Collaboration #23, Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's "Untitled #23", 2011, acrylic on wood, 8'' x 10"

The Gavel Maker

 

 

It started with trees when I was twelve.

And Perry Mason.  When Your Honor smacked

the world into order with one whack

of his mallet, maple on cherry, a final

definitive, That’s that, justice prevailed

and the clever, but not-so-clever-as-he-thought

killer got his comeuppance.  I wanted a part

of that, the last word in the courtroom,

the period at the end of the sentence.

 

I knew how to translate the trees.

I could hear the dark secrets in the heart

of walnut, the contagious laughter

in a pack of Aspen, the sighs

of the white pine.  The buckeye

winked my way when no one

was looking.  Persimmon

puckered up for a kiss.

Time to open conversation.

 

The work takes time, takes patience.

I do it all by hand, no lathe.

I craft three pieces: a head,

a handle, a sound block.

They’re not the same, the gavel

banged by the student council president,

the one opening the New York Stock Exchange.

What gets handed to the Speaker of the House,

hammered when the house is sold at auction.

 

Each gavel speaks from the life

of its tree.  I do not silence it, lock it tight

in a foreign shape.  I release it:

say what you will. I give it a tongue.

Wood always speaks to wood:  guitar

to mandolin, chair leg to roof beam.

Library table to card catalog.

Hear the hum in the courtroom:

prisoner’s dock, jury box, gavel’s knock.

 

1/16/11

Collaboration #22 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded. Dedicated to our dear friend, the artist Thomas R. Aprile (1953 – 2010).

Mourning Tom

We end in joy.
–Theodore Roethke

I will do it with splashes
of ochre and orange, alizarin, cerulean
on a canvas as wide as his Huck Finn grin,
a riot of kiwi and turquoise storming
the cliché: desert hues at sunset,
Cape Cod wind and water, wood grain
and tree limb bending to
the sculptor’s hand.

I will do it by fusing matchsticks
with glue sticks to sharp sticks, to broken
sticks, to stockade sticks, by building
boxes, by boxing in the light
in bricks of glass that catch
the morning swimming by
like tropical fish in a tank.

I will not tear the world apart.

I will do it by taking the stage
where I can be absurd,
abstract, abnormal,
where I can be an abdomen,
an Abominable Snowman,
a man lost in snow,
a white sock.

I will do it by telling tales
of my Italian relatives,
Uncle Giovanni and Cousin Dominic,
though I have no Italian relatives,
have never been to Italy,
and do not drink wine.

I will come to love hummingbirds.

I will do it by cooking
with every spice on my shelf:
oregano, basil, cardamom and dill.
Cinnamon, mustard, chili pepper, sage.
I will make a poem for the palate,
a prayer for delight. I will mix
and mash and make more than enough.
I will feed everyone.

10/2/10

Guillermo Delgado's "For Tom", 2010, acrylic on wood, 8'' x 10"

Collaboration #21, Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #21, 2010, mixed media on paper, 22'' x 30"

 

At the Place Where

 

 

In the farmhouse, in the meadow, in the field

of stones,

 

the voices remain, regardless.

 

Did he hold his hands just so

when he spoke of how far he had come?

 

Did she lean into the conversation,

bent by sorrow?

 

And the boy, was he always watching

as the girls turned their heads?

 

Who heard the wisp of his voice

as he lowered his eyes?

 

When it happens with gunfire

or the steel shiver of the blade,

 

with sticks, with rocks, with kicks,

syllables shatter,

 

unanchor from language.

 

Listen:

 

there is chatter in the trees.

 

 

 

 

 
 9/9/10

Collaboration #20 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

Birthday Poem for my Mother, Gone Two Years

 

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
 The secret worlds are not regenerated

 --Yevgeny Yevtushenko

 

 

You would have said

you had no secret

worlds, that secrets

 

made for trouble,

something you

could do without.

 

What about those nights

you sat so late at the old Singer?

Where did the treadle

 

take you? To what world

did you travel when the tumor

snatched your mother?

 

What walks

did you recall

to hold her hand?

 

Those hopes you never

spoke, those regrets

catching you off guard,

 

again and again,

the doors you opened,

then closed, when

 

you were alone.

Now, trouble is

there’s no transport

 

to those sites,

the last ship

sailed from port

 

on your final breath.

Towns erased their coordinates.

Eighty-five years

 

flattened like a city

in a pop-up book,

lost like Atlantis.

3/27/10

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #20, 2010, mixed media on wood, 8'' x 10"

Collaboration #19 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

	 	 	 	 

What Lingers 

 

Sometimes a splash of brown

just to the side of my vision.

 

In the woods, near the compost,

grass matted flat.

 

At night, the click of claws

on the deck, a bark at the neighbor’s

where now there are only cats.

 

Something slides beneath my eyelids,

goes neon when I squeeze

tight for a better glimpse.

 

I might catch the odd floater

on the horizon.  I might think

I’ve just seen a snake.

 

There is an apple

on my kitchen counter

and somewhere my mother,

 

pairing knife in hand,

ready to slice it for a snack.

 

 

                       2/22/10

Collaboration #18 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

Type

 

                 Poetry is news that stays news.  --  Ezra Pound

 

 

On the phone, my father recalls

his time in the Charleston High School

print shop, the hours he spent

standing in a shaft of moted sunlight

plucking the s, the e, the t from the California Job Case,

sliding them into the composing stick.

 

I printed The Book Strap, he says, the school

newspaper.  You remember. I do remember,

twenty five years behind him, how each Friday

I was eager to see who’d been chosen

Student of the Week, what would be said

about the weekend game, which teacher

 

might reveal some amazing fact (she

drives a Mustang?).  I never thought about

who set the type, which boys in their rolled-up

sleeves and aprons, Industrial Arts boys,

brought words to the page, made sure

their was not there, united not untied.

 

I tell my father I’m calling late

because on Monday night I teach

the Book Arts class.  I’ve spent four

hours pointing out the gears

and shafts on the Chandler & Price,

how to treadle the press, how to choose

 

and distribute type:  Bembo, Baskerville,

Garamond, Helvetica, Goudy Old Style,

Spartan Bold, a poem on my tongue.

I was College Prep, in 4th year

Latin, not woodworking,

physics, not shop.

 

Even then I loved the printed page,

texture of rag and linen

more than Laws of Motion,

letters aligning toward the mystery

called word, words busy to tell it all.

My father says he liked the work,

 

the steady rhythm of a story coming up.

Three quarters of a century later, he’s proud

he always got out the news on time.

We say goodnight.  Before I go

to bed, I work to set the last

line of this poem.

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #18, 2010, mixed media on wc paper, 6'' x 12"

Collaboration #16 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

31st

 

The trees stand absolutely still,

leaves too lethargic to wave to anyone,

sunlight draped across the deck

 

as if it fainted there and can’t get up.

Feeders hang devoid of wing

and chirp; the wind

 

has sped ahead to more ferocious

months.  Poor August, caught between

the splash and squeal of summer,

 

the pregnant backpacks and obese gourds

of fall.  The month we plod through

on our way to virgin crayons

 

and intimate evening walks,

the subtle touch of someone’s hand.

It’s even burdened with this extra day.

 

No cars scuffing the blacktop.

No dogs protesting letters floated

through the slot.  Even the ginger cat

 

lies belly up in the uncut grass,

not an eyelid lifted as the vole

in his wooly coat chugs by.

 

                             9/1/09

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #16, 2010, mixed media on wc paper, 6'' x 12"

Collaboration #17 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #17, 2010, mixed media on wc paper, 6'' x 12"

 
How to Keep a Notebook

I have always carried the mountain
with me:  grandmother, Crede hill,
Pedernal, Petoskey stone.

I learn how to sing
these things alive, how the vibration
of pencil on paper strikes

a chord, how that sound
can be blue, its waves
tucking over you.

Because he had no word
for blue, Homer sang the sea
wine-dark.

Inside a wine-dark shaft
in the mountain, lips
are moving:

it may take months
to form a syllable,
for a word to swim the map
of the known world.
With words I begin to map
the mountain:  dirt, pulse, snow-light.

                                 1/21/10

Collaboration #15 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #15, 2009, mixed media on wc paper, 12'' x 9"

Learning to Pray


I was never good at it, even as a kid,

kneeling on the tile floor, elbows

on the pieced quilt, hands

folded, a collapsible steeple.


When I shut my eyes, I didn’t see

God, but silver bullets and horses

cresting the horizon of hills.

What I was told to say to God


about my soul, my blessings

felt muzzled by an inside voice,

one that wanted a fast new sled,

more of my grandmother’s dimes.


I knew my mother prayed daily

that my grandmother’s brain tumor

would shrivel to a raisin.  The grape

enlarged to cluster and she died.


I never got the inside voice

to hush, stop interrupting, making,

grocery lists, quit asking how to miracles

and seeking explanations.


It kept up such a racket:  argue,

measure, translate, deny.

Compose, regret. Then my mother

died.  Voices lost their sound.


Now I know silence as a kind

of prayer, a voice asking nothing,

tired of words, tired of lifting up

and tying down, tired


of grammar, syntax, left brain.

Prayer finds its own release,

the hand and breath of God

calling forth a chord.


It’s no struggle

tuning this instrument

I’ve never held, playing

a score I’ve never seen,


the song untethered from its notes:

acorn, feather, moon.

Collaboration #14 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

You Never Know

The wolves rise with the moonrise.

As your breathing grows heavier,

more rhythmic, the wolves emerge

from their underbed lairs.  They watch

you sleep.  They watch you dream

the things which make you howl

in the forest of nonsense. They hear

that howling. The fine hairs in their

ears waft like anemone in the sea’s

undulations.  The wolves leap onto

the quilt, patchwork of plowed fabric,

no woods for dens or caves.  They lie

down around you like dogs, not friend,

not foe.  The wolves wait for your next

move. You watch a raven circle, needle

of black stitching a wound in memory’s

sky.  There is something familiar about

the bird, something in its cry that cuts

open your heart like the surgeon’s blade.

Still, you float unharmed on the white

river of sheets.  But, the wolves smell

blood.  They glide toward you, fluid

and feral.  The raven departs, flies

through a hole you hadn’t seen.  It

widens, opens like a porthole, the iris

of a blue eye, cold as Arctic air. You

step in:  left paw first, then the right.

                                  7/20/09

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #14, 2009, mixed media on wc paper, 12'' x 9"