The Sleeve Waves Read online

  The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The Sleeve Waves

  ANGELA SORBY

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street

  London WC2E 8LU, England

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  Copyright © 2014

  The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sorby, Angela, author.

  [Poems. Selections]

  The sleeve waves / Angela Sorby.

  pages cm — (The Felix Pollak prize in poetry)

  ISBN 978-0-299-29964-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-299-29963-7 (e-book)

  I. Title. II. Series: Felix Pollak prize in poetry (Series).

  PS3619.O73A6 2014

  811’.6—dc23

  2013027994

  In memory of Professor Nelson Bentley, 1918–90

  Oaks and garrets lit the falling dusk.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  I

  Night Vision

  Fallout

  What Might Happen Might Not

  Hard Bop

  The Knit

  Kochanski’s, Saturday Night

  Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening

  The Disappearances

  Trance Music

  Spill

  Golden Spike

  Close Shave

  The Ghost of Meter

  Petition

  Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment

  Boom Town

  Blood Relative

  Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living

  End of the Century

  Nonsense

  Flatland

  Double Neighbor

  Errand

  Interstate

  The Obstruction

  Duct Tape

  II

  Pastoral

  III

  Thrifting

  Paradise, Wisconsin

  A Is for Air

  Duck/Rabbit

  Notes from a Northern State

  A Walk across the Ice

  The Thorne Rooms

  Just Looking

  Blush

  Thirst

  Watson and the Shark

  The Schoolteachers

  Ink

  Doppelzüngig

  Fall Forward, Spring Back

  Fat

  Sacred Grove

  Go-Between

  Sofia’s Stove

  The Second Daguerreotype

  Epistle

  The Suburban Mysteries

  The Sleeve Waves

  Sivka-Burka

  Acknowledgments

  Heartfelt alphabetical-order thanks to those who provided collegial, familial, moral, and/or material support during the writing of this book: Vic and Jan Anderson, Faith Barrett, Jenny Benjamin, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, Matthew Cosby, the Edenfred Foundation, the Fulbright Scholar Program, C.J. Hribal, Catherine Hubbard, Jesse Lee Kercheval, David Kirby, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Maureen McLane, Monica Maniaci, Carla Marolt, Sheila McMahon (and everyone at UW Press), Naomi Shihab Nye, Liana Odrcic, Kris Ratcliffe (and all of my colleagues at Marquette University), Chris Roth, Francesca Roth, Ivan Roth, Jonah Roth, Melissa Schoeffel, Janet and Evan Sorby, Sarah Wadsworth, Ron Wallace, Larry Watson, and Adrianne Wojcik.

  Thanks to the editors of the following journals, where versions of some of these poems first appeared:

  Babel Fruit (“Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living”)

  Barrow Street (“Paradise, Wisconsin”)

  Jacket (“The Suburban Mysteries”)

  Massachusetts Review (“Thrifting”)

  North American Review (“Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening”)

  Poets for Living Waters (“Spill”)

  Prairie Schooner (“Sivka-Burka,” “Interstate,” “Notes from a Northern State,” “A Is for Air”)

  Superstition Review (“Ink,” A Walk across the Ice,” “Golden Spike”)

  Verse Wisconsin (“Kochanski’s, Saturday Night,” “Petition,” in a different form)

  Zone 3 (“Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment,” “Fallout”)

  The line on the dedication page is taken from “Villanelle,” by Nelson Bentley.

  The Sleeve Waves

  I

  A wave is a disturbance that moves through a medium.

  —ROBERT L. WEBER, Physics for Science and Engineering

  Night Vision

  Changsa, 2011

  Hunanese babies

  wear tiger slippers

  to ward off evil,

  though of course they’re stronger

  than their tiger-protectors,

  and more rigorous,

  and blunter,

  and they know how to roar. Roaring’s key:

  it drowns out the philosophers

  who drag the river

  for texts

  but miss

  what’s hidden deep

  in baskets tied to the backs

  of women selling fish

  or sweeping streets:

  babies who nap all day,

  then open their eyes at night.

  Living speakers can’t remember

  what it’s like to be wordless,

  if it’s dull, divine, or both,

  like the hundred-odd miniature

  Buddhas stuffed

  into one cave at Nanputuo.

  The monk who wipes them with a rag

  survived two famines

  and a half-hanging

  during the Cultural Revolution,

  which thinned his hair

  and did something to his ears:

  now when the small gods wake in their velvety

  toes and soles, he listens.

  Fallout

  Party at the beach,

  but J refuses to go

  because he can’t swim.

  11 years old. All day

  I watch his cuteness

  break open and fall away.

  He finds Etta James

  on YouTube and says,

  “When I’m sad, only sad

  songs make me better.”

  Already a needle

  in his heart knows

  how to find the chords

  for all he’s missing:

  direct sunlight, easy listening.

  Already the wax

  cylinder’s spinning

  its old technology of longing,

  and I recognize the boys I knew

  in the ’80s and ’90s,

  who dragged me to Fallout Records

  so they could “look for something.”

  What? It has no name, this sadness

  that feels like happiness.

  What Might Happen Might Not

  The psychic oboist charges

  ten bucks per fortune.

  He lodges above Clarke’s Shoes

  in Marinette, Wisconsin.

  He says he doesn’t know

  how he sees what he sees.

  He calls himself a cleanser,

  a healer—of widows, of adoptees.
r />   On slow days he sometimes

  pauses between futures

  long enough to play

  Tomaso Albinoni’s Opus 7,

  blowing its pure notes virtuously,

  as if they could filter

  trash from the Menominee River,

  but his oboe knows better—

  it floats downstream keening.

  Music is beauty consuming

  itself. It is loss writ large,

  it is an empty factory,

  it is night come to clog

  the Midwestern heart of the nation,

  where the Green Bay Packers

  tense and disperse

  in random formations.

  Hard Bop

  The guy at the piano dump

  pitches pianos, using a huge

  claw to grab—lift—release.

  Wippens, hammers, and jacks

  scatter. A few wires snap,

  and the rest snarl into silence,

  the same silence

  that snarls girls

  who refuse to practice scales,

  who sit hunched on the bench

  reading Secret of the Old Clock

  while the timer, set to one hour,

  ticks backward. You’ll regret this,

  warn their mothers,

  but the girls think the future

  is in speeding convertibles,

  like Nancy Drew’s roadster,

  or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

  top up, top down, wheels retracted,

  wings out, over the cliff into the ocean,

  and boom—it’s a boat.

  They sense

  what the dump guy knows:

  to draw near the rim of the piano

  pit is to witness

  the body turn,

  the hinge convert,

  which is why the dump guy chains

  a big ring of keys

  outside his pocket.

  Most open known doors, but a few,

  he’s not sure what they’re for.

  Those are his favorites.

  The Knit

  Honeyboy Edwards,

  onstage at 93,

  could be my Grandpa Harold’s twin brother,

  which makes no sense

  since one’s a live blues singer

  and one’s a dead Swedish American

  asphalt worker,

  but Grandpa, cool and silky

  into his 90s,

  dressed urban smooth,

  and if a car hood was open,

  no matter whose car,

  he stuck his head in,

  partly to suss out the engine,

  and partly to spark a long

  long conversation.

  Can loud plaids cross the color line?

  Can certain polyesters travel

  beyond our peculiar national evil?

  God knows nothing’s simple,

  but if one shirt could pass

  between two strangers,

  one living, one dead,

  one black, one white,

  Honeyboy Edwards is sporting

  that shirt tonight. Its double-

  knit gleams, so slick,

  so inorganic,

  it will outlast our muscle memory

  of the twentieth century—

  how it felt to sweat

  under that fabric,

  how plastered

  against the skin a shirt

  could turn timeless.

  Unwrinkled. Ecstatic.

  Kochanski’s, Saturday Night

  One more going-away

  bash for a friend,

  Afghanistan-bound, and the last thing

  he wants is to hear some

  peacenik strum. So up I shut,

  and stick to seltzer,

  as snowflakes fall with neutral

  nonchalance

  outside the bar. No windows.

  Snow’s too soft to cut

  the chill, too gentle to kill

  the one-armed drunk guy’s engine.

  Off he roars.

  Oh, Lord.

  To say the whole army

  is stupid and wrong

  is stupid and wrong, surely.

  Walt Whitman thought he could heal

  amputees with poetry. All I know

  is when to leave a party.

  Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening

  The whole East Coast is buried

  in weather we manufactured

  indirectly: the carbon-emissions unconscious.

  How curious, this sameness.

  Kilmer died fighting in France

  in 1918. He wrote, “I think that I shall never see

  a poem lovely as a tree,”

  but was silent on the topic

  of rest stops,

  how the engine pauses,

  and the Starbucks steamer hisses,

  and all states feel equidistant

  though this is nominally

  New Jersey. He exploded

  before he could picture a cup of coffee,

  dark and complex

  like modern poetry (Ezra Pound’s maybe)

  which, though stronger than Kilmer’s,

  still isn’t cool and stark and pure

  as a tree.

  Soldier, soldier:

  can you tell us where to go

  now that we’ve shaken up the glass

  globe and brought down the snow?

  The Disappearances

  The cold is large and pale and everywhere,

  and falling on the South Milwaukee trees.

  A cardinal moves his heat across the air,

  above the clearance sales, the vacancies,

  above the locks that fasten as they freeze

  key-holders in the act of passing through.

  A mortgage is a number no one sees:

  a sleight-of-moon, a slip, a coming-due

  of obligations tightening the screw.

  The neighbor takes her name off every list,

  and blows a fog onto the windowpane

  to stamp a phony footprint with her fist.

  Petite and singular, the print remains,

  as if the neighbor walked out of her veins,

  and up the glass—and up, and out of sight.

  The cold invades the outlets, cracks, and drains.

  The cardinal sheds its red coat overnight.

  No blood runs deep enough to crack the ice.

  Trance Music

  Gerund comes from the Latin gerere (future p. p. gerundus) to carry on; it carries on the power or function of the verb.

  —JOHN W. WILKINSON, 1895

  Do you have 5, 10, 20

  thousand dollars in credit card debt?

  1-800-398-2067.

  Call now! Imagine

  walk-

  ing the green spring

  like a fawn sprung

  from its spots.

  No need to winter over.

  You are the gerund.

  The sky aches blue—

  no cure, no analgesic.

  Your debt is buried

  like the skeleton

  of a twin born dead.

  Your feet trot horn-

  hard, so far from human

  you can’t remember

  how the voices sounded,

  or what they wanted.

  Spill

  First I thought it was my furnace:

  a black metallic odor

  seeping through the glass-block

  window into the yard.

  Then I guessed it started

  under my car: a shimmery river

  of darkness. Then I figured: my lawn-

  mower. Did it blow a plug?

  What was that weird smell?

  Where were the plovers, the sparrows,

  the terns? My eco-neighbor,

  out watering compost worms,

  said, “It’s BP!”

  And then I knew.

&nb
sp; It’s not BP. It’s him. It’s me.

  We’ve been gushing bullshit

  since Earth Day, 1970.

  What to do? Make a poem?

  Christ.

  Rilke beat everyone to it.

  He wrote, “You must change your life.”

  Golden Spike

  It doesn’t pay to try,

  All the smart boys know why.

  —JOHNNY THUNDERS

  i.

  To cure insomnia,

  don’t try. Pretend

  the bed’s a bunk

  in a Pullman car,

  bolted to the floor,

  but moving steadily

  from A to B.

  The trick’s to picture

  neither A nor B

  but the space

  between characters,

  large and yet limited,

  like time—

  how it elapses

  everywhere at once,

  despite the zones

  fixed by railway

  executives in 1883.

  Wrong clock,

  thought the Chinese

  laborers who ached

  but could not write.

  The pain spread

  from their arms

  into their spines.

  ii.

  All the smart transcontinental titans know

  vision is motion. To be

  is not to be, but to go.

  A koan: keeping moving.

  An hour lost in Maine

  is lost in California.

  Close Shave

  The perennials flash their steam-

  punk violet hues,

  daring human

  women to lose

  the flats, the control-

  top hose. My mother

  always says, “If I have a stroke,