Soon After Rain Read online

  And distraction’s so inadequate,

  the urge to flee remains close by.

  But I accept that my fate’s here

  and I embrace all that’s nearby.

  I’ve seen sweet realms but now it’s time

  to leave once more all that’s close by.

  Piñon and snowmelt are calling me,

  but they and fragrant air are not nearby.

  I know, of course, I’ll have to return —

  I’m not locked down by what’s close by.

  Summer’s First Rain

  1

  Muddy, the small river’s rising now

  from the early afternoon’s heavy rain,

  and though the air is still, dark clouds

  say another storm is on the way,

  and with it threats of lightning strikes:

  groundcover here and brush so dry.

  2

  Thunder bouncing off the mountainsides,

  the lightning that caused this noise

  is still so far away no flash of light

  assaults this place — nothing’s aflame

  in the air, but for now there’s little chance

  a fire will set loose an avalanche.

  A Long, Hard Wind

  Wind whipped the pond all day.

  Even the ducks left

  and the sky stayed gray,

  the wind stayed stiff,

  but rain stayed away

  and the chill factor dipped.

  It’s often this way,

  moderation adrift —

  will it stay this way?

  When humidity’s high

  and wind blasts away

  at face and thigh,

  is there a way

  to diminish, to defy

  one’s pointless way?

  When the wind’s high

  and the world raves

  mindlessly, why

  don’t we push away

  the cloudy chill, the dry,

  absurdly pointless way

  we, the unprepared, try

  self-servingly to pray

  we won’t be undone by sky?

  Wind whipped the pond all day.

  And as ducks began to fly

  the sky stayed gray.

  A Massive Stillness

  A dark weight in the air,

  a massive stillness settling in

  promises a thunderstorm,

  though summer’s been rainless —

  mornings uncomfortably close,

  the afternoon winds scorching,

  and even thunderheads rare.

  No teasing gesture rides the air.

  Clouds have been few and thin.

  But now a fragrant stillness

  is offering a chance for rain,

  though it might not come —

  droughts have been longer than this one.

  In the Lobby

  Too much coffee and the hotel lobby’s buzz

  nauseate me whereas Chicago’s streets,

  their sirens and horns, motors and shouts,

  stir me and, delighting me, free me

  from the absurdities of identity

  whose buzzes tempt me toward despair.

  So sitting here I watch people I don’t know.

  Passing by fast, passing slowly, they go

  upstairs and down, and in and out of here

  where notions of pointlessness assail me,

  but fatigue, I know, will soon numb me

  and bless me as much as that costume there —

  T-shirt, frock coat and shorts — amuses me.

  Dilemma

  1

  A broken branch is wedged

  over the street in a crotch

  of our tallest sycamore,

  and it’s too high to reach

  unless I prop a ladder

  on a limb that might not bear

  the weight I’d press on it

  when I leaned out to saw

  or flip the branch loose.

  2

  Each day a few leaves drop

  and each day high winds

  make the dead branch sway.

  If it falls, when it falls,

  will it smash a car or head

  or crash against asphalt?

  There are numerous turns

  a high, long wind can take:

  plenty here to keep one awake.

  Summer Ordeal

  When heat rises the wind rises

  and lays a scorch on your skin

  and a terrible fact comes clear:

  moving against wind brings grief.

  But when you’re able to turn,

  to give it your back at last,

  the drive of the wind disappears,

  and facing you is a wall of air

  that’s often too thick to breathe,

  and you find yourself breathless:

  back winds don’t seem to push you:

  instead they take your breath.

  But if you’re out too long

  your body forgets to sweat,

  your legs go limp and vision fogs,

  and a dragon made of light

  will appear and you’ll think

  you feel its burning bites

  tearing into your joints until

  your blood sprays daggerlike fangs

  that disappear into thunderheads

  that rise castlelike in the sky,

  but likely there’ll be no rain —

  back winds don’t seem to push you:

  instead they take your breath.

  Last Night’s Derecho

  Loud cracking sounds woke me five times last night,

  and in the first-light dimness I saw wrecks

  of trees in yards and streets, but I had seen

  no lightning flash and had not known the wind

  had been half high enough to cause all this.

  Last night the noise I’d heard had come when big

  trees snapped, and setting morning’s paper aside,

  I cleaned our yard and two more, too, in parts.

  I cleared away the broken limbs and sticks

  as best I could, but trunks had been knocked down,

  and piles of limbs were water-soaked — we’d have

  to wait until the crews with mulching trucks

  and chainsaws came to grind the stumps to dust.

  We’d have to wait and hope that upside down

  snapped trunks would hold and not drop powerlines

  on window panes and roofs — those hopes were all

  we had for now: the straight-line winds had bombed

  us all, and this vast aftermath of last

  night’s storm was more than I could clear away.

  Father-Son Talk

  Oddly defensive again, my son says that he can’t afford

  glass hooks, but I don’t know what he means or can afford.

  Except for confusing, erratic affirmations of love

  he keeps silent about what he can or can’t afford.

  At times he’s gracious, but at other times he’s meanly oblique

  in revealing what he wants to do but can’t afford.

  He has a gift for throwing me weirdly back against myself,

  so much I’ve no idea what he can or can’t afford.

  In spite of how close we’ve seemingly been for most of his life

  I don’t know where to begin to understand afford.

  Is he speaking of freedom or whimsy or comfort or will?

  Who can tell? He keeps changing the meaning of afford.

  A wall rises between us then falls or somehow moves aside,

  but is this confusion something that I can afford?

  My entire world has turned so impossibly ambiguous

  I’m left to wonder: What exactly can I afford?

  Nothing ever seems to come to coherent conclusion here,

  but I do know that breakage is something I can’t afford.

  First Freeze />
  There’ll be no talk tonight about the climate here

  except to say that lightning, wind and thunder crasht

  as hail and sleet and freezing rain struck here at once —

  I’d never seen or heard them hit this place at once —

  then fog formed suddenly as wind kicked up ten knots

  and blew cars off the road, the road a sheet of ice

  that avalanched when brittle limbs began to snap,

  and thrills drilled into me as I ran fast across

  the parking lot to get my car, the overpass

  in view as tons of chaos slid toward low guardrails.

  A Terror fills the Air

  A terror fills the air — the clouds close in —

  and after lightning strikes the thunder rolls

  and winds kick up, at first in gusts, but then

  a gale force hits the air, the atmosphere

  a constant devastating blast that tears

  and whips a thorny scourge through troubled air

  as clouds turn black and air becomes pale green:

  a sickness in the atmosphere, a pall

  of yellow haze, infection in the air.

  Though hope once sang us through bad storms like this

  there’s nothing now, it seems, can guide us through

  this awful time of unjust change, this time

  when terror fills the air and clouds close in.

  The Old Model

  (Painting by Robert Henri, c. 1912)

  I can hear her as well as see her —

  her voice a bit high, a bit reedy,

  and her eyes somehow seem to shift

  as if she’s looking both at me

  and past me — and I don’t understand her,

  but why should I? I don’t know her

  and never met her till I found her

  on this 95-year-old canvas where

  her presence compels me toward

  an understanding I’ll never have.

  I think if Henri had titled this one

  Old Spanish Dancer or Song of Seville —

  he could even turn a rock Spanish —

  I’d know the gesture was a fiction.

  If he had done something like that

  I could have freed myself from her

  and dismissed her as a foreign exotic

  and forgotten the mystery of her lips —

  they’re so oddly full for her age,

  and her skin — but what do I mean? —

  there’s so little skin to see: a face

  and half a hand, and here I am, vexed.

  Does that disturbing look in her eyes

  come from grief, and if so, is it hers

  or mine? She’s turned me into knots.

  Memories of Mosul

  The Tigris’ current’s cold and fast.

  At Mosul it’s still cold and fast.

  Saw-tootht, the mountains there look harsh.

  In town the scofflaw traffic’s fast.

  By May the sky turns dun with dust,

  the hard winds gusting hot and fast.

  The amber lights on thoroughfares

  turn night’s look bronze — the traffic’s fast.

  But downtown, where the markets are,

  the people walk, but never fast.

  Now I must interrupt myself —

  the time I spent there passed so fast.

  What I once knew is now destroyed

  though I still keep my memories fast.

  I can’t, though, list more here, not now.

  What I once knew blew up so fast.

  Now I can only rage or grieve:

  the past’s a world our war wrecked fast.

  The Tigris’ current’s cold and fast.

  At Mosul it’s still cold and fast.

  Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals where many of these poems first appeared: a-diverse-city, Articulate: The Magazine of the Blanton Museum of Art, The Blue Rock Review, Borderlands, Concho River Review, Cutthroat, The Dirty Goat, English In Texas, Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Karamu, Langdon Review of the Arts, New Texas, The Seventh Quarry, Slant, Southwestern American Literature, Texas: The Houston Chronicle Magazine, Texas Poetry Calendar 2009, Two Southwests, Wichita Falls Literary and Arts Review, The Windhover.

  About the Author

  James Hoggard’s work in multiple genres has routinely been called “brilliant.” A poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist and translator, he is the author of more than twenty books and the recipient of numerous awards, including, in 2006, the Lon Tinkle Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a Career. He has also been Poet Laureate of Texas and twice president of the Texas Institute of Letters.

  Hoggard’s collection of essays, Riding the Wind (1997), was hailed as “one of the best books ever written by a Texan.” His novel Trotter Ross (Wings, 1999) was called “far and away the finest novel about masculine coming of age in current American literature” by Leonard Randolph, former director of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program. Writing about Patterns of Illusion: Short Stories & A Novella, the novelist John Nichols said, “Hoggard knows as much as anyone on earth about the small tender mercies and brutalities of people … a truly wonderful writer.” His collection of poems, Wearing The River (Wings, 2005), received the PEN Southwest Poetry Award. His most recent book of poetry is Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems (Wings, 2009). His most recent book is The Devil’s Fingers and Other Personal Essays (Wings, 2013).

  In addition to appearing in periodicals such as Harvard Review, Southwest Review, Words Without Borders, Manoa, TriQuarterly, Arts & Letters, Image, Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, and many other journals and anthologies, his work has also appeared in India, England, Canada, and the Czech Republic. He’s given readings and lectures at universities throughout the U.S. as well as in Mexico, Cuba, and Iraq. A noted literary translator, Hoggard was chosen to give the University Professors Lecture On Literary Translation and Theory at Boston University.

  Hoggard is the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.

  Wings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing—meaning all of the Americas, without commercial considerations clouding the decision to publish or not to publish.

  Wings Press intends to produce multi-cultural books, chapbooks, ebooks, recordings and broadsides that enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. Everyone ever associated with Wings has been or is a writer, and we know well that writing is a transformational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other’s souls. We believe that good writing is innovative, insightful, and interesting. But most of all it is honest.

  Likewise, Wings Press is committed to treating the planet itself as a partner. Thus the press uses as much recycled material as possible, from the paper on which the books are printed to the boxes in which they are shipped.

  As Robert Dana wrote in Against the Grain, “Small press publishing is personal publishing. In essence, it’s a matter of personal vision, personal taste and courage, and personal friendships.” Welcome to our world.

  Colophon

  This first edition of Soon After Rain, by James Hoggard, has been printed on 55 pound Edwards Brothers Natural Paper containing a percentage of recycled fiber. Titles have been set in Chaucer type, the text in Adobe Caslon type. All Wings Press books are designed and produced by Bryce Milligan.

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