Doubtful Harbor

Poems

Idris Anderson

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446317
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Doubtful Harbor, Idris Anderson turns wandering into art. From large landscapes to the minutest details, she seeks with each poem to convey the world more clearly, acutely, and exquisitely. As she meditates on indelible moments with intimate others, friends, and strangers, she teases from these encounters their elusive connections and disconnections. As Sherod Santos wrote when selecting the book for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, "These are not the journeys of a tourist, but of a wandering solitaire whose purpose is not to maintain a travelogue, but to lose herself in the otherness of her surroundings."

Doubt is itself a driving force here, an engine of both questing and questioning. As exact as Anderson's eye is, her poems draw energy from ambiguity as she renders interior and exterior landscapes—foreign and domestic, lovely and littered, familiar and strange.

Four

Colman’s Well

in memoriam, Michael Miller

All rituals are strange customs of the desperate,

the hard look for meaning, symbols made

of ordinary objects, gestures to grace them.

Consider modern strips of cloth hung in trees

by Colman’s well, colors in touch with the body

of someone sick or dying, the dearly beloved’s

sleeve carried in a pocket up the raw rock slope

to the spring that runs through mossed-over stones,

ferns flourishing big as trees. Flannel rags

of cotton, wool, polyester—the trashed-up

forest a desecration of the Holy Well.

A dirty hand dipped and hung each clootie.

A persistent belief in a healing holiness Colman

would have wept to see, knowing all suffer and die.

We’ve walked a short way up from the road

in new boots and rain jackets. Hard to pick a way

through vines running everywhere on big stones,

wet mist dripping from leaf and stone lip,

mouth of rock. Ordinarily impossible to find

this tangled place, Colman’s cave and well,

the oratory he built before Rome imposed

strict rule and order for monastic life.

Here wildness itself claims and reclaims

body and earth, green breath in a bewildering

wilderness. Colman wrapped himself

in deerskins to keep warm, trimmed wild beauty

to animal essentials. A worried way to solitude,

the hermit-monk’s discipline to let be.

Here under an eagles’ eyrie in the burren

with his mouse to nibble him awake, his fly to mark

his last-read word, his rooster to remind him of time,

Colman prayed, chanted Celtic syllables, meditated

in the morning and followed the evening flight of eagles.

A wall remains, an arch. We settle behind it

in the shade and summon his name. Any word spoken

is resonant. Cameras stop whirring and clicking.

Michael, whose idea it was to bring us to

this place, reads his poem about Saint Colman,

who denied himself all comforts except words,

their warm precision flowing from his mouth.

We’ve trudged up the king’s clattering Road of Dishes,

hardly aware of our noise and desolation.

Red Sails

All I can figure, he must have been Irish, the sailor

who sang on our porch after midnight, mother alone

in our house near the Navy Yard, her children sleeping,

my father on the night shift, not home until morning.

Night after night, the sewing machine light

the only light on, her fingers picked stitches.

I remember the stumbling boot on the steps,

the slosh of the bottle, the porch swing creaking,

the rough voice in the same song sung night after night.

Red sails in the sunset, way out to the sea—

She’d be still for a moment, then switch off the light

and lie down beside us, listening, listening—

Oh carry my loved one safely to me.

I could feel the ferocity of her vigilance.

I didn’t know for a long time all the pieces

of the story, the man who left her and went to the war

returned to his other wife in the North. Bigamist,

she told me, his sergeant rank stripped to buck private.

Somehow he survived the Battle of the Bulge

but never came home to my mother and his infant daughter.

Red sails in the sunset, way out to the sea—

Now that I’ve been to Ireland and seen them,

some bright blood-red, some faded, puffed full

in an easy bay wind of a Galway gloaming,

that rough sea-light on the harbor, the black pitch

hulls of the hookers, I know what the song is about,

the whimper suffered, withheld in the listening.

The name was Irish but I’ve blanked it out.

Woman Fishing

1

I dream a woman with silver hair fishing

an Irish morning lake; her slim canoe

cuts milk-opalescent skim of sky.

One arm stirs craters and vortices.

The paddle never lifts. The image moves

like a short film-clip of vanishing desires.

A red fin rises and rolls in the reedy edges.

Line whips and thrums, its formal elegance

drawn out to the last s-shaped uncurling

of the fly, the deep easy bend of the rod,

sweet play of the run, circling swerves,

the hand a simple slip in the gill, the lift.

I walk to meet her on the shore.

We talk and clean the fish and build a fire.

2

Crystal and silver are set on Irish lace.

The woman with silver hair looks at me

across the table as she listens to conversation

about the war, whether we should or should not

be there. Her husband sits by a peat fire.

Everyone laughs. Their son, on break from school,

talks to me, voluble enthusiasms about

anything Irish. I nod and listen and look at her.

He’s a lovely young man who reads Heaney

and Yeats. He knows about curraghs, a hooker’s

red sails. He’s ferried out to Inishbofin.

He wants me to know what he thinks about

Gretta’s secret and Gabriel, Trevor’s restraint.

Today he hiked ten miles over the burren.

Above the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Woman in Kuala Lumpur
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Notes
• Acknowledgments