Washington Independent Review of Books
December Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
December 16, 2014
Station Zed by Tom Sleigh. Graywolf Press. 106 pages.
Let us put Tom Sleigh’s book in a time capsule to be found another century by another species and then all those meta-androids will know what a poet was, and what we thought and felt “back then.”
Sleigh has not only traveled to the Middle Eastern war zones to live there and write of it (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, etc.) but he also goes where geography never reaches. In the poem ”Second Sight,” he begins: “In my fantasy of fatherhood, in which I / your real father, not just the almost dad / arriving through random channels of divorce, / you and I don’t lie to one another…” And he ends: "Will we both agree / that I love you, always no matter / my love’s flawed, aging partiality? / My occupation now is to help you be alone.”
Let’s buy the book for our classrooms because it’s instrumental for students to know how far a person can burrow so deeply to find, and surface, a poem. Here‘s a bit from “The Negative”:
“That was how it was in those days, back when my friend / hadn’t yet met the coroner who wrote down / his cause of death as ‘polysubstance abuse” / that brought on his heart attack while fucking…/ And regardless if I believed, whenever/we were together God shown clearly — / those were the days when every morning God woke up / in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night / in divine rage. Whoever loved him, / he loved. Whoever hated him, / he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality / of hate or the volatility of love.”
This is the same man who can define being a twin better than all the psych books. As a mother of twins myself, I should know — “The Twins”: “You know those twins hanging on the corner, / they look like me and my twin brother / when we were younger, in our twenties, / the paler one like me, sickly, more uptight, / but weirdly aristocratic, more distant / than the one like you, Tim, who if / you are him with would put his arm around me with that casualness and gentleness / I’ve always craved between us, which we / nearly lost in her twenties but got back / in our fifties now the death’s in my face / when I look at it just the right angle: / then your smile’s so open, Tim, that we go / back even further, to when we were / boys listening on the stairs to our older brother telling us about girls…”
Sleigh improves our knowing. We would be resource-starved if it were not for poets; and because Sleigh’s messages change all former presumptions, I call it Poetry of Integrity. His temporal life is made better by some search for the divine. The first section of the book holds the childhood poems, and in "The Parallel Cathedral," # 3: “All through childhood on eternal sick-day afternoons, / I lived true to my name, piling dominoes/into towers, fingering the white dots like the carpenter Thomas/putting fingertips into the nail holes of his master’s hands. / A builder and a doubter. Patron saint of all believers / in what’s really there every time you look: / black-scabbed cherry trees unleafed in winter, / the irrigation ditch that overflows at the back / of the house…”
The book is in four parts. In section 3, HOMAGE TO BASHO, Sleigh moves from the Gulf War and Iraq, back and forth with flashbacks to his writer workshops as he crosses time. We have much to learn about the wars as they turn into classroom discussions. To have done so much of interest, Sleigh stays up all night to write of it.
Section 4 is HOMAGE TO VALLEJO. #6 is “Insomnia Is The Only Prayer Left.” The second stanza says,”prayers prayed for the dying, for the confessions / going on between earthworms and earth, between / the way a man argues with his own shoulder bones…” The poem ends about the eye that never shuts,“and smarts in its sleeplessness staring / up into the dark shadow by stingrays, gas stations, / the slow flapping wing of a lottery ticket.”
It is not only what Sleigh writes but what he is that inspires us — brave — trippy — mixture of sun and thunderstorms — power in the pen.
I will give Sleigh a gift quote from Emerson — “To the poet to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”
Songs for the End of the World
1.
On the other side of praise
it’s time to chop down the tall tree in the ear —
enough enough with the starlit promontories —
a nervous condition traces itself
in lightning in the clouds,
a little requiem rattles among Coke cans
and old vegetable tins
and shifts into a minor key
blowing through the dying ailanthus,
grieving to the beat beginning to pour down
percussive as a run
on a nomad’s flute of bone
while car engine dangling from a hoist and chain
sways in a translucent gown of rain.