03-08-2016
Kevin Prufer
Potential Energy Is Stored Energy
When the bomb tore through the train,
it cut the first-class cabin into halves.
Inside, the wealthy travelers mostly died,
though here and there
one cupped his bleeding ears
or looked around,
confused. Where the car had split,
snow blew in,
capping the upturned drink cart,
a lady's coat, the dying porter
who smiled
up at the sky.
+
Such constellations
blown-out windows make,
their million shards sprinkled over snow.
Such filigree
where the hot glass sank
and cooled--
+
For hours,
the bomb knelt in its suitcase, half-aware
of the thrum of wheels on tracks,
the churn and tip
when the train turned
or, following the river, cut west
along its banks,
+
and the dying porter thought about his son.
+
For hours, its little heart had ticked
on its rack
above the ladies' heads. It heard the old men
playing cards,
the rattling drink cart.
It dreamed about a plume of smoke,
the second when the casement cracks
and up to the Lord with the splinters
and the glass--
+
Snow fell on his face and melted there,
snow in his hair,
covering his lapel--and his only son,
how he felt his heart beat through him
when he cradled him
or helped his wife
to bathe him in the sink,
the heat coiled in the infant's body--
it was years ago.
+
Dear Lord, dear Lord,
the bomb kept saying,
curled in its suitcase like a prayer,
muffled on its rack-
+
And the baby in the bath was burning up with fever,
so they soaked him there, filled the tub with ice
and smoothed his hair. Oh, beautiful
black-eyed baby,
his wife was singing,
while she stroked his cheek
and the doctor never came--
+
Dear Lord, I give this to you:
each lady's black felt hat, each full glove.
I give you coats
and shards of frosted glass that decorate the first-class cabin's
perfect ceiling.
I give you books and cards and windowpanes,
the men who dream behind them--
+
And the heat inside the baby--
he recalled it now as down the thick snow fell
and covered up his eyes--
he was ungodly hot, a burn
no ice could draw.
He won't last long like this,
his wife was crying,
but still they bathed him--
+
and when the heat tore through it,
the ceiling split
and crashed into the floor. The derailed train
tipped and buckled,
curled and died. And in its final moments,
the doomed bomb smiled--
+
I give this to you, Lord,
in a wisp of smoke, in splinters
scattered in the wind and love.
+
The porter
slept where the train had wrenched apart.
His son,
pinch-faced, stayed in the sink, grew hotter still,
and could not breathe.
Oh breathe, breathe, his wife was saying,
while the great unmelting snows concealed his eyes,
and up to the waiting heavens
this black plume rose.
Churches
In 1981
in a hotel gift shop outside Phoenix, AZ,
a little girl stood by the postcard rack, turning it gently.
It creaked.
She considered a picture of the desert, then
looked around for her mother,
who was elsewhere.
She gave the rack a firm push so it spun
gently on its axle,
smiled, pushed it again,
and the postcard rack wobbled on spindly legs.
And soon she had it spinning
so quickly the cards
made long blurry streaks in their rotation, gasps of blue
for sky,
yellow for sand, and then faster,
the girl slapping at it with her hand,
grinning at me,
and then a single postcard rose from the rack, spun in the air
and landed at my feet,
a picture of a yawning canyon,
and then another, handfuls of postcards
rising from the rack,
turning in the air
while the girl laughed
and her oblivious mother, at the other end
of the store, bought a map or a box of fudge,
and then the air was full of pictures
all of them shouting
Phoenix, Phoenix, Phoenix,
twirling and falling
until the empty postcard rack
groaned once more, tipped,
and crashed through the window.
+
There ought to be a word
that suggests
how we're balanced at the very tip of history
and behind us
everything speeds irretrievably away.
"It's called impermanence,"
the little girl said,
looking at the mess of postcards on the floor.
"It's called transience," she said,
gently touching the broken window.
"It's called dying," she said.
It was 1981
and the clerk ran from behind the counter,
stood before us.
The girl smiled sweetly.
The postcard rack glittered
in the sun and broken glass.
He turned to me and my face grew hot.
I couldn't help it. I was blushing.
+
In 2009, my father lay in a hospital bed
gesturing sweepingly with his hands.
"What are you doing?"
I asked him. "I'm building a church," he said.
"You're making a church?" I said.
"Can't you see?" he said.
He seemed to be patting something
in the air, sculpting something--a roof?--that floated above him.
The hospital room was quiet and white.
"What kind of church is it?" "I'm not finished."
"Is it a church you remember?"
"Goddammit," he said. "Can't you see I'm busy?"
+
It was 1988 and I stood in line for my diploma
and my father took a picture
that I've lost now.
1984 and there we are
around a campfire I can't remember.
It was 2002
and his cells began to divide wrongly, first one
deep in the wrist bone, then another
turned hot and strange,
deformed, humpbacked and fissured,
queer and off-kilter,
one after the other,
though no one would know it for years.
+
"It's called dying," the girl said,
while the postcards suspended
in the air like a thousand days.
I reached out to touch one,
then another,
and all at once they fell to the floor.
Then the clerk said
I was paying for the window,
where were my parents,
and who was going to pay
if I didn't know where my parents were?
And the girl
smiled from behind the key chains
and her mother
pursed her lips at the far end of the store.
The window
had a hole in it through which a dry breeze came.
The postcards shifted on the floor.
+
Years later,
my father was still making a church
with his hands.
"They do that," the nurse said,
patting his head like he was a little boy.
He was concentrating
on his church, though,
his hands shaping first what seemed to be
the apse, then fluttering gently down the transepts.
He sighed heavily, frustrated,
began again.
"Can I bring you anything else?" the nurse asked.
"No," I said. "Thanks."
"Are you sure?" She watched him
tile the roof, watched his finger shape another arch.
And then it was much later.
He'd fallen asleep.
Outside, snow covered up the cars.
+
"It's called forgetting," the girl said,
while the clerk
watched me and I blushed. "Until there's nothing left."
And a breeze entered
through the hole in the window.
"And then you're out of time," she said,
and shrugged.
Some of the cards were face up on the floor:
two burros
climbing a craggy slope,
the grand canyon like a mouth
carved in the earth, a night-lit tower like a needle.
I was sweating now,
but I couldn't speak.
And then I was running from the shop,
past the fountain and the check-in desk,
down the tiled hall to the hotel pool,
where my father lay on a plastic beach chair,
reading a book about churches.
Sunlight flecked his chest.
His hair was wet from swimming.
"What's the trouble?" he asked.
+
First
his cells were thick and soupy,
clotted and aghast.
Then they were spinning
through the air.
And it was 1986 and rain
drummed on the roof.
Or it was snowing, years later,
in Cleveland,
his hands working the air
while the nurse stood in the doorway and sighed.
Wind and sun,
a bright day, a lovely day
to lie by the hotel pool and read
about how men spent lifetimes building them
and never saw them finished.
Love Poem
No money
and the mailbox grew wet and empty-hearted
in the rain. No money
and the ambulance's great red eye
lit someone else's
sleeping street.
They made me leave the hospital
and come home
where, moneyless, I looked out the window, into the rain.
You were empty, asleep and untouchable
in your hospital gown. Emptily,
the nurses walked past me,
their sympathetic heels chipping the linoleum.
That bruise where the IV goes
was round as the absence of a coin,
and you, asleep, the tube in your throat
both terrifying and
I don't know what to call it--
broke? Without money,
the world stops, the world's great cities
close their eyes.
Then the heart goes dead no matter how they pound it.
Without money, I keep driving
the long road from the hospital
cursing the nurses who touched my arm so gently,
said, "go home now, there's nothing you can do."
Darling,
it's so much easier to talk about money,
to spend myself inside this poem.
Wake up.
You've slept and slept while the rain came down.
Say something, anything at all.
Open your bankrupt mouth.
-from Churches
BIO: Poet and editor Kevin Prufer was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned degrees from Wesleyan University, Hollins University, and Washington University. His work, which has been praised for its elegiac attention to the banalities of the contemporary United States, includes Churches (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011), a finalist for the Rilke Prize and listed as a 2011 Notable Book by the Academy of American Poets, and National Anthem (2008), named best poetry book of the year by the Virginia Quarterly Review. Other collections of poetry include Fallen From a Chariot (2005), The Finger Bone (2002, reissued 2013), and Strange Wood (1997). A bilingual edition of Prufer’s poetry appeared in Germany as Wir wollten Amerika finden: ausgewählte Gedichte: zweisprachig (2011), selected and translated by Norbert Lange and Susanna Mewe.
Prufer edits the journal Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing; other editing projects include Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin (coeditor with Jonathan Weinert, 2012), Dunstan Thompson: on the Life & Work of a Lost American Master (with D.A. Powell, 2010), New European Poets (with Wayne Miller, 2008), Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (with Joy Katz, 2006), and The New Young American Poets: An Anthology (2000).
Prufer’s many honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. He has received three Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Poetry Society of America, and the William Rockhill Nelson award. He is a professor in the English Department at the University of Houston and lives in Houston with his wife, the artist and literary critic Mary Hallab.
