| From West by Northwest.org Arts & Letters Three Poems of David Mason By David Mason May 25, 2003
Winter, 1963 As my father turned the car into the drive and we were home from our rare trip to church, a man's voice speaking from the radio caused us to linger there, engine running. Just so, the voice with its calm cadences lingered by woods where snow fell downily. Though only eight, I thought I understood the words to fit our snowless January, and that the man, whose name was Robert Frost (like rime I saw that morning on the lawn), had died in Boston, which was far away. Who knows where I went next, with all the woods about the house to play in, but I recall the chilling dullness of the winter sky and firs so still I almost heard them breathing. I thought it wasn't Jack, but Robert, Frost, who made them live in such a cold repose. Within two weeks another poet died, her head in a cold gas oven. No poem of hers was broadcast to my family. Years would pass before I learned her name. The old man in his woods, the young mother dying with two children near, such vanity and madness framed the choices both had made- the way he stuck it out, the way she lost it. I've tried to cast my lot with that old man, but something in her fate tugs at me too. She can't have known the cause celebre she'd be, wanting to leave the world for leaving her. The world goes on despite us and our poems, snow falling in woods, or not falling, lights coming on in houses, lights going out, but I feel grateful that my father stopped the car that January day, his head almost bowed as he left the radio on. -David Mason Mise En Scene In king crab season, the cannery ship Trembled at anchor, its great boilers steaming. The crew inside were soaked under raingear, Working the lines, extracting flesh from shells With jets of water gushing into flumes. I worked the crab boats tied along the hull, Long shifts in the holds, tossing like creatures Two at a time in the lowered mesh bags. And when we'd cleared a hold and hosed it down, A toke or cigarette took up the slack. Above us they went on killing in thousands. Guys we called butchers plunged their chain-mailed chests Down on the blades, breaking crab across them– Guts and backs in the grinders, claws and legs Packed frozen for the Lower 48. We waited for the silence between killings, When mesh was full of nothing but the sky, To elevate our heads above a hatch And watch the rain slant down through masts and nets. Beyond were hump-backed islands under clouds, As if a pod of whales, now settled in To watch the people in their theatre, Were spellbound to rock and heather by the scene. And none of us who worked there, none of our dreams, Could break the spell and bring them back to life. -David Mason Swimmers on the Shore Whidbey Island Like half a filial circus act splashing the Y pool shallow end, I swam about my father, who could stand. And when I climbed, an acrobat, diving from his muscled shoulders, they seemed as solid as two boulders. Now I can hold his shrunken frame in my arm's compass. We're together on a park bench in lingering summer weather before I make the long drive home. But halfway through some story, speech lies suddenly beyond his reach. I see him cast for words, and fail. Though talking never came with ease, it is as if my father's memories dissolve in a cedar-darkened pool, while I no longer am aware which of us goes fishing there. Has he begun the long swim out toward silence that we all half-dread? I hug my father's shoulders, lean my head closer to his, yet I cannot, from his unfinished sentences, quite fathom where or whom he is. I want to stay. The day is warm, the salt breeze blows across the Sound long plaintive cries of seagulls sailing down to hover over churning foam there in the docking ferry's wake. I want to stay for my own sake, holding the man who once held me until I dove and splashed about. He gives my hand a squeeze. There is no doubt, despite his loss of memory, and though the words could not be found, it's I who have begun to drown. -David Mason David Masons poems appear regularly in The American Scholar, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review ,The Georgia Review, Verse and many other magazines and journals. His book of narrative poetry, The Buried Houses, co-won the the 1991 Nichols Roerich Prize. To read more of David Mason's work online visit The Buried Houses Revisted: Two Poems of David Mason at West By Northwest.org. © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org |
