This week's Poet of the People is Larry Rhu. I think I first met Larry when Curtis Derrick hosted a poetry workshop and Tim Conroy introduced us. Larry and I cohost Simple Gifts and I cherish sitting in his backyard garden to discuss literature and Boston Celtic basketball. He is a generous and humble friend and I am honored to be in his orbit.
Lawrence Rhu is the Todd Professor of the Italian Renaissance, emeritus, at the University of South Carolina. He has published books and essays about the American and European Renaissances and edited Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. His poems have appeared in Poetry, North Dakota Quarterly, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Poetry Society of South Carolina Yearbook, Pinesong, Fall Lines, One, Main Street Rag, Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, Jogos Florais, Forma de Vida, and other journals. They have won awards from the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans.
Instead of a Letter
Ever since your scary diagnosis, Jerry,
your Kawasaki Ninja’s helping us
document nostalgia’s hits or misses:
Fats Domino at El Casino Ballroom
in downtown Tucson, Oracle Union Church
beyond the Catalinas. Grandfather Ford—
an old Ford, he’d say, but still serviceable—
supplied its pulpit with clear messages
he shared implicitly (or I divined)
between approach shots on the practice range
when he taught me to golf during junior high
and we began our easy-going exchanges.
Nothing oracular about that town
except the name and my experience
of friendship with a kindred soul whose calling
required some explanation of its quiet
moments, like golf, when others take their turn.
Chemo and radiation are still shrinking
your tumor while our sunset dialogues
help reconstruct our common histories
with anecdotes and our imaginations
in FaceTime calls from two time zones away.
Bits and pieces patched together come
to represent whatever meant the world
to me and you, my father’s other son
in spirit and my mother’s other student.
Grammar and medicine, their offerings,
helped you avoid English X at U of A
and then through medical school at UNM.
Transcendental brother, Anglo caballero,
biker, physician, my dear friend, your Ninja
and horses call to mind a life of travel:
happy trails, lonesome roads, and our reunions
in Rio Hondo, New Orleans, Missoula,
Boston, Prescott—even Italy,
when I was teaching high school there in Rome.
In just three months you’ve biked eight thousand miles
in perfect weather on backroads and blue
highways, inspired by sunlight and fresh air.
Has anyone lived long enough to be
“almost a native,” as some born elsewhere
used to say after many years in Tucson?
May we not homestead in creation, staking
our claims, not taking what’s given for granted,
settling in some ever nearer region?
Benefits of Doubt
For D. T. S.
No inference made, no implication either—
I did not infer what you did not imply,
but thanks. I appreciate your concern.
Ghosts haunt words with shades of meaning
difficult to dispel. Slips and lapses
make us marvel at the secret life
of language in conversation with itself.
Perfect strangers intrude upon the best
intentions, foiling our plans. Still, we’re thrilled
to entertain felicities unaware.
It all depends upon our being being
attuned. So, drop your guard. Speak your mind.
Learn what you mean in sync with those awaiting
news of you and yours. I’ll listen up. Online
or off, count on my friendship as a reader.
Arborist
Two trees or maybe three I knew for sure:
the fig and sycamore…but now I can’t
recall the third. The Church of Rome inspired
my confidence about the first—fig leaves
cover places Michelangelo
and Donatello felt the shepherd boy
need not blush to leave exposed. A protest
rallied us to save the sycamores
along the Charles River by Mem Drive.
But I knew cacti of my desert boyhood
well before hope of a better school stole me
away from home to greener climes with all
four seasons, ice and snow, and trees Thoreau
once learned by heart alone. The orchard keeper,
my beloved, leads me now through arboretums
around the world. Unlike Walden’s chronicler,
even in dark woods, we wander as a pair.
Released from rigors of the father tongue,
which he so harped upon, the fallen world’s
transformed into a commonwealth we share.
Memento
No reason for the trip but Sunday free
we headed toward the North Shore on Route 1
— itself a brilliant stretch of salesmanship
where concrete cattle graze invitingly
on green cement before a steakhouse door,
one of many bright commercial fancies
up and down the strip.
We toured the infamous Witch House in Salem
where pre-trial interviews were held before
witchcraft and wizardry scared slaughter out.
There must be reasons why the Lord would fail them.
Soon, a host of innocents told why.
Our high school guide recited all the facts
and ushered us about.
Then, on to Marblehead where several hills
are strewn with brayed slate gravestones by a pond
the locals fish on weekends when they’re free.
Hourglasses, death’s heads, cross-bones are the frills
that trim the verses written for the dead.
We paused and read their prayers so quaintly rhymed
and lost to history.
May her virtues take her where they should
graven on the slate of Mary by her John
invoked the angels she’d soon bide among
To such as she I’m sure that death is good.
We moved from stone to stone like other tourists
till evening took the light and brought a chill
that made us move along.
Going back on the same route we came by
we passed a dinosaur at a putt-putt course,
a lowering hazard on the thirteenth hole.
The traffic slowed. A siren gave a sigh
and blinked upon a wreck beside the road.
Three bodies, under cover, lined the pavement.
The cars slowed to a roll.
Streetcar through Parnassus
Don’t you think somebody ought to pray for them? - How six-year-old Ruby Bridges explained her prayers for protesters against school desegregation
From Lee Circle to the Garden District
nine muses cross the tracks,
divinities of total recall
once upon a time.
From history to astronomy
along St. Charles Avenue
the streetcar bumps and grinds
from Clio to Urania, the goddess
Milton summoned puritanically
insisting on a Christian meaning
for her pagan name. No such
precise distinction here obtains.
That culture clash sounds academic,
the harmonizing rhetoric antique.
The Heavenly Muse now names
some lapsed Presbyterian
daughter of faded Memory.
Yet, in the roundabout, Lee’s empty place
on the Olympian column top
prompts Clio to review her latest draft
—its epic or tragic plot—
with Calliope and Melpomene.
That vacancy makes room
for hope to change the shape of time
imposed by powers that be—
or were and wished to stay.
Cycling between the Odd Fellows’ Rest
and the Archdiocesan Cemetery,
beyond the neutral ground,
I turn toward Metairie and soon discern,
from beneath the Interstate,
a marble soldier
ready to read the roll of casualties,
the toll his counterparts memorialize
on a thousand small-town New England greens.
Whatever local muse prompts song,
as I recall, no run of Boston streets
bears gaudy classical names
if you don’t count the Marathon.
There’s no Mardi Gras with krewes,
like Bacchus or Endymion
or Comus’s raucous gang
routed in that Puritan’s court masque.
Yet who’s to say they won’t be coming back?
Here or there, in Cambridge or Fenway Park,
or on the banquette where first graders once
braved mobs with Federal Marshals,
walking to school and hoping
against hope for a fresh start.