The Benjamin Vogt Website

POETRY

Indelible Marks: Poems

ISBN 1-58998-250-9

30 pp. -- $8.95 -- Pudding House

www.puddinghouse.com

Reviewed at: Small Spiral Notebook and Pebble Lake Review and Diagram

Want a signed copy? Pay via Paypal (send payment to enfrancais@att.net) or check (email for the address to send it to)

Uncle with Landscape—Kansas, 1954
Photograph of Chevy Axle and Wheels—1949
Retirement
A Suburban Affair
Still Life Refracted
July, Just Outside of Columbus
Last Rites

Other: Link to my Hector De Saint-Denys Garneau translation page

Uncle with Landscape—Kansas, 1954

The corner of the farmhouse, worn by wind
that has warmed fields for centuries, is bent
and sullied to the color clouds will carry

in April. Spades and rusted buckets lean
against a toppled silo, rows of wheat—
still green like lawns—converge, a vortex

of earth that’s bent, retrieved by pausing light.
A boy is standing, six or seven, hands
in overalls and hair shaved army thin.

His teeth are white as Sunday shoes,
clean arms not yet tanned by earth or grease.
His glance, below center, turns away from sun

towards ground as if the day’s not possible;
that on some lost acre, black and white
photo in grandma’s album, he’s become

the lines of fields, the sway of thinning wheat,
the passing shadow, brief and cloudless night.

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Photograph of Chevy Axle and Wheels—1949

Someone said they parked it there just to see
what would happen when the train came
down from KC. They knew that here, in the middle
of fields that only sparrows kept, the train
would be coming fast: far enough from beginning
to be moving hot and hungry for somewhere else.

This wasn’t like that time the milkman swung
the County 7 curve too harsh, his heavy pendulum
of jugs and bottles carrying him late for 5am—
this wasn’t just an accident. The truck sat across
the rails out of simple country curiosity.
It’s all gravestones now.

An axle here. A tire there. Driver’s door scooped
and torn like drugstore ice cream curled
inside the spoon. Metal on metal is much more
permanent. But if someone left, and lost themselves
along this railway, no one would pay it much attention.
No one remembers unless they have a souvenir.

Only flesh on flesh made the family scrapbooks.
For years the kids strolled along the place and dug
for bolts, glass shards, mementos of cool. Now
fields slide over ties like passing clouds, uninterrupted.
Sparrow shadows dip into wheat and come out whole—
reminders of what’s become and what is gone.

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Retirement

A shoreline. A couple. Older, probably
late sixties. Her hat, larger than the crane’s
shadow that’s caught in its blurred flight,
looks like a cargo ship against the cloud line.
Their heads are almost perfectly adrift
from their bodies, severed by the calm horizon.
His leg, the left, is naked to the knee,
his right is soaking wet up past his waist.
In the foreground: sand that’s flat and hard,
compressed by tides that close upon themselves.
Threads of seaweed line a crab who’s white
and spread eagle against the earth like stone.

The waves roll in smooth like new bed sheets.
No matter the hour it seems clouds will burn
away before their lunch. It might be noon.
It could just as well be evening and the man
and woman set out to beat the rain, enjoy
the beach they’d come to settle toward. They’ve put
their dark shades on. They’re wearing hats.
She’s in a dress that shows her muscular calves.
But it’s cold. It’s fall. There’s no one else nearby,
no ships across the water, and somewhere in front,
forty feet, a stranger stitches them against
horizons—ocean, sky, and land—the world
their bodies cross, but cannot navigate.

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A Suburban Affair

Men move through car engines on Saturdays,
replace the wailing fan belts and clean

brand new spark plugs. Their ash-colored hands
fall and rise like tree lines in the wind.

At mid-day the push of sunlight into the
house’s crevice shifts its weight from

thinning clouds, then draws out
the buried people. Grandmothers stir

like leaves to lawn chairs, nurse their walk
beneath the shade of eaves. Young men

play the driveway in one-on-one b-ball,
loop their bodies to the hoop like bows.

By afternoon the fire department is flushing
hydrants so the street moves smooth like the

Mississippi. Kids slide down the asphalt in plastic
sleds and tip their siblings on the cool curb.

In the black evening fathers will grow into their
wives’ embrace on porches, and wait for the

night to become too dark—when the women
can’t see their own hands reaching into another’s,

like planting tulip bulbs above the roots
of suddenly still birches.

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Still Life Refracted

A company called LifeGem has begun taking
orders to create diamonds made from carbon
captured during cremations.
– Associated Press

Your half-life has extended exponentially.
Now, instead of looking up to the near
and far spittle of stars—making up stories
for our children and memory—you can be cupped
river water, frozen, pressed into manageable shape.

Your pendent life, loose across my breast,
reminds me of rough elbows, concave
back, tomato smell of neck. I can finger
you even when you’re not there, or here,
whatever this is. At night, lying in bed,
I can hold you up across flashlight,

rock our sleep in rhythmic trance mumbling
starlight, starbright, give me faith tonight.
I gather you, compact you in my soul, dream
you like sparkle dust in magic shows—transform
the body into something harder than love.

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July, Just Outside of Columbus

The fireflies are mating, hovering over
fields of infantile corn. Beetle bodies
pulse, chemicals like breath released
into the body light the ground as if
a thousand bombs are landing far below.

Males are calling, their incandescent lust
an almost gone, the female's waiting glow
direction and response that binds desire
to action. Dimly lit, my window hovers on
the field, still masked by twilight dust. Below,
just fifty feet away, the fireflies are

like pens on paper, brief calligraphy
transposed to translucent night. Their body-light
a memory ongoing, dream of purpose
blown down to grass, then lifted up as if
a speckled hand were rising from the waters,

pedantry, like melting diamonds, cool and warm
against the momentary senses. How many
suns will rise and set on this frenzied hour,
work that the body needs between lost moments;
a bloodless still life when we clearly see
one-hundred lifetimes asking questions when

our mouths should have been more pensive, full
with speaking this silence-not ours, not theirs-
but meeting at a time and place where neither
are gods or creatures, one and the same light,
because we need the dark to find our way.

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Last Rites

Believe me when I say that lavender cries.
This is why in autumn mornings butterflies
move silently across the stalks, buoyant
like bells that slide over altar candles.
That exhalation, after scent has ambled
toward the heavens, removes life’s memory, fervent
intensity of freedom from the stem—
it makes the world a stunted requiem.
And insects burning with the forests—wings
a folded canopy of maple red,
yellow ash, umber oak—these inclined
transmuted shadows slip into this wonting.
Even we within our lightly tended beds
will fade into another, intertwined.