Two
poems from John Surowiecki's The Hat City after Men Stopped
Wearing Hats
followed
by a note on the author
Matin
No. 2
With
the morning's bird calls comes a woman's sobbing
and I'm left to eavesdrop, to reconcile sympathy with
helplessness and speculate on first causes. My guess:
loneliness,
no longer compromised, no longer comforted,
has finally found its voice. She stops when the chickadee
ends its two-note lament and the dove its hollow moan.
People
are leaving for work and she's either among them
or, like me, she's listening to the fragments of her song
in a mockingbird's revised parody of how a day begins.
The
Wisest Aunt, Telling the Saddest Tales
1
They give her lunch, prick her finger for sugar.
Her stories are usually about being unlucky:
a young soldier is given away by the steam
from his own urine and so on and so forth.
2
During the war it was easy to find piecework;
after the war, it rained the names of the dead.
On her place mat is a map of the world: Canada
is a pink peony pressed into the northern seas.
3
She was the last to hold her daughter's hand;
death entering her had the sting of nettles.
When she was eleven she saw a boy's head
crack like an egg and a gray yolk spill out.
4
A phoebe builds its nest under an awning,
sky-blue and cloud-white stripes like her robe.
Once, against regulations, her son brought
her strawberries: O how delicious they were.
5
In the TV room, Search for Tomorrow is on,
the volume too high, the color all wrong.
How can you search for something that's
certain to arrive and just as certain to pass?
©
John Surowiecki was born in Meriden, Connecticut
in 1943, and educated at the University of Connecticut, where
he obtained a BA and an MA in English. He lives in Amston, Connecticut,
and works as a freelance writer. He has a book of poems, Watching
Cartoons Before Attending a Funeral (White Pine Press, 2003),
three chapbooks, Caliban Poems (West Town Press, 2001),
Five-Hundred Widowers in a Field of Chamomile (Portlandia
Group, 2002) and Dennis Is Transformed into a Thrush
(White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 2004), and something he describes
as a "book/chapbook hybrid", Further Adventures
of My Nose: 24 Caprices (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005). His
poems have appeared in numerous journals, amongst them Alaska
Quarterly Review, Antietam Review, Briar Cliff
Review, Caduceus, Columbia, Cream City Review,
Folio, Freshwater, Gargoyle, GW Review,
Indiana Review, Kimera, Literary Review Web,
Mississippi Review, Nimrod, North American
Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rhino
and West Branch. In 2005, he was a recipient of a Fellowship
Grant for Poetry from the Connecticut Commission on Culture
and Tourism, Office of the Arts.
"Matin
No. 2" first appeared in Freshwater, and "The
Wisest Aunt, Telling the Saddest Tales" first appeared
in Caduceus.
Note:
The Hat City After Men Stopped Wearing Hats has just
been awarded the Washington Prize from The World Works [note
added July 10th 2006].
