Vagrants & Accidentals

Kevin Craft

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295999852
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia americana

Vagrants & Accidentals, the second full-length collection from poet Kevin Craft, is part vade mecum, part songbook, whose taut lines and adaptable stanzas traffic in the personal effects of emigration and estrangement, exile and return. In ornithology, a vagrant or accidental is a bird that appears out of its natural or normal range, blown off course by a storm, or inadvertently introduced into a new environment by human trade. Likewise, Craft is interested in things taken out of context--Greek myths in the Pacific Northwest, the potsherd or megalith stranded in a museum, excess carbon in the atmosphere, American pop songs in a Roman piazza, adoptions, estrangements, dangerous migrations, the constant shuffle of human beings from place to place—asking how we reorient ourselves in the crossfire of constant, rapid, global transformation. Organized into four parts, the collection moves from the deeply personal to more global issues of interconnectedness. In language intensely lyrical, grounded in prehistory and science, Craft evokes questions of family and belonging that underscore a lifetime, gradually revealing the forces that shape us from the deepest reaches of time and place. As some birds sing to define their territory, so his poetry calls between the raggedness of daily life and our deeper yearning for coherence. Listen to an interview with and readings by the author via KUOW: http://kuow.org/post/what-i-learned-my-feminist-mom

III

Poor travelers, I thought, seeing myself among

them: always somewhere else.

—W. G. Sebald, Vertigo

Transparency

Years later (43) my father offers a name—says

I looked over the desk, saw the paperwork stray

when the caseworker ducked into the backroom—

says this casually, over the phone, in the middle of some

playoff talk about the Phillies or the weather in Florida,

recounts it as a known fact, something I must have

learned long ago, and forgotten, like the allegory

of the chariot pulled by two horses—tells me her name was

Madeleine, just like that—I thought you knew—

as if everyone in Wilmington, Delaware knew—

knew the circumstances, the chemical shame,

1967, the indelible fact of having gotten herself

pregnant by no name my father can recall seeing—

just Madeleine of the typescript, Madeleine

of the dotted line, Madeleine of the horse & buggy split.

I’m thinking 17, I’m thinking dropped out

of high school, sight unseen, I really don’t know,

except in one iteration my name is Michael,

that I knew by 8th grade, at least, when Lori Wiedner

started calling me that, Lori the first flute,

Lori the perennial September crush who sometimes flirted

though usually not, though she would offer up

magnanimous middle school warmth and alarm

and thus in her eyes did I begin to live that other

boy’s life as well as I could before the World Book

Encyclopedia—peeling back layers of see-through anatomy

to get to the nervous system—autonomous

if not sympathetic—the skeletal remains,

the blank page wavering behind it all—

I have been poring through your absence all these years

scratching out name after name

Linear A

I am the city

as you remember it,

save one.

I am a dark

incision—cat’s eye or claw

in a field of slash and burn.

No sooner said than

waves will slosh

on a half-moon beach—

fond of their habit

and the leisure of five

wild swans.

(My rival’s an archive

of miscarried fleece.)

Divulge what you will,

embryonic kri-kri swimming

circles around our knuckles,

gold goddess hovering

like a hornet

in a thumbprint epiphany.

Even stones

have pastimes—stepping down,

weighing in.

Now hindsight flickers like a bull’s

bright horn

cleared by a headlong

running leap.

(We’re beginning to tabulate

our livestock in dreams.)

When summer

fills the lustral basins

with green water, terrapins

ringing the cistern

like a loose archipelago—

when the whole

sluggish island nose-dives

like a foundering whale—

I am the ladle they call

Diaspora,

I am the rhyton

whose measure is tears.

Drink up. Wish me luck.

(Cuttlefish thrash in a whirlpool cup.)

So that blue monkeys swing

in turpentine trees,

so that blue women

chatter like chickpeas in jars:

all the figs of Memphis

are not sweeter than your fingertips—

so long out of touch, so long out of touch

they trace their lineage in scar.

Persona Non Grata

. . . and indeed were not particularly welcome in any of the states— the vagrants, old soldiers, travelling theatrical companies, pedlars— all these silted up on the frontier like floating rubbish on a river’s banks.

—Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

I wore a mask made of holes,

none of which weep. I was armed

like a gladiator to face assimilated sheep.

I could only nod or shake, never blink,

never strike like a bowling ball

in a back alley brawl. I was a chain letter

composed of missing links. It wasn’t my style

to menace or gloat.

Here’s what I learned: like a bowling ball

tossed into the drink, half of us sink

and half of us float. Which is why it took ...