One Summer Evening at the Falls

Peter Campion

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780226737119
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226737256
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The poems in this collection capture the fantastic feeling of falling in love, all while keeping eyes on its lifecycles of crashing aftermaths, lingering regrets, guilt, and renewal. Peter Campion brings us to a series of scenes—on the damp patio, in the darkroom, and along the interstate—where we find familiar characters, lovers, and strangers. In the title poem, he takes us to the falls, where people and passions mix amid the sticky hanging mists:
                        That charge of summer nights, that edge, like everyone's checking
                        everyone out. Lingering a moment in the crowd
                        gathered to watch the rush and crash and let the mist
                        drift upward to our faces, I'm here: the future feels
                        open again. Even alone tonight—still: open.
 
Campion's poems introduce us to a range of people, all of whom are rendered with distinctiveness and intimacy. Their voices proliferate through the collection, with lyric folding into speech, autobiography becoming dramatic monologue, and casual storytelling taking on a ritualistic intensity. The poems in One Summer Evening at the Falls show how each character and each moment can be worthy of love and that this love both undoes us and makes us who we are. In narrative and lyric, in formal verse and free, Campion brings contemporary playfulness together with his classical talent to create this far-reaching and tender collection.
 

Three

The Street We Lived On

turned at the end to a walkway

leading down the bluffs, between two

boulders, and into the Atlantic Ocean.

There were cedar slats for your toes to catch,

but weeds attached there too and grew

so slippery—before a storm one day

the waves swept higher than the posts

and scooped me up. Time held

as whole suspended walls of water

sloshed against the stone.

Under at first, I watched

light murk, resharpen.

Minnows cast diamonds down the planks.

One powder-blue-and-orange claw

dangled while eelgrass billowed,

voluptuous, off the drop-off.

And this intensest burst of life

(when love and hate and need dissolve

to one sheer fire of nerve

. . . our daughter in her incubator

decades away yet)

hovered above fine terraces of sand

showing no end—at the same

time as a rusted post

jutted beneath, and there it was:

the central cylinder’s

small disc of dark, down in.

Greensleeves

i.

Singing while wiping counters in the kitchen,

she could have been inviting me if not

to sing along with her at least to listen.

“Oh, honey, here I am again: in pain.

My parents dead. My two divorces. Yours.

And now your uncle, oh my god, in prison.”

Her song was cooler though. More elevated.

More her imagined gesture of grandeur.

Which, truth be told, I hated. Not the high notes

quavering sharp at the same time they swelled

but the distance that her singing claimed:

we were at my apartment in Saint Paul

while she was wandering the rock spit

beyond her parents’ home at the harbor lip.

She was escaping that mothball formality

(“tradition touching all . . .”) or was it enchantment

hanging with elm-branch shadows round the bureau

where her brother’s old letters lay, medallions

circling Southeast Asia with stars and stripes.

His tone of cool good cheer, he learned

this bluff of normal from their parents, years

oh years ago. She was twelve, she overheard:

those times their doctor “needed crew” he sailed

her brother past the cove, then anchored there.

Out on this lick of brush and rock, the ocean

wind all around her, everything that elsewhere

spelled wreckage—prisoners filing out to meet

their visitors, that moment when the guard’s

not watching signaled she could risk one furtive

squeeze with her brother, then a whole day driving

back to the couch she crashed on because she’d left

her husband—wasn’t wreckage, not out here.

Waves frothing up the rock, the channel markers

lighting their way through darkness: her emotion

before she called it rage or joy or sorrow

came as just being: being shimmering through her.

ii.

Maybe it’s a stretch to claim she was there. This was my apartment in Minnesota, not Cape Cod, much less Elsinore. And she spoke that evening in the dry prose of someone offering advice:

“Fresh vegetables are cheaper and more nutritious than deli food.”

“Museums sometimes offer free activities for kids.”

“The only paper towels to buy are Bounty.”

Wasn’t my irritation really hampered desire? I wanted to be together. Out of our marriages, at last we could see each other.

But she was lecturing on paper towels, then singing at the sink with such high tones about “thy petticoat of slender white with gold embroidered gorgeously.”

Maybe the urge was mine alone.

But this was my mother. This was the whole, unweeded garden of our language together, and the garden’s paths kept winding from that house above the water.

Just then at dinner: “I’m learning from my therapy. See, there are voices circling a person’s head. Not wing wongs. Everyone hears voices. When I’m visiting the prison, we talk about this stuff. How the old days live. How everyone has a childhood home inside.”

iii.

How to describe that moment, how a glow

gathered and brimmed: there must have been a lamp,

but objects in the room seemed to give off

light on their own. The salad bowl, the ivy

printing against the windowpane, my daughter’s

tricycle at the center of the floor

pulsed with a shine that kept replenishing.

“Everyone has a childhoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• one
• two
• three