was happy he thought I could take his ribbing.
2. More about the Dead Man Giving Me Advice
He haunted me while still alive.
In my own classes, I quoted his maxims and passed along his advice.
Don’t “enjamb out of anxiety.”
Make sure there’s a “payoff” at the start of the next line.
Now, when I look through his kaleidoscope, I see duck farms at the
Moriches.
That’s the watery region where he grew up, a half-line in my thesis,
and we talked about it on a winter afternoon in his office.
I drive through his Long Island, beside his Atlantic and the hole he
found in the ocean.
I watch him playing his cornet at an X-rated reading in the English
Department lounge.
I glimpse his mother, Belle Bell, and hear the Yiddish proverbs he
may have learned from her.
I want to “sleep faster,” to relinquish those pillows they needed, so
I give up tea and learn to drink coffee, my amphetamine in the
morning.
It jolts me, makes me hum, and shifts my teaching into higher gears,
a swirl of music in poetry.
I learn to be less and less embarrassed about more and more, after
he tells me that’s what “maturity means.”
He questions the models I’ve drifted toward but acknowledges
that’s my prerogative.
He doesn’t say Write like me, exactly, but he’s hinting Write like me
inexactly.
I keep on looking for that bait—to take or to use—which could be
anything.
Elegy in a Room of Windows
for Dana and Mary
Beyond the open French doors to the sunroom,
my son slept on a blanket, rotating
on the floor, like a boat around its anchor.
I knelt and listened for the swell and lull
of his breathing. Sometimes it was hard to tell
in faint street light that seeped between the shades.
I eased my hand upon his puny chest
and always thought about your first child, Michael.
In my son’s room of windows, his angel was
a boy he’d never meet, the thought of whom
jostled me awake to drop on my knees,
there in the half-dark, as the heat flicked on.
© John Philip Drury
John Philip Drury is the author of six poetry collections: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.