Read The Sleeve Waves Online

Authors: Angela Sorby

The Sleeve Waves

 

 

The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry

The University of Wisconsin Press

The Sleeve Waves

A
NGELA
S
ORBY

 

The University of Wisconsin Press

1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

uwpress.wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street

London WC2E 8LU, England

eurospanbookstore.com

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

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sorby, Angela, author.

[Poems. Selections]

The sleeve waves / Angela Sorby.

      pages    cm — (The Felix Pollak prize in poetry)

ISBN 978-0-299-29964-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-299-29963-7 (e-book)

I. Title. II. Series: Felix Pollak prize in poetry (Series).

PS3619.O73A6    2014

811'.6—dc23

                                      2013027994

 

 

In memory of Professor Nelson Bentley, 1918–90

Oaks and garrets lit the falling dusk.

Contents

Acknowledgments

I

Night Vision

Fallout

What Might Happen Might Not

Hard Bop

The Knit

Kochanski's, Saturday Night

Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening

The Disappearances

Trance Music

Spill

Golden Spike

Close Shave

The Ghost of Meter

Petition

Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment

Boom Town

Blood Relative

Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living

End of the Century

Nonsense

Flatland

Double Neighbor

Errand

Interstate

The Obstruction

Duct Tape

II

Pastoral

III

Thrifting

Paradise, Wisconsin

A Is for Air

Duck/Rabbit

Notes from a Northern State

A Walk across the Ice

The Thorne Rooms

Just Looking

Blush

Thirst

Watson and the Shark

The Schoolteachers

Ink

Doppelzüngig

Fall Forward, Spring Back

Fat

Sacred Grove

Go-Between

Sofia's Stove

The Second Daguerreotype

Epistle

The Suburban Mysteries

The Sleeve Waves

Sivka-Burka

Acknowledgments

 

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.

The Sleeve Waves
I

A wave is a disturbance that moves through a medium.

—R
OBERT
L. W
EBER
,
Physics for Science and Engineering

Night Vision

Changsa, 2011

 

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.

Fallout

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.

What Might Happen Might Not

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
—of 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 better—

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.

Hard Bop

The guy at the piano dump

pitches pianos, using a huge

claw to grab—lift—release.

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 boom—it'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.

The Knit

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 century—

how it felt to sweat

under that fabric,

how plastered

against the skin a shirt

could turn timeless.

Unwrinkled. Ecstatic.

Kochanski's, Saturday Night

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.

Stopping at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on a Snowy Evening

The whole East Coast is buried

in weather we manufactured

indirectly: the carbon-emissions unconscious.

How curious, this sameness.

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