The Optimist

Poems

Joshua Mehigan

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780821441329
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Joshua Mehigan's award-winning poetry, one encounters a lucid, resolute vision driven by an amazing facility with the metrical line. Most of the poems in The Optimist unapologetically employ traditional poetic technique, and, in each of these, Mehigan stretches the fabric of living language over a framework of regular meter to produce a compelling sonic counterpoint.

The Optimist stares at contemporary darkness visible, a darkly lit tableau that erases the boundary between the world and the perceiving self. Whether narrative or lyric, dramatic or satirical, Mehigan's poems explore death, desire, and change with a mixture of reason and compassion.

In choosing The Optimist for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, final judge James Cummins, wrote:

"The world is given its due in these poems, but its due is the subjective voice making 'objective' reality into the reality of art. To do this Mehigan accesses a tradition of voices—the echoes in The Optimist are, to name a few, of Frost, Robinson, Kees, and Justice; and more in terms of point of view, Bishop and Jarrell—to form with great integrity his own. It isn't that Mehigan is concerned more with what's outside himself than inside; nor merely that he travels the highway between the two with such humility and grace. It's also that these voices, this great tradition, infuses his line with what the best verse, metrical or free, must have: wonder."

I

Promenade

Bowne Park, Queens. Labor Day morning. A man stumbles across a wedding.

This is the brief departure from the norm

that celebrates the norm. The wind is warm

and constant through the field set at the heart

of the impervious borough, yet apart.

This day and this place, born from other days

and places as a parenthetic phrase,

and this sky, where a businessman may write

the purposeless, brief beauty of a kite,

are like the possibilities of love.

The kite leaps up, rasps fifty feet above

until it is almost unusual,

and fastens there. The wind’s predictable

but private method with it sets it free

to dive toward greater plausibility

and finish its digression in the wide

municipal burlesque of countryside.

What distantly appear to be festoons

of white, white bunting, trefoils of balloons

in white, improve the black affectless trees

where three girls stand like caryatides

patiently holding crepe bells to a bough.

Something exceptional will happen now.

But first the fat, black, windswept frock will swerve

past the buffet to steal one more hors d’oeuvre.

He floats like an umbrella back to where

his book is, smoothes his robe, and smoothes his hair.

Yellow grass undulates beneath the breeze.

Couples file through the corridor of trees

toward rows of folding seats. Bridesmaids unhook

from groomsmen’s arms. Every face turns to look;

and when the bride’s tall orange bun’s unpinned

by ordinary, inconvenient wind,

all, in the breath it takes a yard of hair

to blaze like lighted aerosol, would swear

there was no greater miracle in Queens.

Wish is the word that sounds like what wind means.

Two New Fish

Inside the knotted plastic bag he tossed

and caught in front of him the whole way home

were two new fish. They seemed to him to bear

a trademark not quite rare, as though the two

were penknife souvenirs from the next county.

The fish were alien and mediocre.

He felt his strength as if it were a bomb

that detonates with no complexity

of wires or clocks, fuse or even impact.

His tosses changed without much thought to heaves.

They arced, slowed, hung like miniature flames

trapped in a bubble, glanced the power lines . . .

The fish sped back an inch and forth an inch

in the bag cupped in the boy’s hands, and then

not in his hands at all, then on the grass.

He rolled the bag experimentally

over the gravel drive to demonstrate

again how well he kept from breaking it.

He hung it on a stick and jabbed the air

fitfully, like a hobo shooing bees.

He did his undecided best to burst

and also not to burst the bag. And when

within these limits neither fish had died,

the boy put down the bag and went inside.

A Questionable Mother

The camera crews were gone home for the evening,

an infant dead, but then again, as always,

the white globes fading on above the entrance.

The estranged boyfriend stayed with family, resting.

The suspect’s parents clasped hands in the foyer.

Their daughter was once more a daughter only,

yet, blood or no, unsound or no, no daughter.

Not calm but quiet settled in the station,

in all who’d heard her cry they must believe her.

The suspect’s father petted a police dog,

and felt, without remarking, it was pregnant.

The cracked, hard leather chairs were now familiar.

Life’s fell astonishments were now familiar.

Here thoughts of murder weren’t all that uncommon.

Nakedness was uncovered by the hour.

Within, the suspect cried they must believe her.

The female officer behind a window

of thick green glass typed slowly without stopping.

Beneath the squat cap holding in her hairdo,

her face suggested she withheld her judgment.

The unleashed shepherd lay beside her, licking.

She didn’t look at it, but typed on, thinking

animals always know when they are dirty.

The House Swap

That night the town was far behind somewhere,

and now the city lay there in the road,

a ve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• II
• Notes