Wild Track

Kevin Hart

Description

The poems of Kevin Hart have nurtured international poetry audiences for nearly four decades. Translations of Hart’s work have appeared in Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Vietnamese, among other languages, and bear witness to the growing interest in Hart’s poetry both in the United States and abroad. This volume performs a valuable service by bringing together the best of Hart’s work from seven published collections, some of them now out of print, and from his forthcoming book, Barefoot. Wild Track reveals a poet capable of articulating genuine feeling and considerable philosophical depth. This volume confirms Hart’s standing as one of the most sophisticated poets writing today.

Sujets

• América
• Literature
• General officer
• Poetry
• General
• American

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268081805
• Langue: English

Extrait

WILD
New and Selected Poems
TRACK
KEVIN HART
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2015 by Kevin Hart
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu -->
All Rights Reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-268-08180-5
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hart, Kevin, 1954– [Poems. Selections] Wild track : new and selected poems / Kevin Hart. pages ; cm ISBN 978-0-268-01121-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 0-268-01121-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PR9619.3.H3336A6 2015 821'.914—dc23 2014044971 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. -->
for Sarah and Claire
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
The Stone’s Prayer
The Twenty-First Century
The Horizon
Prague, 1968
The Day Shift: Ford Works, London
Three Prayers
The Ten Thousand Things
This Day
Midwinter Summer
Your Shadow
For Marion, My Sister
The Hammer
Sunlight in a Room
The Members of the Orchestra
Your Shadow
Come Back
Your Shadow’s Songs
Summers
The Companion
The Last Day
Poem to the Sun
Gypsophila
Gacela
Approaching Sleep
The Ship
That Bad Summer
Haranguing Death
Facing the Pacific at Night
The Map
“This Stone Is Thinking of Vienna”
“The Present King of France Is Bald”
The Letter
Peniel
Making a Rat
The Historian of Silence
The Black Telephone
The Gift
Her Name
No Easy Thing
The Great Explorers
The Letter
The Room
The Book
Dark Angel
Thinking of David Campbell
The Fragrance of Summer Grass
Brisbane
The Voice of Brisbane
My Mother’s Brisbane
Those White, Ancient Birds
The River
The Calm
Rain
The Word
Beneath the Ode
Wimmera Songs
Nights
Nineteen Songs
“How Hast Thou Counselled Him . . .”
The Bird Is Close
The Little Air
Prayer
My Name
That Life
Snow
Yes
Nights
Amo Te Solo
Here
The Past
Night Music
A Tree
The Mouse
Summer
Birdsong
Colloquies
Next Year
No Guide
March
Prayer
Afternoon
Dark Bird
With You
The Museum of Shadows
Nights
Morning Knowledge
Eurydice
Descartes
Dominique
Fall
Lullaby
Hell Songs
Late Questions in Winter
Winter
Father
Father
Grief
Apart
My Daughters
Tarrawarra
Your Kiss
Sugar
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Poems in this collection have been drawn from The Lines of the Hand (1981), Your Shadow (1984), Peniel (1991), Wicked Heat (1999), Flame Tree: Selected Poems (2002), Young Rain (2008), Morning Knowledge (2011), and a forthcoming book, Barefoot . Some earlier poems have been revised, almost always very lightly. Previously uncollected poems have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education , Commonweal , Humanities Australia , The Sun Herald , and Virginia Quarterly Review .
THE STONE’S PRAYER

Father, I praise you
For the wideness of this your earth, and for the sky
Arched forever over me,
For the sharp rain and the scraping wind
That have carved me from the mountain
And made me smooth as a child’s face.
Accept my praise
For my color, a starless night,
That my width is that between the first two stars of evening
Reflected in the water,
That my quartz flashes like lightning
And reflects the glory of your creation,
That you have seen fit
To place me near a stream and thus to contemplate
The passing of time;
For all that is around me I sing your praise,
For the fierce concentration of ants, their laws,
For all that they tell me about you.
Keep me, I pray, whole,
Unlike the terrible dust and pieces of bone
Cast about in the wind’s great breath, unlike men
Who must suffer change,
Their endless footprints deep as graves;
Keep me in truth, in solitude,
Until the day when you will burst into my heavy soul
And I will shout your name.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

When we arrive there
With our guns, our machinery, our heavy books,
There will be so much to say,
And we will sit down
Over cigars and cognac, and tell our stories
Of minor battles, mirages, times when it seemed
That no one would survive.
And we will talk only about ourselves,
Forgetting our fathers
And all they did, their belief that the future
Was only as good
As their plans for it,
And that we grew to be the same.
Then we can finish our stories in peace,
When the wars
Are no longer ours to fight,
When we no longer have the clenched fists
Of our youth, and our children have inherited
The terrible certainty
That we have ruined all we have been given,
And our hands will be empty,
We will have nothing to give, only our stories
Of how everything we should have held before us
Like a candle
Was lost, forgotten, as we made our way
Across the fields of sadness, walking to the horizon.
THE HORIZON

Whenever you take a step
I am with you leading you meeting your eyes.
I am here at dawn watching
The old priest hurrying to mass
Ready to greet him with my gift of blood.
How easily I shed the clothing
You try to give me
You who cannot bear to see me as I truly am
Your trees mountains buildings I have no time for them.
I was here
Before the world received its hardness,
This entire world could not be conceived
Before the thought of me.
You comfort yourselves,
You say I am only a line never reached
That I do not exist as you do
But none of this is true:
You see only the top line of my head
Beneath that I have the world
With all its fields sun moonlight and rain.
You who hate departures,
You who forever try to shut me out
Listen to me:
Whenever you think of death,
Whenever you enter the room of someone gone from you,
I will be peering through the window.
I will catch you
Even though my net has just one string.
You have no need for mirrors
Who lie to you until it is too late,
Look at me and see the only truth
Your past what you are now
All your future and your only blessing.
PRAGUE, 1968

1
As if the entire population but you
Slipped off the globe at night: so you wake
To find the house empty, the kind of silence
That broods in abandoned aerodromes,
And quicken outside, hoping to find someone
But feel a rifle thrust in your back,
A burst of rapid consonants from behind . . .
It must have come while dreaming. He leads
You off, across the city, past mounds of things
Still burning, tanks blundering down streets
Much faster than you’d think, until the distant
Thunder of orders, tanks, guns, contracts
To a crowded Square where soldiers raise their flag,
Divide men from their meals, open trucks,
Slowly collect your first row, then your second . . .
2
As if you somehow slipped off the globe
During the night: you wake a little early
In a foreign room, your clothes are here
And next door someone is eating noisily.
Terrible things have happened. Outside,
Men are walking to work, sullen as pewter,
You hope no one thinks you different
And quicken past the soldiers at the corner
Fingering their guns that seem so big,
Speaking grudgingly, a winter guttural.
It is too cold for a dream: your breath
Hangs like the clouding smoke from the nearby tank
That points you, with the rest, to the Square.
What is happening? The old man beside you
Is trembling like the edge of a flag.
3
As if you had somehow stepped into a dream
Walking one night through Wenceslas Square,
You see a distant flagpole begin to tilt
Then sweep the sky, some soldiers march past
A balding man who turns into a shadow
And presses against a wall. Now home,
You remember waking early, and seeing
The sky full of mushrooms floating down,
Becoming men with guns once they touch the ground.
After the first week it was not strange,
Not hearing the paper’s dull thud on the porch,
Seeing the tank swiveling its head
While shopping in the Square, the children off school
Playing soldiers in the house all day
And the city bristling with spires and searchlights.
THE DAY SHIFT: FORD WORKS, LONDON

At evening women in scarves return
To council houses with packages
Smelling of vinegar while their slim daughters
Fiddle with their hair
In shop windows that have become mirrors
As the street lights come on
About the Works,
The gray factual buildings beyond all change
Where, as the sky now deepens,
After all these years, with the smell of grease
I re