Authors: Angela Sorby
The Sleeve Waves
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The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry
The University of Wisconsin Press
The Sleeve Waves
A
NGELA
S
ORBY
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The University of Wisconsin Press
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Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright © 2014
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sorby, Angela, author.
[Poems. Selections]
The sleeve waves / Angela Sorby.
      pages    cm â (The Felix Pollak prize in poetry)
ISBN 978-0-299-29964-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) â ISBN 978-0-299-29963-7 (e-book)
I. Title. II. Series: Felix Pollak prize in poetry (Series).
PS3619.O73A6Â Â Â Â 2014
811'.6âdc23
                                      2013027994
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In memory of Professor Nelson Bentley, 1918â90
Oaks and garrets lit the falling dusk.
Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening
Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment
Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living
Â
Heartfelt alphabetical-order thanks to those who provided collegial, familial, moral, and/or material support during the writing of this book: Vic and Jan Anderson, Faith Barrett, Jenny Benjamin, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, Matthew Cosby, the Edenfred Foundation, the Fulbright Scholar Program, C.J. Hribal, Catherine Hubbard, Jesse Lee Kercheval, David Kirby, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Maureen McLane, Monica Maniaci, Carla Marolt, Sheila McMahon (and everyone at UW Press), Naomi Shihab Nye, Liana Odrcic, Kris Ratcliffe (and all of my colleagues at Marquette University), Chris Roth, Francesca Roth, Ivan Roth, Jonah Roth, Melissa Schoeffel, Janet and Evan Sorby, Sarah Wadsworth, Ron Wallace, Larry Watson, and Adrianne Wojcik.
Thanks to the editors of the following journals, where versions of some of these poems first appeared:
Babel Fruit
(“Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living”)
Barrow Street
(“Paradise, Wisconsin”)
Jacket
(“The Suburban Mysteries”)
Massachusetts Review
(“Thrifting”)
North American Review
(“Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening”)
Poets for Living Waters
(“Spill”)
Prairie Schooner
(“Sivka-Burka,” “Interstate,” “Notes from a Northern State,” “A Is for Air”)
Superstition Review
(“Ink,” A Walk across the Ice,” “Golden Spike”)
Verse Wisconsin
(“Kochanski's, Saturday Night,” “Petition,” in a different form)
Zone 3
(“Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment,” “Fallout”)
The line on the dedication page is taken from “Villanelle,” by Nelson Bentley.
I
A wave is a disturbance that moves through a medium.
âR
OBERT
L. W
EBER
,
Physics for Science and Engineering
Changsa, 2011
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Hunanese babies
wear tiger slippers
to ward off evil,
though of course they're stronger
than their tiger-protectors,
and more rigorous,
and blunter,
and they know how to roar. Roaring's key:
it drowns out the philosophers
who drag the river
for texts
but miss
what's hidden deep
in baskets tied to the backs
of women selling fish
or sweeping streets:
babies who nap all day,
then open their eyes at night.
Living speakers can't remember
what it's like to be wordless,
if it's dull, divine, or both,
like the hundred-odd miniature
Buddhas stuffed
into one cave at Nanputuo.
The monk who wipes them with a rag
survived two famines
and a half-hanging
during the Cultural Revolution,
which thinned his hair
and did something to his ears:
now when the small gods wake in their velvety
toes and soles, he listens.
Party at the beach,
but J refuses to go
because he can't swim.
11 years old. All day
I watch his cuteness
break open and fall away.
He finds Etta James
on YouTube and says,
“When I'm sad, only sad
songs make me better.”
Already a needle
in his heart knows
how to find the chords
for all he's missing:
direct sunlight, easy listening.
Already the wax
cylinder's spinning
its old technology of longing,
and I recognize the boys I knew
in the '80s and '90s,
who dragged me to Fallout Records
so they could “look for something.”
What? It has no name, this sadness
that feels like happiness.
The psychic oboist charges
ten bucks per fortune.
He lodges above Clarke's Shoes
in Marinette, Wisconsin.
He says he doesn't know
how he sees what he sees.
He calls himself a
cleanser
,
a
healer
âof widows, of adoptees.
On slow days he sometimes
pauses between futures
long enough to play
Tomaso Albinoni's Opus 7,
blowing its pure notes virtuously,
as if they could filter
trash from the Menominee River,
but his oboe knows betterâ
it floats downstream keening.
Music is beauty consuming
itself. It is loss writ large,
it is an empty factory,
it is night come to clog
the Midwestern heart of the nation,
where the Green Bay Packers
tense and disperse
in random formations.
The guy at the piano dump
pitches pianos, using a huge
claw to grabâliftârelease.
Wippens, hammers, and jacks
scatter. A few wires snap,
and the rest snarl into silence,
the same silence
  that snarls girls
who refuse to practice scales,
who sit hunched on the bench
reading
Secret of the Old Clock
while the timer, set to one hour,
ticks backward.
You'll regret this
,
warn their mothers,
but the girls think the future
is in speeding convertibles,
like Nancy Drew's roadster,
or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:
top up, top down, wheels retracted,
wings out, over the cliff into the ocean,
and boomâit's a boat.
              They sense
what the dump guy knows:
to draw near the rim of the piano
pit is to witness
the body turn,
the hinge convert,
which is why the dump guy chains
a big ring of keys
outside his pocket.
Most open known doors, but a few,
he's not sure what they're for.
Those are his favorites.
Honeyboy Edwards,
onstage at 93,
could be my Grandpa Harold's twin brother,
which makes no sense
since one's a live blues singer
and one's a dead Swedish American
asphalt worker,
but Grandpa, cool and silky
into his 90s,
dressed urban smooth,
and if a car hood was open,
no matter whose car,
he stuck his head in,
partly to suss out the engine,
and partly to spark a long
long conversation.
Can loud plaids cross the color line?
Can certain polyesters travel
beyond our peculiar national evil?
God knows nothing's simple,
but if one shirt could pass
between two strangers,
one living, one dead,
one black, one white,
Honeyboy Edwards is sporting
that shirt tonight. Its double-
knit gleams, so slick,
so inorganic,
it will outlast our muscle memory
of the twentieth centuryâ
how it felt to sweat
under that fabric,
how plastered
against the skin a shirt
could turn timeless.
Unwrinkled. Ecstatic.
One more going-away
bash for a friend,
Afghanistan-bound, and the last thing
he wants is to hear some
peacenik strum. So up I shut,
and stick to seltzer,
as snowflakes fall with neutral
nonchalance
outside the bar. No windows.
Snow's too soft to cut
the chill, too gentle to kill
the one-armed drunk guy's engine.
Off he roars.
Oh, Lord.
To say the whole army
is stupid and wrong
is stupid and wrong, surely.
Walt Whitman thought he could heal
amputees with poetry. All I know
is when to leave a party.
The whole East Coast is buried
in weather we manufactured
indirectly: the carbon-emissions unconscious.
How curious, this sameness.