Tornado

Ted Lardner

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776163
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death, said Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and so it is here; around the loss of a beloved sister in childhood, Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language by which he reveals what does not and cannot die, in the scale of nature above and underground, in the movements of time, and in the ongoing reach of human tenderness that 'glides through our skins like a wave, lighting it up from inside.'" —Alicia Ostriker

"Ted Lardner enlarges our range of wonder. For him, the task is to bring the jolt of another world to us by showing us that a springtime apple tree is 'a brain in flower' that comes to us 'from the other side of human language.' Each line of Tornado sends out a beam that flashes in the line then bounces like sonar in the reader's deeper parts where we keep our beloved dead.... It's as if Lardner did not write on a keyboard but with a typewriter ball with images, not letters. The 'tornado' is his image for leaving, for an 'intersection' where the living pass beyond the visible yet begin the Orphic need for imagination. At the center of this vortex Ted Lardner creates the space where the dead still have their Being and make their Rilkean demand that we change our lives. This is a wonderful book." —Bill Tremblay

SUMMER VALLEY

Blown spray from a dogleg waterfall,

the need that comes up

all surfaces, attraction—the falls radiate ions,

they circulate outward, attach the body’s own taps

of circulating chi—

I’ve been here all week.

I’m more tired than ever.

I want to fling myself outward.

Every turn leads down more stairways.

I want to know how many languages

intersect here, in this waterfall, its steady rolling.

Helen says later, good idea.

She hasn’t a dialectical bone to pick.

Expression and form, she could hardly care less

some emotional drama in whatever subject

is allowed to carry the force.

Start over:

My sister who is little has grown up inside us.

She is living under water, under the lip

of this flattop granite barn-size boulder

most of which is lodged underground,

a pool here, scooped by the creek.

What happens when light hits the water and the water folds it?

Crest of the falls, swallowtail butterfly.

The old man coming down the basement stairs.

Start over:

Cleft mountain pouring in, water pouring out.

The bodies of fir trees

shored along the rim, and the one still standing, stripped down.

Metaphor is our first language,

in it we come to the visible trace

of the motion of thought.

Here at the rim of this bowl hollowed out of rock,

the one silvered, wind-beetled fir still standing.

I see: Swallows over the resort opera house,

in light evening wind, flags, dogs turning around and around

not quite able to settle.

Start over:

My sister who was little has grown up inside.

The mass of Step Mountain catches hold of a color.

My sister is falling under the wheel.

From the newspaper page she moves under water.

Handlebars of the bicycle folded

flat, the run-over frame.

I would trace the form of that gone April evening to say

the things I love. I look for her here in this verging,

swallows hunting the final curve,

dogs turning around, standing up, barking.

Downslope drafts sort the warmth from Step Mountain.

Living and not, a deeper breath enters the rooms of the house.

Something invites our attention—all eyes—

and its knowing.

It is dark. I can’t see where the next word may fall off the line.

I stand, walk outside in the dark to the phone,

calling Helen back home in Ohio,

in Ohio, midnight, time nor space...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Eye
• Tornado
• I Look at the Apple Tree
• Bath
• Little Infinite Actuarial Table
• Ant
• Postoperative Care of Small Wounds
• From Afar
• Singing
• Stingray
• Paintbrush Left Overnight on the Ground Asana
• Summer Valley
• Poem for a Son
• Lullaby
• U-Pick Orchard
• Memorial for My Life
• What My Parents Did
• What the Dead Don’t Do
• X
• Birds Fly
• Notes