North Point North

New and Selected Poems

John Koethe

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780060935276
• eBook ISBN: 9780061974878
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

North Point North: New and Selected Poems showcases the work of an important contemporary American poet, winner of the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award for Poetry.

The volume opens with twenty-one new poems, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other periodicals, and in The Best American Poems 2001, edited by Robert Hass and David Lehman. Following are selections from Koethe's five earlier collections of poems: Blue Vents, Domes, The Late Wisconsin Spring, The Constructor, and Falling Water. Together these poems create a remarkable and powerful new volume, a milestone in this gifted poet's career.

FROM FALLING WATER

FROM THE PORCH

The stores were bright, and not too far from home.

The school was only half a mile from downtown,

A few blocks from the Oldsmobile dealer. In the sky,

The airplanes came in low towards Lindbergh Field,

Passing overhead with a roar that shook the windows.

How inert the earth must look from far away:

The morning mail, the fantasies, the individual days

Too intimate to see, no matter how you tried;

The photos in the album of the young man leaving home.

Yet there was always time to visit them again

In a roundabout way, like the figures in the stars,

Or a life traced back to its imaginary source

In an adolescent reverie, a forgotten book—

As though one’s childhood were a small midwestern town

Some forty years ago, before the elm trees died.

September was a modern classroom and the latest cars,

That made a sort of futuristic dream, circa 1955.

The earth was still uncircled. You could set your course

On the day after tomorrow. And children fell asleep

To the lullaby of people murmuring softly in the kitchen,

While a breeze rustled the pages of Life magazine,

And the wicker chairs stood empty on the screened-in porch.

THE CONSTANT VOICE

Above a coast that lies between two coasts

Flight 902 turns west towards San Diego.

Milwaukee falls away. The constant passenger,

Removed from character and context, resumes

His California story, gradually ascending,

Reading Farewell, My Lovely for the umpteenth time,

Like a book above the world, or below the noise.

I recall some houses halfway in the desert,

And how dry the trees all seemed, and temporary

Even the tallest buildings looked, with bungalows

Decaying in the Santa Ana wind. And finally

Just how small it was, and mean. Is it nostalgia

For the limited that makes the days go quickly,

Tracing out their spirals of diminishing concern?

Like all the boys who lived on Westland Avenue,

I learned to follow the trails through the canyon,

Shoot at birds with a BB gun, and dream of leaving.

What are books? To me they seemed like mirrors

Holding up a vision of the social, in which people,

Beckoning from their inaccessible preserves

Like forgotten toys, afforded glimpses of those

Evanescent worlds that certain minor writers

—Raymond Chandler say, or even Rupert Brooke—

Could visualize somehow, and bring to life again.

And though these worlds were sometimes difficult to see,

Once having seen them one returned to find the words

Still there, like a part of the surroundings

Compliant to one’s will.

Yet these are attitudes,

And each age has its separate store of attitudes,

Its store of tropes—“In Grantchester, in Grantchester!—”

That filter through its dreams and fill its songs.

Hume tried to show that sympathy alone allows

“The happiness of strangers” to affect our lives.

Yet now and then a phrase, echoing in the mind

Long after its occasion, seems to resurrect

A world I think I recognize, and never saw.

For what was there to see? Some houses on a hill

Next to a small stream? A village filled with people

I couldn’t understand? Could anyone have seen the

Transitory sweetness of the Georgians’ England

And the world before the War, before The Waste Land?

Years are secrets, and their memories are often

Stories of a past that no one witnessed, like the

Fantasies of home one builds to rationalize

The ordinary way one’s life has gone since then.

Words seem to crystallize that life in pictures—

In a postcard of a vicarage, or of a canyon

Wedged between the desert and an endless ocean—

But their clarity is fleeting. I can nearly

See the coast from here, and as I hear the engines

And the bell chimes, all those images dissolve.

And then I start to hear the murmur of that

Constant voice as distant from me as a landscape

Studied from an airplane: a contingent person

With a particular mind, and a particular will,

Descending across a desert, westward over mountains

And the sparsely peopled scrub beyond the city,

Pocked with half-filled reservoirs and rudimentary

Trails with nothing waiting for me at the end

—“And is there honey still for tea?”—

But isolated houses nestled in the hills.

SORRENTO VALLEY

On a hillside somewhere in Sorrento Valley,

My aunts and uncles sat in canvas chairs

In the blazing sun, facing a small ash tree.

There was no wind. In the distance I could see

Some modern buildings, hovering in the air

Above the wooded hillsides of Sorrento Valley.

I followed the progress of a large bumblebee

As the minister stood, offering a prayer,

Next to the young white California ash tree.

Somewhere a singer went right on repeating

When I Grow Too Old to Dream. Yet to dream where,

I wondered—on a hillside in Sorrento Valley,

Halfway between the mountains and the sea?

To be invisible at last, and released from care,

Beneath a stone next to a white tree?

—As though each of us were alone, and free,

And the common ground we ultimately shared

Were on a hillside somewhere in Sorrento Valley,

In the shade of a small ash tree.

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME

There was nothing there for me to disbelieve.

—Randall Jarrell

Dvorak’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me,”

From the cycle Gypsy Melodies, anticipates

The sonorous emotions of the Trio in F Minor,

Though without the latter’s complications.

The melody is simple, while the piece’s

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• North Point North: New Poems
• From Blue Vents (1968)
• From Domes (1973)
• From the Late Wisconsin Spring (1984)
• From the Constructor (1999)
• From Falling Water (1997)
• About the Author
• Other Books by John Koethe
• Copyright
• About the Publisher