Sample Poems by Gabriel Welsch
Pennsylvania
after Bishop
The state with the prettiest name
and the ear of an ancient ridge—
its runnel of stone cluttered
with the wet trees that hold taut
the devastating brown in winter,
the state with air cluttered by the noise
of more miles of road
than any other state, its cities
rarefied by steel and freedom—
the state of deer hungry and baffled,
twisted on its roads, tufted on its fenders,
swinging husks on the porches
of tight homes crowded on the Susquehanna,
the Juniata, the Allegheny—
the state where roads of chicory
rattle through the weight of August
out of the mountains and onto the slow
limestone slab that runs to the Chesapeake—
the state hollowed out in its wood-dense
middle, rusted in a line from Scranton
to Monroeville, slag heaps stand sentry
over ridges pillaged bald—
the state on fire at its core where stories
slide into the maw of hell each time
another house groans its way into the earth—
the state abutting the Great Lakes
which feels their force with each gush
of winter that rakes over the ridges—
the state where mud sings, its telepathy
gritty and familiar, its voice a particular
shade of its character, given roundness
with sweet lime—
the state of forests that beckon
with trails of shadow and distance and great
disappearance, tied to its deliberate
stretch toward winter, when this state is all smoke
and the gray reaches of trees, all darkness
and fire, all ash and water and the salt-worn
roads that lead all thoughts to home—
the state where to talk of soup is to talk
of God and Sunday bundling and bazaars
through the countryside and gravestones
laid over with flags and wax begonias—
the state with pierogie sales and funnel cakes
and cheesesteaks and soft pretzels
and the ruddy faces of corpulent railroaders—
the state that is everywhere and here,
made distinct by its bunched mountains
and hidden towns, how it lays demolished
under leaves, resting on ground that grows
hollow and more hollow year after year,
burning and sinking—
the state with the prettiest name, a name
that is both lie and promise,
adjective and mystery, history and fable,
one man’s woods.
We hear robins in the laurel, semis
jake-braking into town,
the sudden snap of deer hooves
on tomato stakes. And always,
highways building and seething
with our weight, pushing on limestone,
building and building on this softening ground.
The Expensive View
—title taken from a line by D.
Nurkse
He spoke about his wife in pursed euphemism—
“We decided to raise our children with one
parent always at home.”
From his suit—chalked and smooth at once—
to his shoes, soft calf bellies like a gilding
for the foot, I expected a tumbler of whisky
in Manhattan’s throb of afternoon—
a clear tumbler, to see the amber
bought with lavish time and oak—
but he drank water, from a thin tap
behind his uncluttered desk. I was there
to write a fawning story of what he’d earned
to a less affluent readership, but the expensive view
kept drawing me to its jumbled progression
of stacked deeds pointing to the sea.
Of course he drank water! Afternoon drinkers,
the reprobate among us, earn indulgence but rarely
an aerie for surveying those who would undo them.
The expensive view, so much real estate, so much cost
of all that is buried under this leafless jungle,
and this man in the bunker of his euphemisms—
“I’ve done what it takes,” he says. “It’s like
the song:
if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”
I wrote later that his hair swept back like a Renaissance
poet’s, let him chuckle at his own wit, his depiction
of himself as a bygone dilettante. I want to say
I felt the cheap sting of my own smugness, knowing
the card house of my own euphemisms stood tall
as well. I thought him rich, pompous, a stretch
of his own skin and wit. I couldn’t look at him,
except to find details: platinum lapel pin, jade cufflinks,
chin cleft, mole behind the ear. The tape ran
while I took in the view, a sky as clear as his forehead,
not a cloud or a plane or even a reflection of light
off the ocean that, from here, looked so small.
Pressing Business
Trees leaf out—roses and lilacs
sequin with buds. Smooth tense skins
tighten like a promise. We’ll break them down.
We’ll press them, force them flat
for a record. Press them within the pages
of an unabridged dictionary, the RHS
encyclopedia of gardening. Let them feel
the weight of the language we have heaped
upon them. The weight is heavy indeed:
philosophy, the bible, a dictionary,
a Rookwood pot—terra cotta, urn-shaped,
paperbacks stuffed inside, the weight
of more learning and cultural import
to crush the color of a tulip flat, a tulip
that had come a long time down to this,
pushed in a towel in a dictionary under a pot,
this blossom of Dutch monarchs, this Mercedes
of mercantilism, this blossom to kill a king for, this
delicate gem of no facets. We write the tags,
take their names and learn them,
speak them in our home, teach their curves
to our tongue and teeth, feel
language work even here, simply by its
accumulated weight. In this way,
syllables blossom, the names lose
their context of weeds, keep the color
slipped from the sun.
A Natural Selection
“Nature does not proceed by leaps.” —Linnaeus
Here and there
the minute stutter of biology
works from quill to spur,
vesicle to panicle to lisp,
building the traits that mean
we adapt. The pitch pine coats its cones
in resin so it only sprouts in the fires
that savage every century or so;
the dromedary hump defines
the depth of deserts. Given that lexicon
what of the far less delicate
bomb, the maladaptive urge to resign,
or the simple singleness of murder?
If I can make it past this question
and its jumble of mutations—
well, who’s to say? There float yet more
mysteries—the fragile bow
of the ulna, the specifics required
by seeds, the varying sizes
of lenticels, all those floss thin
signs of circumstance,
fronds tested time and again
by the unseen wonder of wind.
—for David J. Welsch
Watershed
“—the little we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.”
—Eizabeth Bishop, “Poem.”
Wine bottles in recycle bins all down the block
glint the last light of a dry June evening,
a Sunday, make deep shadows in the new grass,
a peony a splayed burst
of another light glowing in Northern rooms
as the cool descends with maple seeds
and the street rests, yards quiet and dense
with grill heat and early honeysuckle
lining the stream at the hill’s bottom. The stream
runs southeast, behind an auto body shop, a printer,
out beneath a laureled ridge and on past Dublin
and Rising Sun, to a confluence of streams
from Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, into the slow
Chesapeake, its snails and curvaceous clams,
its silted bottom and illusory green, the true exotic,
so far from here—from the coiled hose,
the mailbox flag, the forsythia clutched in English ivy,
the tuft of clipped grass, the soapy husks of lather left
in the driveways where we washed cars—far, far from ease,
from these rooms now clasped in evening.