Poetry By
David M. Harris
Published on: 8/10/2015
Tools
Manual typewriters, when everyone used them. Then electrics. Then computers, early, starting with dot-matrix printers -- three novels (one published), many bad stories and some not so bad. A newspaper column. An advisor: "Write a journal by hand." Overboard, of course. Dip pen and inkwell, and handmade Tibetan notebook (leather cover, soft paper, ink feathering beautifully and illegibly). I learned. I got Mont Blancs, Parkers, cheap beautiful Chinese fountain pens. Notebooks with fine, smooth paper. New materials, new processes, revised my writing. A notebook sits easy in a pocket with a pen, a portable word processor. Always ready, tempting and expecting use. I can amuse myself with ink colors, crowd the page with evolving revisions, write in lines, not paragraphs. Each word hand-crafted. Sometimes the tools shape the worker.
Published on: 7/20/2015
Anton Tibbe
Dear Tony: Over poker, cup by cup, you taught me about tea. You sent me to T Salon and Harney's, Whittard's, to Assam and Yunnan and Ceylon teas, touring Asia from the breakfast table. I still drink coffee sometimes, away from home, faced with coffee or bagged fannings, but tea for me, drink of my ancestors, stuck in Russia all those centuries with lump sugar or jam. Lemon, when they could get it. In a cabinet upstairs I've got the tea glasses and holders, podstakanniki. For years I tried to find the right mug for my father's tea, not knowing that his wartime British airbase cup had been a plain half-pint, elaborated by nostalgia into something rare, impossible to locate in reality. Swee-Touch-Nee bags blended the best and worst of his times, the war against Hitler and the other against his father. A history of tea, of Chinese emperors and British colonies and perfect mugs and pots, which you helped me rejoin. I would have got there anyway— less caffeine, more ritual, another point of difference between the common world and me— but I might be buying teabags still. Now, exiled in a land where "tea" means iced suffused with simple syrup, I cleave to teapot and loose leaves, to boiling water, to the cup of friendship and memory.
Published on: 7/15/2015
Dead Letter Office: Damon Knight
Dear Damon: Across the continent, filtered by electrons, I never saw you so clear as to see your flaws. Human, there must have been some; the meticulous writer revised them out of all those online posts, O eminence of message boards. I only picked up some of your good, or tried to. I learned from the fiction, of course, which left me (and so many others) envious, and the criticism, clear and fluent. But you modeled more. The careful argument, the probing, your gedankenexperimenten (and calling them that, not "thought experiments"). Your hopeless crusades against the apostrophe, against academic abuse of the language. Principle. The fine-tuned mind at work. Socrates online and at play. Pushing us through the mind's workout, to help us— me— to think, to be, better. And sending my comments on your new edition to your editor, even if he knew better than to put them on the cover. Patron, advisor, supporter--but we never had the chance to lift a couple of cold ones. I'll lift one for you now, with someone young, and try to carry on as you taught me.
Published on: 7/9/2015
Poets Play Nine
Slam watches as his drive falls short and plops into the lake. "I'll take my mulligan," he sighs, and tees another ball. We each get one free pass, a second chance to hit a shot we need here on the course. And as we play we argue over lines and words and images, and how we can revise, recast, improve the outcomes of our verse. But by the seventh hole we tire of that, and conversation turns more personal, to Slam's divorce and Mookie's child support that makes him keep the job he'd rather quit. We cool off in the bar, and total all the scores, and measure our regrets, and know again: there are no mulligans in life.
Published on: 7/6/2015
Old Timer
He sits in his big chair— the comfortable one, bought long ago to ease his back when he turned fifty— and stays in touch with the times, with The Times, neatly folded, trying to unfold old words newly unfamiliar— to keyboard, to mouse, to friend-- and tries to rescue the memories of what will soon have been a Golden Age.
Published on: 9/9/2013
Trimmings
What can I do with spring? Love doesn't work for me, not here, not now. I have no use for liberty or justice. Words mound up in dunes by my feet, drifts of sawdust that fall ignored by Shop-Vacs, considered and culled for the sake of sleeker lines. Deleted phrases alight in their own file. Single words sift through gaps in my desk. How many friends have slipped by, how many years, each one gone, ignored but not lost, ready to be forged fresh and gleaming like chromed Craftsman tools when I need them.
Published on: 6/21/2011
Process
Asked to write a poem, I go straight to the garden, tug at weeds and lever out roots, haul out the spade, turn soil and break and sift and sweat until I find the pebble. I put it in my shoe. Then I can go to my desk.
Published on: 6/21/2011
Pre-Madonna
The future was a rose of Sharon. Young and lovely, born to influence, descended from kings, destined to marry some prince, to honor his family and be a prominent wife and mother. Young notables lined up to court the priest's niece. No hick carpenter for Mary. Then the angel came.
Published on: 6/21/2011
Why I Am Not a Bear
Smashing through the woods, parting trees and bestriding logs, scooping up wineberries, blackberries, whatever is ripe and irresistible, swiveling to listen and sniff the air, the hairy beast is seized by a sudden swivet--a hawk's hurtle, a chipmunk's flustered flight - and thinks, "That could be a poem."
Published on: 6/21/2011
Untaken Photographs
1: A small dog pauses on a woodland path, looking intently to one side. 2: My father stands in a gallery, leaning forward slightly, examining a painting. 3: The uniform is gleaming white. 4: Two people stand on a beach in California, according to the vegetation and the cliffs. 1: The dog is peering into a laurel hell, his mouth slightly open. 2: Behind my father we can see another painting, from the bottom of which hangs an elaborate blue rosette. 3: The young man wearing the uniform is small for a professional ballplayer, but he stands confidently in the classic shortstop crouch. 4: The couple carry their shoes; they have wiggled their feet comfortably into the sand. 1: Within the laurels, we can just make out the shape of a badger. 2: If we look closely, we can make out writing on the ribbon, BEST IN SHOW, and on that painting, my father's signature. 3: On my head, a cap; on the cap, the logo of the Newark Bears. 4: My parents hold hands contentedly as they watch the sun creep above the horizon.
Published on: 17-May
Sandra Warshaw
Dear Sandy: In the train station in New Brunswick, did we kiss? Oh, yes, and more, but not much, despite my urgency. Inexpert hands deranged our clothes, grabbling for skin. And then I vanished from your life, choosing someone else, then intruding what? Twice in the decades since. I haven't seen you since '68. So why should I bother you now? Why keep dreaming of the ghosts I chased away? Did no not mean no when I said it? I am always looking back, trying to touch what I turned to dust before it could dare to solidify. All I can change is the future, and I trap myself in the past. Now it is time for me to say goodbye to you, to all the rest I pushed away, who haunted through my dreams despite my turns away and back, away and back again. My faulty choices are just errors, not the ghosts of perfect romance never born. I'll exorcise myself, shake loose regret, And take a step to what can be.
Published on: 5/6/2016
Dead Letter Office: William Harris (2)
Dear Dad: Every writer has a secret editor sitting on the shoulder, You were always there for me, telling me what was wrong. In school, in work, even on the golf course, where I could match your scores. You corrected my grip, my stance, my swing. Nothing ever perfect, ever good enough. In life or in death, you sat and observed, cool and articulate. You learned that young, and well. You were saying, "Be better, be worthy," but I couldn't hear that. I never learned to recognize approval. Not until much later, when I cleared that great weight from my shoulder.
Published on: DATE
Letters
I started with pencils, shaping each word with care, but soon learned to type. After the Smith-Corona portable was taken through the window, I bought an old IBM, pre-Selectric, and gradually filled a file drawer with correspondence, incoming originals and carbons of what I sent, the x-outs diminishing with time and haste. Then printouts. Then the drawer collected rust. Emails stay on the hard drive, data files, quick first drafts, digital ephemera, born to evanesce. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not the leisure to make it shorter." For living contact, uncap the pen, lay out a sheet of paper, and craft a message of friendship with real blood.
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