Soon After Rain
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,