Night Garden, poetry by David Stankiewicz

Night Garden poetry

David Stankiewicz

published by

Deerbrook Editions

P.O. Box 542

Cumberland, ME 04021

www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions

first edition

© 2024 by David Stankiewicz

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 979-8-9865052-9-9

Book design by Jeffrey Haste

To Lucy & Renna

that you remember the colors are never sleeping

Two things cannot be reduced to any rationalizing: time and beauty. One must begin from them.

—Simone Weil

Night Garden (mixed media on paper, 2017)

The colors are never sleeping. It is not as you fear.

If you look you will see them tangled in dreams.

The blue bars of night hold nothing back.

The warmth and the fragrance, interwoven humus and sky.

Still your true home or had you forgotten those nights together in paradise before these dry days of exile?

No matter. Greener even and lusher than desire

the garden grows in darkness. It grows! The moon

the tallest blossom. Rest easy tonight.

So little depends on you.

I waited on the outskirts of nettles and diesel smoke, stray billboards and bored pigeons, unacknowledged, unacknowledging my few fellows, each of us absorbed in our solitary contemplations as if only great concentration (like that prescribed by the anonymous author in The Cloud of Unknowing) could call forth the creaky, cranky tram that would carry us, heavy as it was, all the way to the bustling heart of the Old Town, obedient to an unseen power it devoured greedily, scattering sparks like generous crumbs, like words.

Robert Henri: Rocks and Sea (oil on canvas, 1911)

Thick with it: green, primordial

Mineral rich, electric

The sea thick with it: the surge of passion (which is suffering), creation, desire Even the saltspray windslap air igneous, barometric

The way the painter’s brush, the colors surged over this canvas proclaims

the very ledge beneath our feet, dark and solid seeming now (though ready to gash) once flowed, will flow again

Not a safe spot for a swim, I’m afraid— water too muscular, shoreline too rocky, too risky

Yet we’re in it already love this bracing brine thick and teeming this bloodthrob this gush

I don’t know now what I was chasing. Your image, yes. A vision you wore for me. The same that I’ve been seeking In song all these years. But I am not the songs As you are not your beauty. A song is held only In the singing—except for those unearthly moments when, As wildfire once kindled takes and holds entire trees In its transforming embrace, the song sings us. Yes, I loved you as you were (as far as in The dazzle of that burning I could see you). And I loved you as you seemed and seem to me still: A vision, a melody. How could I let you go?

Though there is no human warmth there, no colors, No dawn, and I went armed only with my longing. No beach roses blooming as where we used to sit together Looking out onto the islands and the bay aflame With the miraculous sunlight of an ordinary day. Ashes. Ashes and shadows. Was Hades really moved? Or was it so only in my lonely mind? Most days in my despair I think it must have been Delusion. Since, as everybody told me would happen, As everyone else seemed to know, when I turned to gaze on you At last again in life, there was no one. But what Do they know? They only hear my minor key. They Can’t see that you are the song I can never unsing. You are the song that is singing me still. Eurydice! For you alone I will teach it to the mockingbirds Among the roses by our bench overlooking the sea.

Coffee, pen, and notebook this early morning

Where he sits, looking down Main toward The frozen estuary. One degree above zero.

The rising sun has found three second story windows

In the old brick mill building across the street

In which to reflect for him its distant blinding fire.

Someone he may never see again sleeps or is stirring

Just a few blocks away somewhere off to his right

While he opens a book of poems he would never Have found without her and reads

“In the ruined lodges of my body is a garden

With a dove high in a moringa—

She dies longing and melts in desire for what Wrecked her, which is what wrecked me.”

Meanwhile another mystic poet, John Coltrane, Plays on the café’s sound system, becomes that dove and Is this what it all comes back to? Love and longing

And these strange constellations

Of words and images, memories and names

The heart gathers around itself as it pauses And goes on stumbling into song.

Reading the Psalms on a Rooftop, Port-Au-Prince, Dawn

Voices rise with the light in praise of, in praise. Roosters, goats, morning’s peddlers calling all along the street. Songs of ascent, no time for shades of gray: sky already blue, yellow sun, and red the blood in every living singer.

River

The one river of many names— Lethe and Mnemosyne— The Sea itself and Time—River That branched forth from Eden— The waters of Babylon where We sat down and wept— Mississippi, Jordan, and Nile— Snake Brook that ran through My childhood’s backyard

In which I caught native trout Somehow holding on in the suburbs— Battenkill, Kennebec, Grand Lake Stream— River of the water of life

Proceeding from the throne of God (Ezekiel 47 and Revelation 22).

Cribstone Bridge

The bridge to the island of my childhood enchantment is fashioned of stone’s repose.

Without mortar or cable, concrete or steel, without any artless distress it holds open its course, its singular way, each chosen slab in its place—

granite laid on granite laid on bedrock and ledge, a rhythm of chambered space.

On his book’s first page Augustine sighed, O Lord our hearts are restless until they rest in You.

As the stones of the bridge rest like the words of a poem while the tides flow freely through.

Uncle Bob

Uncle Bob wasn’t really my uncle. But once a year on our trip to the island we’d load tackle and lunch in his truck, head down to the landing and a rented boat, and motor out into the morning. A minister by profession, a husband, a father, to me he was a fisherman—his magic box filled with diamond jigs and mackerel rigs, diving plugs for the big ones, a compartment reserved for red hot

atomic fireballs, another for cheap cigars. And what comes back to me here are his faded t-shirts and holey cut-offs, paint-splotched canvas sneakers, the long visor of his cap, his grizzly beard, the gilt of salt and fish scales on the rod and reel he hands up to me. But mostly, in these anxious days, though he’s gone, and there’s gray in my own stubble, precisely the way, once we clear lobster pots and ledge, he eases the outboard down, sits back, cracks a beer, relaxed, yet ready to roar out “hit! O hit!” when the moment strikes and strike back. His bright wave-slap relish for the day as we let out our long lines— the rhythm and sweep of the sea all around us— hoping for mackerel or blues.

Cleaning the Catch

At the weathered table pushed up against the cottage’s shady face the fisherman bows before the morning’s mackerel

stolen from the sea. The blade obeys his deft intentions: heads and tails clean off, then the slice to the belly to tear out

the once vitals, the dead revised for new life. An altar smeared— fish scales and entrails, blood and bone— no tidy sacrifice on earth.

The last one done, hose off the table, hose off the knife, give each cleaned fish a good rinse. I carry them into the kitchen while he trudges down to the ledge road where, with a broad swing of the bucket, he spreads what remains—a sower seeding a riot of gulls.

22 A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Fisherman

Lying still on the dock, his face so close to the surface he looks right through his own reflection, the boy drops bits of broken bread I can still see descending, disintegrating down the years.

Those bluegills and pumpkinseeds, drawn into his small circle of influence, were eager as he in their hunger yet wary, elusive if you twitched the net too soon or otherwise troubled the waters. Oh but he was clever, attentive to that sudden, bidden moment when mastery and luck marry in the thrust to raise the bright, throbbing thing up from murk and mystery, straight up into air.

i.

In the granite light a faint footpath leads up a slope then down among the lowering trees to the untried side of a deeper, plunging run.

All afternoon in the leaden water— no fish, cold and numb— the strike, when it comes, is a revelation, sudden animation, spark before dark.

ii.

Knock and the door shall be opened

the river’s door whether or not you get what you came for whether or not the hook holds.

Sun going down, light on the islands across the shipping channel, somehow slanting under steelgray cloudsheaf, illuminates a line of white houses, some other lives in a lit purple strip studded with diamonds and gold.

As in a vesper cathedral (darkening blueblack sea and sky) an illuminated line of a medieval manuscript, gold-leafed, lit anew by candlelight as incense smolders and the lector begins to intone.

The time, ice-fishing in Minnesota, My buddy left to go pick up His kid—said he’d return in twenty— He didn’t, and I sat there alone In the borrowed shanty as Daylight seeped back under the ice And the temperature followed it down until I was trembling in darkness, Half a mile from any shore, listening To the awakening lake booming and yawping Its nocturnal, infernal stirring Below.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which these poems have been previously published:

ArtWord 2019, Portland Museum of Art: Ezra Pound, Poet

ArtWord 2021, Portland Museum of Art: Robert Henri: Rocks and Sea

The Aurorean: Unsettled; thirty-nine; Listening to John Coltrane with My Baby Daughter; The Words of a Letter

Big Sky Journal: Herds, Yellowstone

The Café Review: Mr. K; Midnight in the E.R.; Inherit; Mr. Cogito’s Despair; Eurydice in the Park

Innisfree: Cribstone Bridge; Outskirts (1)

The Lewiston Sun Journal: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fisherman

Maine Arts Journal: David Driskell: Night Garden

The Maine Sunday Telegram: Fathers and Sons; Knock (October Again)

“Poems from Here” on Maine Public Radio: Off Paxil I Revisit a Box of Old Photos and Letters

Poetry East: Tram; This Morning in the Underworld; Your Poems

“Port City Poets: an anthology of poems from Portland Maine”: View from a Train at Christmastime

Reading Ibn ‘Arabi in Biddeford, Maine contains a quote from the collection, “Bewildered,” translated by Michael A. Sells.

Cello contains a quote from “The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,” translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Thanks, first of all, to my parents and family, especially my mom, Jane Stankiewicz, who has given me a lifetime of unconditional love, and my dad, Richard Stankiewicz, who learned from his dad (who loved to read but never learned to write more than his own name) that books and writers deserve our respect.

Thank you to Jeff Haste at Deerbrook Editions for believing in this book and for devoting such careful attention in bringing it to print.

Thanks to Jefferson Navicky for generous and nourishing literary (and otherwise) camaraderie.

And to the other “poetry dude,” Mike Bove, for being, not only an encouraging fellow poet, but a great friend.

Thanks to the tremendously accomplished poets who are teachers, supporters, and friends, especially Baron Wormser, Betsy Sholl, and Ted Deppe.

Special thanks to Kevin Sweeney—the greatest department chair in the history of English departments. I could never repay all the wise counsel, literary and professional encouragement, friendship, and top-notch banter.

Thanks to my longtime close friends who believed in me as a poet from the beginning, especially Tim Rendall, Aaron Lecklider, and Pilar Perez Serrano.

Thanks, finally, to my wife, Sarrah Stankiewicz, for these irreplaceable years of loving companionship and support. And for giving us Renna and Lucy—the most wonderful daughters a man could wish for.

And, first and last, to the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars