DONALD JUSTICE

It is with special pleasure that Thermopylae presents seven poems by the great American poet, Donald Justice. I took an unusually large selection of his work simply because I love him. I was fortunate enough to meet Don in 1991 at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and have been honored to remain in touch with him since then. In addition to being one of our country's leading poets, Don is kind, serious, dedicated to art, hilariously witty, sexy, charming and everything else one dreams a poet should be.

Perhaps the best way to describe Don's work is simply to quote what other distinguished writers have said of him. Anthony Hecht called Don "among other things, the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens...He is one of our finest poets." And John Irving wrote that Don, "has always demonstrated that the highest purpose of literature is to illuminate those things which are hard, disturbing, painful, moving...."

Born in 1925, Don has had an illustrious career, beginning when he received the Lamont Poetry prize for 1959 for his first book of poems, The Summer Anniversaries. In 1979, Don received the Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems. He's the recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A former professor (who taught poetry at Syracuse, Iowa, and University of Floria), he is now retired and living in Iowa, where he continues to produce the fabulous gems for which he has become so beloved by all serious readers of poetry.

The poems below are from Don's NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (1995). They appear her by permission of the author and the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. You may orders copies of this book by calling the Order Department at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: 1-800-733-3000.

On a Picture by Burchfeld

Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours.
Already your agony has outlasted ours.

Pantoum of the Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
I don't remember all the particulars.
Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.

There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
Thank god no one said anything in verse.
The neighbors were our only chorus.
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

At no time did anyone say anything in verse.
It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.
No audience would ever know our story.

It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us.
We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
What audience would ever know our story?
Beyond our windows shone the actual world.

We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
Somewhere beyond our windows shone the world.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.

And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
We did not ourselves know what the end was.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.

But we did not ourselves know what the end was.
People like us simply go on.
We have our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.
But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.

And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.

Sadness

Dear ghosts, dear presences, O my dear parents,
Why are you so sad on porches, whispering?
What great melancholies were loosed among our swings?
As before a storm one hears the leaves whispering
And marks each small change in the atmosphere,
So it was then to overhear and to fear.

2

But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when, lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then, turning and turning back
With the same terror, into the deep thicket
Beside the highway, at home in the dark thicket.

3

I say the wood within is the dark wood,
Or wound no torn shirt can entirely bandage,
But the sad hand returns to it in secret
Repeatedly, encouraging the bandage
To speak of that other world we might have borne,
The lost world buried before it could be born.

4

Burchfield describes the pinched white souls of violets
Frothing the mouth of a derelict old mine
Just as an evil August night comes down,
All umber, but for one smudge of dusky carmine.
It is the sky of a peculiar sadness--
The other side perhaps of some rare gladness.

5

What is it to be happy, after all? Think
Of the first small joys. Think of how our parents

Would whistle as they packed for the long summers,

Or, busy with the usual tasks of parents,

Smile down at us suddenly for some secret reason,

Or simply smile, not needing any reason.

6

But even in the summers we remember
The forest had its eyes, the sea its voices,
And there were roads no map would ever master,
Lost roads and moonless nights and ancient voices--
And night crept down with an awful slowness toward the water;
And there were lanterns once, doubled in the water.

7

Sadness has its own beauty, of course. Toward dusk,
Let us say, the river darkens and looks bruised,
And we stand looking out at it through rain.
It is as if life itself were somehow bruised
And tender at this hour; and a few tears commence.
Not that they are but that they feel immense.

Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees

I often wonder about the others
Where they are bound for on the voyage,
What is the reason for their silence,
Was there some reason to go away?
It may be they carry a dark burden,
Expect some harm, or have done some harm.

How can we show we mean no harm?
Approach them? But they shy from others.
Offer, perhaps, to share the burden?
They change the subject to the voyage,
Or turn abruptly, walk away,
To brood against the rail in silence.

What is defeated by their silence?
More than love, less than harm?
Many already are looking their way,
Pretending not to. Eyes of others
Will follow them now the whole voyage
And add a little to the burden.

Others touch hands to ease the burden,
Or stroll, companionable in silence,
Counting the stars which bless the voyage,
But let the foghorn speak of harm,
Their hearts will stammer like the others',
Their hands seem in each other's way.

It is so obvious, in a way.
Each is alone, each with his burden.
To others they are always others,
And they can never break the silence,
Say, lightly, _thou_, but to their harm
Although they make many a voyage.

What do they wish for from the voyage
But to awaken far away
By miracle free from every harm,
Hearing at dawn that sweet burden
The birds cry after a long silence?
Where is that country not like others?

There is no way to ease the burden.
The voyage leads on from harm to harm,
A land of others and of silence.

The Wall

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often. Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As longs as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman.
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
They had been told of something called the world.
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

Ladies by Their Windows

They lean upon their windows. It is late.
Already it is twilight in their house;
Autumn is in their eyes. Twilit, autumnal--
Thus they regard themselves. What vanities!
As all nature were a looking glass
To publish the small features of their ruin.

Each evening at their windows they arrive
As in anticipation of farewells,
Though they would still be lingering if they could,
Weary, yet ever restless for the dance,
Old Cinderellas, hearing midnight strike,
The mouse-drawn coach impatient at the door.

2

The light in going still is golden, still
A single bird is singing in the wood,
Now one, now two, now three, and crickets start,
Bird-song and cricket-sigh; an all the small
Percussion of the grass booms as it can,
And chimes, and tinkles, too, _fortissimo_.

It is the lurch and slur the world makes turning.
It is the sound of turning, of a wheel
Or hand-cranked grinder turning, though more pomp
To this, more fiery particles struck off
At each revolve; and the last turn reveals
The darker side of what was light before.

Six stars shine through the dark, and half a moon!
Night birds go spiraling upwards, with a flash
Of silvery underwings, silver ascendings,
The light of stars and of the moon their light,
And water lilies open to the moon,
The moon in wrinkles on the water's face.

To shine is to be surrounded by the dark,
To glimmer in the very going out,
As stars wink, sinking in the bath of dawn,
Or as a prong of moon prolongs the night--
Superfluous curve!--unused to brilliancies
Which pale her own, yet splurging all she has.

3

So ladies by their windows live and die.
It is a question if they live or die,
As in a stone-wrought frieze of beasts and birds
The question is, whether they go or stay.
It seems they stay, but rest is motion too,
As these old mimicries of stone imply.

Say, then, they go by staying, bird and beast,
Still gathering momentum out of calm,
Till even stillness seems to much of haste,
And haste too still. Say that they live by dying,
These who were warm and beautiful as summer,
Leaning upon their windows looking out,

Summer-surrounded then with leaf and vine,
With alternate sun and shade, those whom the noon
Wound once about with beauty and then unwound,
Whose warmth survives in coldness as of stone,
Beauty in shadows, action in lassitude,
Whose windows are the limits of their lives.

FELIX STEFANILE

Poet, translator, and professor, and founder/editor of Sparrow magazine, a publication devoted to the sonnet form, Felix Stefanile is one of our country's leading Italian-American poets. He is the recent recipient of the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the National Italian American Foundation. His past honors include a prize from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Nathan Haskell Dole Prize of the Lyric, and The Virginia Quarterly Review poetry prize.

Felix is the author of five books of poetry and three books of translations from the Italian. The selections below were taken from his newest book, The Dance at St. Gabriel's (Storyline Press, 1995).

To learn more about Felix and his work, read Fighting Poet, an interview I conducted with Felix for Arts Indiana magazine.

Hubie

Army experiments with mixed units:
Negroes being admitted into white companies--
News Item, 1943

Then there was Captain Jones from Millidgeville
(GEE-AY!)who hated you so hard it killed
to hear him give you his Boy-this, Boy-that.
He hated all of us, but that was pure so what
to the dockside bruisers, city toughs
and the ill-sorted country roughs
that made up our sad squad of prison-chasers:
we knew that you were the true King of Losers.
Maybe that's why we liked you, let that stay,
from ignorance to shame to light of day.
Jones ran us like a chain-gang, that's for sure,
but your bland moon-face shone, "Endure, endure."

Once I glimpsed you with the Enemies.
It was their singing time. They were a breeze
to guard, no trouble. It was a heavy night
of stars and blooms, of shadows that turned bright.
A kid cupped his right hand up to his face
the way they did to magnify the voice,
and winked at you. Hubie, you winked back.
It was a sign between you for a song,
and then he gave their yodel, loud and long,
_fronni e limoni_; which maybe signified
some legend lost when ancient glory died,
but left its echo. No one would begin
before the signal, _lemon leaves_, had run
in gross annunciation. The same phrase
would introduce each stanza. In a daze
I heard the eerie music, though this time
the voice I heard was yours, in Neapolitan rhyme,
and my translation of it here is a crime:

_Oh leaves of the lemon tree! It's in the shape of crosses
they are constructed, all the gates of prison,
the better to destroy the sons of mothers_.
Ah, Hubie, what a maundering in my heart
to hear you go falsetto, sob and start,
and grace-note that muezzin-vaunt of words,
gliding the vowels over, like slow birds,
the drawn out line. I thought my head would burst.
For their lament those lads made you sing first;
you knew the chant, it could have been the blues,
three lines of heartbreak, blood down to your shoes.
Then came the answers, in the same old notes,
one fellow, then another, golden throats--
tears for a mother, or a girl back home,
some nasty verse on the Pope in Rome,
and when your turn came round again you sang
about the way the bells of Nola rang.
Mad Captain Jones's "damn eye-talian crew"
had caught your grave compassion, trusted you,
and taught you more Italian for a song
than the rest of us had learned the whole year long.
Those distant bells, they did you no more good,
than the chimes of elegant Englewood,
New Jersey, where you came from, preacher's son,
out of a tiny Baptist congregation
made up of cooks and gardeners, garbage men,
and other service people all hemmed in.
The war came, you were ready, just like me,
which meant no job, no future, and no money.

What now comes back to me, old Hubie, is
how you and I could sit and shoot the breeze
those Sunday afternoons, when things went dead
in repple-depple camp. The peace went to my head.
We chuckled about week-end roll-calls, played
the same each muster: mostly, no one up
except us cowards who were thin on hope,
afraid to miss the check and rate KP,
although in truth half our company
slept through. The guys took turns as stand-ins, one
for every tow or three in mock attention,
answering for O'Toole or Policetti
or Garbatino. Sergeant Parmalee
stared straight down at his pad, and called the lot,
then swung around to go back to his cot.
"Why don't you slack off, Hubie?" I asked once.
You snorted, as though you took me for a dunce,
patted my knee with that ham hand of yours,
and said, "Because for me it would be my arse.
With my complexion can't you see the fun?"
The simple truth fell on me like a ton.

Poor twins, we were discharged on the same day,
a lot to do, pick up our pay,
strip down our cots--"They might just change their minds,"
our sergeant snarled, "so move your fat behinds"--
sweep out the years, go listen to the lecture
on Re-enlistment and Reserve, some double feature;
then scoot to chow, and back to Camp Supply.

The Quartermaster goof-off, Sleepy Eye,
just brushed our gear aside, and made us sign.
On our way out we passed a clothing bin;
talk about brave! I knew we were civilians
when I snitched a cap, an Eisenhower jacket,
and so did you, you bum, and you said, "Fuck it!"
The whole platoon was gone when we got back,
the silence of the barracks pure whip-crack
of memories in my head. I stared at you.
You said, "There's still one thing for us to do,"
and handed me a sheet, hodge-podge
of name, address, and Bible verse for pledge
all loyalty, no betrayal. To make things worse
I read aloud that thundering, crying verse,
because you told me once I was a poet.
What boobs we were; how kind we didn't know it.
I handed you a map of streets, instructions,
accompanied by four-letter imprecations
of what would happen if you didn't write me,
or come and visit. Then you'd have to fight me.
The map showed names of streets and bus route numbers.
All at once we stopped. We were struck dumb.
You blinked your eyes and made a choking noise.
That was enough for me; I lost my voice.

We neither of us wrote. What came
between? It was not a forgetting. It was time
that took its aim, and brought us down like fools.
We had survived--according to the rules--
the deaths, the separations, all the cant
of war, of honor, and the special rant
of patriotism. We had saved our skins
through years of soldiering, the tightrope dance
of danger, boredom, whatever we fought for;
ourselves, we knew, were the true spoils of war.
We moved from that into the orgy of
the personal release of pure self-love.

The time is gone for what we should have said
or done, old Hubie. All the dead are dead.
Time was once ripe. Now time's a rotten thought.
Yet blow me down, and scratch me for an ought,
we buddied to the end, just to endure.
(There is a thought here that is less than pure.)

A black man and a white man, that's for sure,
this other war, and the cagey cowardice
of habit, turning honest blood to ice.
I think that we were brothers once, "The Twins,"
the fellows called us, masking their wide grins.
What's left is poetry, the penance for my sins.

On Theory and Practice

How hard he tried, Van Gogh, in, out of touch
with his familiar lump of world and self:
his daubs and scrapes and scratches agitate
the consciousness. Old Shoes. And yet you feel
the world's accessibility as no shame,
though acceptance is a doze. Forget
the laziness of fact. Accomplishment
is the old brush that trembles in Van Gogh's hand.

Andrew

To look at you is to understand
jungles are not nice.
My mind creates tableaux

set behind glass--don't touch--
in memory's museum,
especially one of a classroom

and teacher calling you wop.
Or that night in Linden Park
when, head lowered,

you told me your mother was dead.
We were fourteen,
completely uncomforted.

I suppose things are better today.
We are offered courses on dying.
The joggers tell us, Love yourself.

Old puff-belly baldhead,
you listen to your kids complain,
and smile.

You make a killing at the track
and zoom home in your huge car,
full of frowns.

For you a proverb might be set:
do not thank the gods too loudly,
or they will hear you and change their minds.

Brother, fellow loser,
I know in these enlightened times
you still tend the Sacred Heart

on the wall
outside your bedroom
with fragrant candles:

it is the one trophy you understand,
as Jesus taught--
we are all nailed to the wall.

DANIEL CORRIE

Daniel Corrie is a poet and critic who lives in Atlanta with his lovely wife Ellen, just a stone's throw away from me and Will. Dan earns a living as a freelance writer in the area of family crisis intervention. His work has appeared in The Nation, The American Scholar, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Indiana Review, among many others. Aralia Press published a long poem of his in a chapbook edition.

Little World

of the wrecked hulks of cars. We leapt
from hood to hood, whooping and calling.
When we fled along a vast crane's fallen
arm of rust, our sudden feet discovered rungs

that crisscrossed empty space.
Once I toppled from that ten-foot height.
Weeping, I stole away from the other racing boys
to hide alone inside a mirrored womb,

a gas truck's silver belly. Later, I emerged into
the blinding day. I witnessed harsh children
clashing on a burnt-out wreck, each struggling
for his flashing moment as the mountain's king.

Job's Punishment

1. A Dream of Job

Again, recurrent dream like a restless
summons. In the arcing gray, I look toward
the lessening auras of trees. The fable begins:
farmer on the hill, so small and distinct.

Recurrent nightmare of a treading God's
monolithic angels. They stun into a distance
too far to reach. I bend my scalp
into a torrent, migraine halo of radiance.

Then rods of light descend from a tall
power of clouds. In my repeating dream,
divine eyes look down, where time transforms
into night, as the farmer looks upward.

2. Weight of Miracles

Sometimes you feel you are falling. You fall
into the blue twilight of a face, dreaming
above your nakedness. Remember nude girls
on used-magazine racks, frayed covers where

they knelt in coarse and wild forevers,
young. You watched them as you passed,
as light altered, transfiguring slick paper
like windows. They knelt in that glare.

If you had looked back in leaving,
they would have returned, unlost and clear,
as if the power of seasons could answer you,
turning away on its axis, dawn into dawn.

3. Unaltering Moment

I remember an unaltering moment of children
running on a lawn near a hedge, how we played
freeze tag, raced and were left behind,
one by one, arms tangled over heads and legs

twisted into pictures of turning. Frozen
by a magic touch, our blurs subsided.
From a distant, hectic sphere remote from us,
we heard the other voices, still calling.

The girls in grass-stained jumpers died
to lovely statues on the lawn, until
a final boy was cornered at the wall,
and all of us condemned to melt to life.

4. Cyclone of Dreams

TV screen's field of light, flickering.
Stale scent in delirium, as all the far horizons
sparkle. Video sparkles rise like doves.
A beam is poised, trancing, out from a cloud.

Newscast slicing through bedroom darkness.
Slow sound of freight trains thousanding,
a shadow-lost prairie, turbine cyclone climbing
as walls fall in on calling children,

divine roulette wheel's undertow. Then,
bright models in bubble skirts, flashing
and turning, as all the new fluorescent worlds
sweep through an eye's electric dream.

The Big Bang

Maybe, then, we'll understand,
when stars bend down to our kind.
Whatever made a difference and all
we left behind, where pulsars rain.

The wave of being passes over
and leaves us startled and blinking
in the face of love without regeneration.
The palindrome of space's time

sets out on stellar pathways outward
until twilight's wandering will wearily
turn away from exploration and finally veer
inward to the heart and to extinction.

And, in its season, season into season,
one young bud opens in a shower.
Its bloom yearns out, and bright dew shivers.
And our morning that knows no twice

repeats, again. Beneath a summer elm,
a boy kisses your girlish face.
Then your fragile shape, your graying hair
are outlined in an unlit grove

of many-leveled days. Your outline hopes
beneath the blackened elm tree where
the stars are falling. You count them all,
all like sheep among your sleeplessness.

Then you run through the groves
as your mother chases with a switch
to punish that kiss. Once and once,
in that glimpsed eternity,

velocity becomes a pause. The ants race
beneath the mower's sky full of twisting
fury. We startle when the sky clangs.
Then, merely the rain. And the distance

of a lonely carillon's tolling, somewhere,
where we feel ourselves begin to close away
lost beyond some lid lapsed,
finally, into a dream that opens up again.

We dream of our own wakefulness, how it
turns suddenly sweet and necessary,
and how it all becomes as clear, suddenly,
as the work hour, as the awful pain, as love.