Charming Gardeners

David Biespiel

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805887
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The formally nuanced and wise epistolary poems in David Biespiel's new collection are grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America. Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, Charming Gardeners explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California. These poems explore the "insistent murmurs" of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, as well as the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America's wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy. We are offered poems addressed to family, friends, poets, and political rivals — all in a masterful idiom Robert Pinsky has called Biespiel's "own original grand style." I should stop back there And stand on both feet in the grazing sunlight And hear this chorus of America singing. But I am so afraid of the testament of the delivered. from "TO __________ FROM THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN WILLIAMSON, WEST VIRGINIA

TO C. D. FROM D.C.

— Washington, D.C.

Dear Carolyn —

All week we have walked in front of the Old

Executive Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue

And across the asphalt White House plaza,

And we have waved to the half-starved protester

In Lafayette Park as he stood ten steps

From where Walt Whitman used to stand,

Not in such great shape himself, the old coot,

When he would wave to Abe Lincoln

As he rode out alone on horseback

On summer evenings in 1863,

Trotting his tallest horse to the Soldier’s Home

Above the Rock Creek, to sleep on the land

Where the first Civil War cemetery was put.

Can you imagine the Great Emancipator

Standing on his back porch among the dead

As he listened to the diggers graveling the graves,

Chipping the soil, lifting in the bodies,

From Rochester and Groton and Poolesville

And King of Prussia, lifting in the bodies

With the steam rising from their skins

Into the insect-mating womb of the light

Around the city, the utterly still bodies

unquivering?

You had asked what was it like to live here

Twenty-five years ago — Carolyn,

Truth be told, I was drunk

So much of the time I cannot say.

I can say it was a city of saviors,

That’s for sure, powder-cheeked and God awful,

The street corners like hospital sheets,

The 15th Street pimps chatting

with the newsmen from the Post,

The dreadlocked couriers quick and mingling

With the FCC guys, the diplomats

Slumping cum laude without their blue blazers

Across Foggy Bottom, the portable flags

Dropping their stars underneath the partisan air,

And the New England legislators — in their socks

After hours at the Irish pubs near Union Station —

Like dome-shadowed columns

Of dreamers with the eyes of animals

And a meeting in an hour on Embassy Row,

And the ex-officio in Dupont Circle

With one eye on his German beer

And another on the crowds — “See her,

That’s the wife of the Belgian

Ambassador’s chief of staff” — and the poets

Sneaking into matinees of Lawrence of Arabia

At the Uptown, then wandering through Rock Creek Park

Listening for linnets, speaking of a thousand things,

As John Keats says one must, and so the talk

Would broach nightingales and sensations,

Genera and species of fancy,

The loose quadrants between will and volition,

Metaphysics and consciousness, monsters,

Mermaids, good morning, and good night —

And all that time we could not see the airy

Path of Abraham Lincoln

who rode his tallest horse

Into those very woods — he must have enjoyed

Dipping swiftly into the bliss and dizzy

Hungers of the night — so much to love

In this city, so much to hold up to the world,

The 19th century streets, even now, rumbling

Behind the crabapple trees, every brick house

Stacked with its hatreds and adorations,

And the parkway shimmering

back into the lettered avenues —

And, yes, I still love the bridges, Carolyn,

That cross into Arlington in Northern Virginia

Onto Robert E. Lee’s sloping lawn

With its milky headstones,

And, better, a mile or so further on,

The red neon “EAT” sign that hung

Above Whitey’s for fifty years

And now is gone, a juke joint that popped

With broasted chicken and unconnoisseur

Beers and diddly-diddly players —

With a deer’s head nailed to the wall

Next to a photograph of a goose-eyed TR,

A place where I once bumped into a general

At eight o’clock and a senator at midnight.

What I was drinking those days remains

A mystery, those years a long body

Of rain poured into a short glass, gentle rain

Like the odor of earth plowed in and upturned,

Rain like the willowy church bells on Sunday,

Rain like the faces in apartment windows,

Rain like the bodies tipped into the ground,

Rain like a wife and home that would last

And, then, in the end, not last —

A bad-mannered, good-natured honky-tonk,

Whitey’s was a hole,

A pickup hall, a chuck wagon, a giddy-up,

Where a man pissed in the Gent’s Room

And threw darts in the Lincoln Room,

So inspirational in the lore of those times

A local personal read:

“Intense, creative professional,

36, 6 ft. 3 in. tall,

220 lbs on a large frame,

Seeks a confident, yet compliant, buxo...