{"id":264,"date":"2014-09-07T22:31:08","date_gmt":"2014-09-07T22:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=264"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:57:24","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:57:24","slug":"a-mans-life-gathering-the-one-great-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2014\/09\/07\/a-mans-life-gathering-the-one-great-song\/","title":{"rendered":"Gathering the One Great Song"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Three Poems by Samuel Green<\/h3>\n

Sam Green was living in the Seattle area in\u00a01978 and struggling to find his writing voice when poet Carolyn Forch\u00e9 asked him to consider this: \u201cIf you want to write a certain kind of poem, maybe you should consider living the sort of life from which such poems might come.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an amazingly astute statement that would not go away,\u201d Green, the former poet laureate from Washington, told a Wabash audience in February. \u00a0\u201cIt forced me to ask myself, \u2018What kinds of poems\u00a0do I really want to write, and what sort of life might bring them into being?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The answers Green found led him and his wife, Sally, to remote Waldron Island in the San Juan chain north of Puget Sound. There he found not only his poetic voice, but also a life among others and, as he writes, stories that \u201cgather as tiny birds\/add themselves one & one to the flock, their small throats\u00a0gathering the One\/Great Song that is more than\u00a0themselves alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a small community, what happens to people matters to you in very immediate ways,\u201d says Green, whose home on the island is a log house he and Sally built with their own hands. \u201cYou learn to live with people you don\u2019t like, you learn that not liking\u00a0someone is not an excuse for not being with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had to live with people as they are, not the way\u00a0I wanted them to be, which was a great gift for me:\u00a0I had to change myself because I couldn\u2019t change other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some poems from this man’s life as a son, a husband, and a father:<\/em><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
On Board the Sea Lassie, Summer, 1944<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I can bring back the boat, a purse seiner
\nbuilt in the 20s, white paint flaking
\nfrom her rails. She has made her set
\n& swings like a clapper against
\nthe enormous bell of Alaskan sky.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

I can bring back the gulls floating
\nlike flakes of dirty snow sternward,
\nthe smell of leaked diesel, the sound
\nof the hull scraped with the weight
\nof tarred cotton & fish.<\/p>\n

I can bring back the crew, & I do,
\na small group of mostly older men with the ghosts
\nof their lives in their mouths, the tall Swede
\nstill sweating out last night\u2019s whiskey. They smell
\nof tobacco smoked or chewed, the sour stench
\nof unbathed bodies, coffee, and too much grease
\nin their food.<\/p>\n

My father is easy: there are pictures of him then
\nat seventeen, handsome, high boots & rubber
\napron, black-billed hat tipped back, bare arms
\nas yet without tattoos. Because he is who he is
\nhe is watching the coastline for bears
\non the beach. Because he is already
\nwho he will become, he is also doing his job
\nbraced against spray & pitch,
\nthough not neatly enough for his father.<\/p>\n

Having brought them here, there is still
\nnothing I can do about my grandfather\u2019s hands,
\nthose knuckles hard as barnacles slamming
\ninto my father\u2019s face, knocking him down
\n& onto the hatch cover, again
\n& again, because he keeps getting up,
\ntoo young & strong & full of pride
\nto simply stay hunched on the deck.<\/p>\n

I bring my father back because I want
\nto tell that boy he will not beat
\nhis own two sons, & they will not
\nbeat theirs, to tell him though he\u2019ll mourn
\nthe fact he cannot mourn his father\u2019s death,<\/div>\n
I know I\u2019ll weep for his. But the boy can\u2019t hear me.
\nHe has become an old man in whom pain
\nhas lived like a flapping salmon in his ruined back
\nhis whole life long. I could tell him, & try
\nwhenever I visit. But that\u2019s not the same thing, is it?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

At the Pond\u2019s Edge<\/strong><\/p>\n

I come to her the way I\u2019d come
\nto a pond\u2019s edge in October dusk
\nso as not to frighten the wood ducks.<\/p>\n

My hands move on her flank like a drake
\ndrifting across a pond\u2019s surface
\nor the slow caress of mist at dawn<\/p>\n

hanging now on, now above the still water.
\nDusk or dawn, a man can be gentle,
\nalways & all ways gentle,<\/p>\n

& still be a man, her slow teaching
\nover long years, the classroom her body,
\nnearly a quarter of a century now,<\/p>\n

no longer the body\u2019s daily insistence,
\nthe hard urgings that caused me once to
\nfear my own desire. We have slid<\/p>\n

into middle age with sweet understanding,
\nthe pleasure of the long familiar,
\na tenderness that still<\/p>\n

explodes into sudden wings on the water,
\ncatching us both by surprise.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
Children, Waking<\/strong><\/div>\n

\u2014for Laura Walker<\/em><\/p>\n

In the long night, when our sons wake
\n& their cries come
\nthrough our thin sleep so we rise then
\nfrom our love\u2019s side
\n& we move off through the held breath
\nof the still house
\nwhere we lift them from their wet beds
\njust to hold them
\nthrough the strained dark with their warm weight
\nin our curled arms,
\nif we walk them, or we rock them,
\nthrough our mouths come
\nall the soft songs from our own past,
\nwhether sleep songs
\nor the sweet hums that propel them
\ntoward our best hopes,
\nthough the truth is that we can\u2019t take
\neither sickness
\nor their grief-hurts into our selves,
\nthough we wish to
\n& we try to, all we can do
\nis to soothe them
\nthrough the worst time, for it\u2019s our flesh
\nheld in our flesh
\n& it won\u2019t stop when they leave us
\nthough they can\u2019t know
\nthat we still sing through the house walls
\nwhen the stars call
\ntill our fears still & the heart sleeps
\nin the long will that the night keeps.<\/p>\n

These poems are from\u00a0<\/em>The Grace of Necessity, \u00a0Carnegie-Mellon University Press, (2008), winner \u00a0of the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. Reprinted with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three Poems by Samuel Green Sam Green was living in the Seattle area in\u00a01978 and struggling to find his writing voice when poet Carolyn Forch\u00e9 asked him to consider this: \u201cIf you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":287,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-mans-life"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2014\/09\/greenlores.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/283"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}