Stephen Haven is Professor of English at Ashland University, where he edits the Ashland Poetry Press, teaches American literature, and co-directs the creative writing program. His book of poems, The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, is forthcoming from West End Press in 2003. The book will be distributed by the University of New Mexico Press. His poetry has appeared in Crazyhorse, American Poetry
Review, Salmagundi, Image, Western Humanities Review, TheMissouri Review, The Clackamas Literary Review, and in many other journals. Haven has an M.A. in American Studies and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry, both from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. He has twice been a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature (Poetry) at universities in Beijing, and has won three individual artist fellowships, and one residency grant (at the Provincetown
Fine Arts Work Center), from the Ohio Arts Council. He is the editor of The Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass: Everything Human (University of Michigan Press, 1993), and of two anthologies of contemporary American poetry.
SUMMER IN A LARGE HOUSE
They heard at night whatever small complaints
the house had gathered, stored, some eighty years
of them, as if it had arthritis in
each limb, and creaked and cracked in wind, no wind,
the exponential growth of each slight sound
as long as they listened, hearts to the bedded dark.
Or rather she heard, and he heard what she heard
when she woke him to it: a chair that scraped
across the hardwood floors, and one night,
she swore, "Oh Suzanna," in hushed tones,
and sent him flashing up the attic stairs
to where, he knew, in years, judging by
the general disrepair, and webs and dust,
the light bulb dead, nothing human had been.
It started his heart working. But when he went
back to their bed, for the sake of sleep he chose
to wish away her fear, what might have been there:
"Nothing," he said, "absolutely nothing."
All night that night, cotton in her ears,
something substantiated by the dark
settled with the mist till the sun burned it off.
Then there was another place she'd never go.
Then, like a sudden itch in deer tick country,
though they found, each long evening, nothing,
the whole of that house crawled with possibility.
Then it seemed she heard her own voice only,
an echo, half an echo, what she once meant
to say, or thought, and had forgotten, and then
beneath its breath the house would utter it.
They burned dried sage, left dishes of tobacco
and mugwort around the doors and windowpanes
and on their porch, though she had never quite
believed before, they hung, lined and starred,
in fourteen different languages the names for God.
And if it somehow steeled them, that tacked on display,
as if they staked a claim for summer always,
was for each dusk, for each night's moon to say,
or the foghorns lowing lowing each cold morning,
or for the slowest hour of the evening
when far from the sleeping children, he'd slip himself
into a pure abandon. But how could she
make love to him whenever they were listening?
Too often the cry that he had hoped to hear
would come in the form of a distant slamming door,
or a voice so low it might as well have not
been there at all. Then always it was night again:
If he slept and didn't stir, still at a word
he held her when she asked, pressed into her
the rote illusion of some distant mass,
the only prayer he knew, of love and dust
and bread, and she recited after him
though neither one could say to what or whom.
And still it pulled, born of the one breath
that bent above them the cypress's silhouette
and drifting, drifting, unseen everywhere,
pitched forever, it seemed to them forever,
dark and near in the warped old eaves of the ear.
SLOW IT DOWN, BABY!
The cosmic expansion should have been slowing down a lot or a little-an effect that should have shown up as distant supernovas, looking brighter than you would expect compared with closer ones. But, in fact, they were dimmer-as if expansion were speeding up. The universe was indeed speeding up.
Time, June 25, 2001
They stared hard. The software didn't blink.
Light spun from the original yarn.
Those distant supernovas pulsed
more closely to the surge
of the first flash. So why, then,
did they thermo more dimly
than nearer Earth's own peripheral yard?
Out on the edge, things were heating up.
The warp of the Big inner urban Blast
didn't fizz in the lonely burbs of time.
Some dark energy-something we couldn't see-
kept churning, churning, as if the Wonders
of the Unseen World dusted itself off
and Cotton Mather beamed himself a spot
aboard the starship Enterprise.
The farther from matter's compact start
the faster the cosmos throws open the throttle
of a brand spanking, good as new
trillion year old Ferrari.
But who needs the laser show of the heavens
for such a world breaking story?
In the beginning, or near, we each sat through
the infinite first days of June, and yawned
for the blessed break. When it came,
the weight of September massed behind
distant pine. Lithe bodies dove off
a pressure treated dock. Out on the edge,
our old Sun minded its own spangled business.
Then the years bullied each slack season,
until a generation ganged up like this:
half life half spent in the light
chaos of kids. A kitten barely whines
before it wizens and dies.
A house floats by,
a dog staked barking to a distant ash.
Then all the left lane down to Columbus,
my daughter's mouthing, Slow It Down,
Baby!, the Spice Girls' drilled prophecy.
June is one fresh breath of air away.
It's in the stars, how time
will peter, how the loins' turbo charge
won't stick, the eternal engine burning
like nothing its last ounce of gas.
Old enough by then to be a child
in a line of children again,
I will find my place at the end
of the cracked whip. My feet will lift.
Faster and faster, at their late hour,
the furthest stars spin, sparks
of the party, drunks on a binge.
We have them in our sights now,
the brilliance of their abandon,
a fever more flush than ever
at the downy start. Then off the charts.
Then the hushed centrifugal wonder
of the drift of the dark.
CELLO
I really only learned to play
a movement or two of some
suite for unaccompanied cello.
Mainly etudes in solitude.
Still, my fingers bled for you.
Even off key, my body swayed
from C to A when I bit in
at the base of the bow
and sent in a double stop
the power of some simple Bach
quivering to the top of your scroll!
My cello, between us
it was something physical:
You were a pulsing thing,
a melancholy levity
drawn hair, thick largo
I hugged between my legs.
My scratchy love,
my public albatross,
I played you only in private
like a fat spouse.
Then, in sixteen years, I never
touched you once, lugged you,
a promise I made to myself
from house to house to house.
When I let you go
sold you last December
for some unpaid bill or the other
your absence in my home
was a closet that filled quickly
like a dent in dough.
Now I wish for you what I might wish
for any quick, any crafted instrument:
that some human touch might tap
the slow vibrato of a voice
that hadn't, all those years,
found a voice
and sat there waiting for release
as if it were the seed, the embryo
of all you knew, all that was carved
or strung unsung in you
hardwood, horsehair,
cat gut strings,
the pang of hunger
in the belly of a mammal,
sway of the living tree.