Soon After Rain Read online

  Books by James Hoggard

  POETRY

  Eyesigns

  The Shaper Poems

  Two Gulls, One Hawk

  Breaking An Indelicate Statue

  Medea In Taos

  Rain In A Sunlit Sky

  Wearing The River

  Triangles of Light

  Soon After Rain

  PROSE

  Trotter Ross

  Elevator Man

  Riding The Wind & Other Tales

  Patterns of Illusion

  The Mayor’s Daughter

  The Devil’s Fingers & Other Personal Essays

  TRANSLATION

  The Art of Dying, poems by Oscar Hahn

  Love Breaks, poems by Oscar Hahn

  Chronicle Of My Worst Years, poems by Tino Villanueva

  Alone Against The Sea, poems by Raúl Mesa

  Splintered Silences, poems by Greta de León

  Stolen Verses & Other Poems by Oscar Hahn

  Ashes In Love, poems by Oscar Hahn

  Soon After Rain © 2015 by James Hoggard

  Cover photograph © 2013 by Bill Wright: Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, Arizona. Used by permission.

  ISBN: 978-1-60940-428-4 (paperback original)

  E-books:

  ePub: 978-1-60940-429-1

  Mobipocket/Kindle: 978-1-60940-430-7

  Library PDF: 978-1-60940-431-4

  Wings Press

  627 E. Guenther

  San Antonio, Texas 78210

  Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805

  On-line catalogue and ordering:

  www.wingspress.com

  Wings Press books are distributed to the trade by

  Independent Publishers Group

  www.ipgbook.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hoggard, James.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Soon after rain : new poems / James Hoggard.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-60940-428-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-429-1 (epub ebook : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-430-7 (kindle-mobipocket ebook : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-431-4 (library pdf ebook : alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3558.O34752A6 2015

  811’.54--dc23

  2014039298

  for Lynn,

  as always

  Contents

  I.

  Soon After Rain

  Late Afternoon Rain

  Touching Different Worlds

  Bull Riding at the Atkeisons’ Ranch

  Leaving the Lincoln Memorial

  Heat Break

  This Alien Place Called Home

  Summer Floods

  Watching the Sky

  Hotter’n Hell Hundred

  Running at Night

  The Wrong Way to Wheeler Peak

  The Way the Weather Works

  Fall’s First Grippe

  II.

  Dark Drifting Clouds

  Nineveh, on Fire Again

  The Changing Clouds

  A Clown Show in the Sky

  A Dimness in the Air

  Low Clouds, Dark

  The Rhythms of Rain

  Walking Where Nineveh Was

  Beyond the Town

  Chills

  A Contradictory Brightness

  The Spears of Zeus

  III.

  Sky Over Knossos

  Odysseus Sowing Salt

  Seasickness

  Revenge

  The Draw of the Other

  A Curious Man

  Our Friend’s Son

  Cervantes

  IV. The Artemisia Suite

  A Finely Cold Will

  Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting

  Susanna and the Elders

  Corsica and the Satyr

  The Sensual Miracle

  V.

  Bats in Havana

  Moonwash

  Seasonal Changes

  Winter

  When Four Tornadoes Joined

  A Difficult June

  Mountain Butterfly

  Peripeteia

  Summer’s First Rain

  A Long, Hard Wind

  A Massive Stillness

  In the Lobby

  Dilemma

  Summer Ordeal

  Last Night’s Derecho

  Father-Son Talk

  First Freeze

  A Terror Fills the Air

  The Old Model

  Memories of Mosul

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I.

  Soon After Rain

  Soon after rain has stopped, a silence comes

  when no bird sings and no wind stirs.

  The world seems briefly mute

  and sweet attention’s everywhere.

  When no bird sings and no wind stirs

  the world itself seems to have hushed,

  and sweet attention’s everywhere:

  no circling ripples stir the pond.

  The world itself seems to have hushed:

  traffics of sound have disappeared,

  no circling ripples stir the pond,

  the turtles staying still on rocks.

  Traffics of sound have disappeared,

  a sense of absence everywhere:

  the turtles staying still on rocks,

  and no fish strike at phantom flies.

  A sense of absence everywhere,

  as if nothing has the need to breathe,

  and no fish strike at phantom flies,

  and nothing has the need to speak.

  As if nothing has the need to breathe,

  the world seems briefly mute,

  and nothing has the need to speak.

  Soon after rain has stopped, a silence comes.

  Late Afternoon Rain

  Late afternoon, the thunder came,

  long after another rain had dropped,

  but when the late, loud thunder roared

  that earlier rain had long since stopped.

  Was another rain ready to fall?

  Touching Different Worlds

  1

  Afternoons more than mornings

  I spent hours watching clouds

  forming creatures and stories

  in the kingdom of the sky.

  Elephant trunks and deer were there,

  rhino horns and wild boar tusks,

  unicorns and dinosaurs,

  and faces of beasts I’d never seen.

  And sometimes winds made the creatures crash

  while wisps of vapors, unattached,

  kept my attention alert:

  I was sailing alone on a distant sea.

  2

  Morning skies, though, seldom mattered.

  Mornings were for persimmon fights

  and the need to haul up pipes

  friends and I had tossed in the creek.

  Catfish and crawdads lodged in them.

  There were worlds under water,

  and worlds under rocks, worlds in tall grass

  and worlds in the thick oak woods.

  3

  Mornings meant earth, but afternoons, sky,

  and evening’s games kept me outside.

  There were endless worlds I had to explore,

  and some were worlds I could barely see:

  neighborhood yards full of tarantula holes

  and snakes coiled up in flowerbeds.

  I had a thousand worlds to explore,

  and many of those I could barely see.

  Bull Riding at the Atkeisons’ Ranch

  The first time I tried to ride the bull

  he threw me fast — a sudden twist

  and I sailed off his back but missed

  the fence — the next
time, though, I knew

  to strain, to lean against his back.

  That worked a rough but sweet wild time —

  through bucks and twists my heels beat time

  against his neck, then suddenly,

  head down, he stopped and I flew off

  over head and horns. The world had lost

  its sense of speed, and though now tossed,

  I hung somehow afloat in air,

  and gliding slowly now, I missed

  the fresh manure I’d been flying toward,

  but when I hit I landed hard

  and somersaulting skidded through

  the loose, ammonia-fragrant dirt.

  Leaving the Lincoln Memorial

  So leaving the Lincoln Memorial

  and coming to the stairs, I said,

  Chuck, take my arm, and he did.

  My sunglasses on and right hand raised

  through the bright late-morning air,

  I said I had truly found greatness here.

  I could feel, I said, Lincoln’s rich presence

  when I touched the stone his likeness rested on,

  but oh! If I only had eyes to see him!

  And as we walked down the long stone stairs,

  I ran my fingers through the braille of the air,

  and stopping, people looked, listened, and wept.

  We were now among new sets of them.

  They, too, were going where we had been,

  and again I said how fine it was to touch

  the stone that Lincoln’s likeness rested on,

  then finally, as we neared our car where

  our parents were waiting for us, another family

  passed by us but stopped as we slowed down

  and I went through my patter again,

  and the mother, tweaking the ears of her boys,

  said, Look! The little brother is helping

  his blind big brother — they know how to act!

  Then they, too, were gone, though the father,

  I saw, was biting his upper lip to keep

  from weeping — then Mother asked, What

  are you two doing? So we told her, but swore

  we had done the good thing: we had made

  the day holy for those who had passed

  beside us, who had heard what grief I felt

  at not being able to see Lincoln in stone,

  though there was joy, a power of joy

  in feeling his presence before us,

  but the moment I said that, I saw

  Dad turn away, in grief, it seemed,

  at what terrible deceit he had spawned.

  Heat Break

  A crowd of thin dark clouds scudded till

  it covered our valley, the place where we’d

  pitched tent, and broke the scorching heat.

  I noticed then the flies had gone — they’d been

  a constant irritant almost a week:

  they’d been as aggravating as the heat.

  Then long and rumbling thunder rolls echoed

  between the mountains — but no rain came,

  then soon I saw three lightning strikes

  zigzagging down the canyon toward the spruce,

  but no rain fell and I kept wondering when

  high virgas would turn into pouring rain

  that soaked the trees, that turned the forest’s floor

  into an aromatic, pasty mulch,

  or if high rain would simply disappear

  the way rain often does — lightning flashing

  in streaks and sheets, as if the air itself

  has been electrified — but no rain falls:

  no way to know if rain will come at all.

  This Alien Place Called Home

  There are no antique shards to dig up here.

  Because the winds had blown the gods away

  the Indians dared not set their camps near here,

  and now we have to face the fact that where

  we live has no tradition, nothing’s stayed:

  there are no antique shards to dig up here.

  If some in foolishness chose where

  we live, they never cared in any way

  that Indians dared not set their camps near here —

  unless they began to wonder: Were

  they right? Of course, they might have been, but say:

  There are no antique shards to dig up here

  then ask if our own fathers did not hear

  the message of the winds and droughts, that they,

  the Indians, dared not set their camps near here.

  And then admit our fathers were wild-haired

  and driven men who did not stop to say:

  There are no antique shards to dig up here.

  The Indians dared not set their camps near here.

  Summer Floods

  News yesterday said storms had sent new lines

  of rushing waters into subway lines.

  Today’s news said whole regions were cut off

  from casual travel there — no railway lines

  were sending trains through there, the places swept

  by flows of waters still so deep that lines

  were being thrown to those who’d lost their homes,

  so many now attached to hover lines,

  and up into a sky of clouds they rose

  toward helicopter blades and rough new lines

  of wind that pushed against their frantic grips,

  that tossed them back and forth so hard the lines

  they held translated fears that lines would break

  and they’d fall down into the restive lines

  of churning waters that now rushed below

  where they once were, below the whipping lines

  of brutal wind, in little wave-tossed boats,

  or even not in boats — they’d grabbed those lines

  dropped from the whirrings in the troubled sky,

  those lines they found cut hands — abrasive lines —

  and though those lines saved lives, the airborne ones

  soon found they needed more than one good line.

  Watching the Sky

  A waste of vapors in the air,

  the morning’s overcast blocked out

  the sun and left a shadow on

  the world, the darkness deepening,

  and rain appeared: a mistlike drift

  that soon turned thick when thunder struck —

  a hard north wind now driving walls

  of rain aslant, and thunder shook

  the world again as wind kicked up.

  The only question was if wind

  and heat and counter-cold were strong

  enough to make tornadoes form.

  Hotter’n Hell Hundred

  A heat inversion made the air seem close,

  a quality of atmosphere that made

  it hard to breathe, that made it hard to move

  unless one moved somehow with speed against

  the wind, for moving with the wind, one’s back

  to wind, made air so thick that breaths came hard,

  as if in spite of speed the wind had died,

  and I, in open sun, was biking in

  to wind, then with the wind, and every breath

  came like a gift, a hot lung-searing gift

  that lifted me above the heat that pressed

  me down, that leeched my legs of strength, that brought

  a world of heavy weight upon my arms,

  that blistered feet, the pedals stabbing at

  my feet, my soles on fire — wind whipping me.

  I’d biked already eighty miles but had

  a score to go to cross the finish line.

  Running at Night

  I can’t see the rocks

  or the raccoons or skunks,

  threats I might kick

  when I run at night.

  And now that the drought

  has broken, are snakes —
>
  rattlesnakes I mean —

  still in the neighborhood?

  The Wrong Way to Wheeler Peak

  We left our mountain place before the air

  turned hot, before the thinness of the air

  scorched skin and scalded eyes, before

  the sweet illusion of the place had torn

  itself away and we came home to heat,

  one-hundred-ten degrees of blistering heat

  that weighted down our goatlike springy legs

  that once had shuffled over rocky paths,

  but we’d pressed on — we had a way to go

  to reach the mountain top, a way to go

  before we reached the place whose summit soared

  above the levels of the other heights,

  but we, we realized, had missed our route:

  the path we took the wrong damn path, the place

  we reached a rocky outcrop that almost

  undid us when new rain made gravel slick,

  and thunder said that lightning might strike close,

  so down we climbed, and down we slid, so close

  to falling that we cursed and twisted left

  then right then left again as if our boots

  were skis, as if our walking sticks could stop

  the threat that we might plummet down and stop,

  impaled on sticks or bruised and pierced by rock.

  The Way the Weather Works

  For two days cloudy skies and thunder rolls

  have promised rain but no rains come.

  Today the sky again was overcast

  and wind this morning blew in from

  the north, blew stiffly from the north,

  but no rain came till mid-afternoon.

  The western sky had just begun to clear

  when lightly rain began to fall,

  so lightly that its drift was hard to see,

  if drift there was, and what rain came

  was less than shower but more than mist.

  Fall’s first Grippe

  Barreling wetly from the north,

  a cold damp wind, hitting early today,

  drove summer’s last remnant away,

  the ghost of August’s scorch.

  The sting of the wind biting bone

  ground raggedly into my chest,

  then below the realm of breath

  it pressed my joints to stone.

  Chilled, joints aching, I was shaking

  then suddenly a flash of heat

  swept like a wildfire through me,