First Things RSS Feed - Robert B. Shaw

The Devil in the Clock

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

You come to me in thick old roots of night
While trucks are changing gears, although you kiss
Like a slack orchid tongue in Cairns, and I
Can’t make you out, and so you call to me

At afternoon in a light rain when dreams
Go whirling in Saigon under wet heat
So I can hear your voice, although the wind
Will wrap me in a house made out of grief

Which tells me nothing new, and so you rise
In smells of mint or fine young April light
As though you were a cat with arching back
Who wants attention now, so I must stir

Myself, and listen for you in the blood
That breaks upon my ear, and in odd gaps
Between the jokes my daughters love, for you
Have something big to tell me, people say,

Beneath the sweetest and the lowest note
Of waxwings splashing back from Mexico,
Way down beneath the groaning of night trucks,
And down, way down, beneath the first warm wind.

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The Better Part of Valor

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A would-be body-surfer, eight years old,
he fell in with the ocean’s mood of calm,
reviewing each low swell as it unrolled
before him its obsequious salaam.

Crossing the fringe of foam with splashing stride,
he found himself knee-deep, waist-deep, and still
nothing swung by worth joining for a ride.
Level and lazy lay the sea. Until

the chastening wave upreared a glassy face,
its towering onset tugging up his eyes
to see it beetling. He was locked in place,
discovering how doom can paralyze.

Punitive pounding, surging overthrow,
churning immersion, brackish aftermath,
it was embarrassing to undergo.
The water was as placid as a bath

after this one leviathan hit land,
leaving him for a time to drip and look
daggers at where he’d been from safe on sand.
It was the oldest lesson in the book

that sank in as he sniffled, nursed a scrape,
and kept his jarred attention on the matter.
He would become a master of escape:
when offered fight or flight he’d pick the latter.

Having survived the deluge, common sense
would hold him back from an unequal brawl
with such a mass of green malevolence
a billion times his age and twice as tall.

Deciding this revived his dampened spirit
somewhat. But as long as he would live,
he’d rate the way it hid till he came near it
with things too deep to fathom or forgive.

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Mirror Verse

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Brightly it gapes at the room. Nothing can argue the glass
out of its passive (but wait: impassive, call it) alert,
ready and able to mate doubles in pitiless pairs,
mimicking background as well, fixed in its quicksilver depth.
Threatened by such unappeased ardor to match what appears
with a relentlessly true witness to each crooked seam,
blemish or wrinkle or stain? Switch off the light and reflect:
all that the mirror can show cannot correctly portray
which is your right or your left. Nor can it see much beyond
frame-edge, or back of your eyes. Here, as the Book says, we see
through a glass, darkly, and no image reveals what it veils.
So it may be, but the peace drawn from such dicta is faint.
Catching your twin by surprise, there in his face is a sad
look that is equally yours, longing for something unseen.

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Sundial in the Rain

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Patiently waiting for the sun to rise,
the dial seems more dutiful than wise:
the sun, already up for hours, seems
a shrouded moon, so muted are its beams
Mist complicates to drizzle, then to drops.
Like on of Thomas Hardy’s dismal props,
demure atop its neo-gothic column,
the timepieces tenders us that old, unsolemn
advisory: it counts only sunny hours.
If one subtracts for night, for clouds, for showers,
that hardly makes a taxing regimen.
Always willing to work, of course, but when
is not for it or us to specify,
much as we might prefer to clear the sky.

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Parable of the Birds

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

They might be swallows. Barely to be seen,
they come through what the combine left behind,
dispersed, discreet, below the radar screen
while burnished stubble gives them grain to find;

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Finding the Diary

Tue, 01 May 1990 00:00:00 -0400

Settling the estate, the lawyer said.
It seemed too grand a way of putting it—
bills to be paid, a bank account to close,
and finally her mother’s house to sell
while her own, half-a-continent away,
sat waiting for her with its lights on timers
and neighbors dropping in to feed the fish.
Bare rooms show better, the agent said.
So she proceeded with the emptying out,
giving away most of her mother’s things
to cousins for their already jammed parlors
and china, cupboards, and arranged to have
one rug shipped that was too big for her car.
She even dusted, as she rarely did
at home, all the time hearing in her head
her mother’s brusque, exasperated murmur
after the hired help was out the door:
“Nobody knows what clean is anymore.”
Maybe, she thought, this last clean sweep would
please her.
Working her way from room to thinning room,
sorting, discarding, labeling, she found
herself at last up in the attic broaching
some cartons not her mother’s but her own,
packed away since she had gone to college
and her room had become the sewing room.
Sweaters gaudy with school insignia
and one, half-knitted, that she’d never finished
lay folded softly on some weightier things:
Bio and Chem notes, watercolor attempts,
the high school yearbook proving at a glance
that bliss lies in oblivion. Had she really
had names for all those eager faces inked
with urgings time had made inscrutable?
(“Remember Halloween in junior year”;
“Don’t forget the fun we had in Art Club.”)
She hurried past her own sweet, solemn picture,
then set the book aside to shuffle through
the last stack of papers when something smaller
slithered out of them in an even more
embarrassing bid for recognition. Had she
buried it there on purpose? Or just briskly
bundled it in with everything she wouldn’t
want or miss when leaving home at last?
She could hardly believe that it had surfaced,
looking, unlike the rest of the sad items,
almost new—a vampire’s charmed intactness—
bound in red leatherette with a gilt border,
snugged shut by a strap that snapped into
a tiny lock whose even tinier keyhole
pursed its faux-brass lips to whisper, “Psst!
I’ve got a secret!” It was unignorable.

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Wisteria

Sun, 01 Apr 1990 00:00:00 -0500

Here it comes again,
after shimmering dead all winter,
stretching, flexing, limbering, unleashing
hordes of feather-cut leaves that look
like dragon tongues, a silty river bronze,
before they flatten to assume
their summer-long, grass-emulating green.
Gone in a few days from dry
sticks and frizz to rampant, virid vine,
it fans out an advance guard
of tentacle-tendrils itching with intent
to get a purchase somewhere, anywhere,
by means of those unshowy but efficient
grappling hooks that stud
their wiry length like blunt, vestigial thorns.
It scrambles up and onward
always by spiralling round whatever
stands in its path—drainpipe, porch pillar,
/lawn chair—
but then, once anchored, corkscrews round
itself, amassing braided cables
of self-hugging self-satisfaction,
the conquering hero’s doublejointed
pat on his own back, the unbridled
ego trip impelled by the uppity sap
from deepest root to farthest outflung tip,
ecstatically, imperially
quivering toward its vegetal entelechy.
It’s then I intervene, I unshackle
the captive clothesline post, prune back
that onslaught to a standstill: several times
a summer hacking through worst intrusions,
severity which seems but to encourage
further incursions.
Why not have an end,
enlist some two-handed machine to smite once
and smite no more? It must be that we need
each other, complimentary claimjumpers
locked in contest through the drowsiest
spells of heat, continually rousing
each other to claw back ceded tracts
of still disputed territory.
And
it’s worth it, too (I say, sweeping up heaps
of stemmy trash), to see how every May
before these rank, voracious leaves
abound, the blossoms burst from the bare wood
(prized by the Chinese for this, and prized by me),
fountaining down in beads of wistful blue
like droplets of spring’s mild sky congealed.

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