Sample Poems by David Moolten
Grace
Another night in which they have words, another flap
In the kitchen, sharp criticism, squawking,
Someone pushing someone into the Frigidaire
While you fidget at the supper table,
Trying to digest what you hear. But now,
That all over, plain as rolls and butter, comes
The sacred code phrase, the meal ticket flattery
Of God it takes to spare you from this world.
It’s your turn for the apocryphal incantation,
Everyone holding hands as for a séance,
And you sit savoring the calm of dead silence,
The power you have over them, your arms
Pulled in both directions, their heads bowed
As though in shame for eating each other’s hearts
And letting their children starve. You say nothing
For almost too long, awaiting your own voice
Like an oddly familiar flavor you recognize
But can’t name. You fill with its presence
Even as your breath crackles, expelled
Like the miserable heat of their passion,
The oven open like a desert wind invading,
And you know that it’s chicken again.
High pitched, your muttering floats above them
Like a bird, a wing and a prayer, mostly
Wing, lightly balancing sadness and hope,
Dark meat and white meat, every syllable frail
As bone, porous as the hunger for more
That asks even as it thanks. How many times
Did your belly growl like an animal
While you stared at tender offerings
Through such lip service that delayed them
Slopping out the portions? No one listens.
They become the scrape of cutlery, claws and beaks
Of metal, a belch, a sigh, then the drab rooms
Of evening. But years later you’ve saved them
Like leftovers in your head, the bitter aftertaste,
The oily texture and excess salt of tears,
Him standing suddenly like a wall and her
Flinging a plate. Terms of praise still flutter down
From nowhere like manna, the spirit of blessing
Summoned from memory, featherweight as steam
Above the fulminant green beans au gratin.
Here, you say, it is all good, it is all grace.
Quarry
I’m working for Di Carlo Bros. Gravel and Stone,
Summer school of a sort, raising
A new bank or high-rise once in a while
Brick by brick but more often just the heavy dust
Of railroad ballast, matching pound for pound
Any of my father’s Sunday feats of strength:
The twist of the tire jack, the stab
Of the spade. I find my mother’s flutter
Around him, from the breeze in her dress
To the glide in her tray of juice, harder to duplicate
Precisely, the muscles which sustain her burden
More subtle. But who is strongest?
Another woman lifts him out of our lives.
So there I am, stuck making the wrong man
Of myself despite myself, tying rope
And herding the blocks onto the rumbling trucks.
Let someone else dream them into architecture.
I don’t drive; I only load. Except, sometimes at night
I’ll swing the headlights of my mother’s wagon
Past the rusty gates that never close
To where the monoliths lie pale and unassailable,
And skinny-dip with a girl in a pool
Of gathered rain. Hell is a sensual place.
But there is never enough time that one day
Doesn’t tip the scales into the next
All those mornings when thought breaks down
Under the sun’s heaved up boulder of fire, awakenings
To tasks of synthesis and accretion
More intricate than those of Sisyphus:
Regret more cumulative than anger, the same ache
Repeated like a stone in the symmetry of a wall.
The true test of strength is always on its way
Because no matter what I build down there as years pass
Where it stands useless among the butterflies
And wild iris-bridge, tower, statue
Of a man—it is all a single stone
Getting larger each time I push it up the hill.
Achilles
During that proud, petulant year my father left
And I became a punk, nothing could touch me,
Certainly not Mr. Chase, fifth period English,
Who wore ratty sweaters like my father
And even resembled him a bit, ashen
Around the temples, quick to become impatient.
Armed with chalk he rapped and squeaked a swath
Of hexameter across the shaking board,
Cooly dispatching names, Achilles
In the middle, giving us the standard
Grandiloquent view of an immortal fracas,
Looking down even on the gods. Furious
With my father, I cut up in class, hurled
Whispered jibes at a man who once praised me, craned
To yawn at windows full of fields and spring oaks,
A whole world for the taking. The Greeks left Troy
An ashpit centuries ago and in no time
The gong would ring, the books slam shut
On all their heroes. No amount of scattering dust,
Of declamation with spittle on the lips
Could hold my attention, make me vulnerable
To the poetry. He never got one point
Across, no more than my father lecturing
At the police station, begging me to stop
While I could because I was hurting
Only myself, so unbelievable
He might have been talking about
Another boy, the real son he never knew
Finding an apartment meant losing, the one
Just a corpse of memory I desecrated
With each stolen jacket and smashed windshield.
But he hit on no weakness, no dumb shrug
One could take for the tiniest flinching
In someone pent up as Achilles when Priam
Stooped into his tent on that windy beach,
Conquered him with his own compassion.
As for Mr. Chase, he’s gone the way
Of old men, box of unread notes burned or deep
In some midden, nothing left, not even
My doodled caricatures on yellowed loose leaf.
His voice has grown softer with time though, sadder
Like my father’s. I could almost lean forwards
Now amid my quiet breathing, and listen.
Melting Pot
Mr. Manning in the sixth grade expounded, imperious
As J.P. Morgan or a by-the-book foreman
Who for a few cents more buys the whole deal,
The dawn of a golden age of industry, ethnics
Invited by the boatload to produce and reproduce,
Take part in the intercourse of commerce—
Irish and Germans, Italians and Poles,
Everyone making it with everyone else
In the same tenements, under the same factory roof.
Who could miss him glowing in the projector light,
The overhead he left on the entire hour
For effect, a blazing cauldron of sun
In some reddish black cave, of molten metal
Suspended, tilting to never quite pour forth
For the slacking, yawning class? If they got screwed
Sometimes in the process, at least it forged
Diversity like an alloy that incorporated
Chromium or zinc to steel its properties
Of which he used me, half Puerto Rican, half Jew
As ironclad example a few toughs proved wrong
When they waited afterwards by the train tracks.
I suppose taking their side now conceptually
I should sympathize, their muscle-bound fathers
Sullen, exhausted of love, childhood for them
An early shift before time cards and hard hats,
School just another massive building
Of singed bricks, though the shed where they dragged me
To mix it up resembled less an efficient plant,
Robber barons feeding immigrants
In like scrap, than some primal blacksmith’s hut
In the old country with its tongs and sledgehammers,
Three of them, their unflinching fists
Dropping down, pounding me into resilience.
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