County LInes: The Poetry of Sacramento
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County Lines: The Poetry of Sacramento, by Bob Stanley, Sacramento Poet Laureate, 2009-11
County Lines will feature a local poet each week. As poet laureate of Sacramento city and county, I want to publicize the work of many fine writers that call Sacramento home. If you have comments or suggestions, or want to be considered for the County Lines series, please contact me at Bob Stanley.
WEEK 30: August 9, 2010
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SCOTT WEISS
Scott Weiss knows the art of developing an extended metaphor – keeping the poem both with a foot in the story and a foot in the corresponding comparison. In Folding Laundry, we see a couple quietly working together folding clothes and somehow folding themselves at the same time, yet we can follow the dual thread, the images work together as well:
faces and fabric have/ wrinkles in common
The extended metaphor and quick turns of phrase keep the reader involved, and the images tell the story:
the weave we have become/ through the years like threads /frayed and discolored.
These three poems of Scott’s balance solemnity with beauty as well, as the narrator often stops short of celebration – finding only temporary solace in moments of lucidity as in Elegy for a Sunday Afternoon.
streaks
of new grass fight through
the dull dead of the past in tender
filaments of green as the breeze
bends the slender ends of citrus
limbs…
And take some time reading Weiss’s long narrative poem Pandemonium Found, where the rich detail casts a glow on an industrial life story. To this reader, this piece is something of a magnum opus – it shows a poet who has something to say. Enjoy the work of Scott Weiss.
Scott Weiss’s poetry has appeared in the journal, Poetalk, on the Web at amphibi.us, and is forthcoming in Chopper Poetry Journal and The Battered Suitcase. His fiction has appeared in the online publication, Crash, at http://cra.sh/. He lives with his wife Brenda in Sacramento, California, where he earned a degree in English from Sacramento State University, and where he now writes fiction and poetry and works as a technical writer. He also serves as an associate editor of Convergence: an Online Journal of Poetry and Art, which can be found on the Web at http://www.convergence-journal.com.
SCOTT'S POETRY
FOLDING LAUNDRY
Saturday night and
faces and fabric have
wrinkles in common
the weave we have become
through the years like threads
frayed and discolored
relaxed with warmth and
pliant to nimble fingers
in these intricate hours
the two of us turning
each other’s clothes like secrets
between us into an order
we have assembled
creases pressed smooth
enough to endure
the closeted ages ahead.
ELEGY FOR A SUNDAY AFTERNOON
Waiting for spring on a disappearing
Sunday afternoon as the shadows
steal away my heat while she
knits in gray, and the music peaks
and lulls and peaks; and cool streaks
of new grass fight through
the dull dead of the past in tender
filaments of green as the breeze
bends the slender ends of citrus
limbs; and smoke flows in neat
beams from her parted lips and ascends,
forgotten, from the cigarette’s tip,
while birds defend with wing-wrought
rage their right to the seed she
has left them; I write
through the day’s remaining light and we
share a glance of concern—assured
that Monday sits on time’s horizon
like the return of a somber solstice,
prepared to turn this fleeting freedom
into another lifeless season.
PANDEMONIUM FOUND
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
John Milton—Paradise Lost
I was nine when I first found
the foreman
at the Pentecostal church
he’d long attended where he spent his nights
and his weeks began and ended with the sounds
of hand-clapped song and the rapid fire
of God-lit tongues.
Now seventeen and freshly fired
a wife at home with first-born child
a son just two months old I find
a job that older men won’t hold for long
in a town where sun-bright gold runs
snake-veined through the mines below
the pine-fringed skirt of horizon hills
and here I find him in his mill
this foreman melting rust-cold
scrap-iron into finished steel.
The foundry sits unnoticed
fallen from the pretty streets above
to sloping smoke-stained silver-black
back-alley corrugation and the lesser-demon
denizens of a workday and its chains
adamantine-made of obligation.
If I’m here by fate
or by Hephaestus’ will
I’ll never know
living in an alloyed state
of man-boy mind fluid
as star-hot steel
and the sweat seeps lean
over muscle new-made in all this boil
and milling by machine I’m
here to grind the steel and gnash
away at hours and days
while bright-hot gnats
of shredded metal swarm
my arms and eat away
long sleeves
and the sometime smell of my own flesh
micro-cooked
rises hot around the bend
of plastic shield that covers
the fragile glass of my eyes.
But vision only gives a firsthand look
at hell
so fearing for my soul
I pass the time by memorizing scripture
while all around sparks dance the floor—
light-footed imps across the concrete’s cracks.
Just how many fingers
are nearly lost these five years here
I’ll never know—a sleeve or gloved hand
catches quick in the grindstone’s
heavy-wheel pedestaled spin
reflex
arm-jerk-heart-race-breath-rushed
relief
the hand preserved for the fleet-fingered sins
of fretboards in the off hours
of another day.
The ex-sailor close-by wears
sea-leathered skin and smokes
and welds and weld-smokes again
the cigarette dangling spastic in his lips
as he swears and jokes
in stories with neat quips like
young dumb and full of cum
and I can only laugh along
no stories of my own to tell.
Across the way
Van Halen on the radio
plays Runnin’ With The Devil
as muscled men make molds of sand
to hold the heat of steel
in degrees
poured hot by the thousands.
O, Milton—your Satan never had a life
so sweet.
On breaks men talk politics
and goodness of Reagan evil
of Democrats like the little
woman who raised me hating
Nixon.
A furnace fires
and chews scrap-iron
in great electric groans
raises a trio of goat-like
giant horns—
alternating probes that rise
and fall through its roof
and touch metal to a roaring arc—
spurts its white-bright bile
in molten spittle through the man-wide
hatch where the foreman adds to
prods
and goads his steel
to a glowing stew.
A second furnace
bellows gas-flamed
heat and kisses
the castings within to a devil’s
glowing red-orange-yellow
till I pull them whole
with quick-quenched hisses
into the cool swallow
of water below
steel shocked hard to temper
then the liquid boils
and billows.
Days always end
my nostrils thick with soot and sand
no matter which mask is worn
young hardened hands
like a heat-baked desert’s
dry-cracked land
but five o’clock redemption forges
a smile upon the foreman’s lips
and he lifts his filthy hardhat and
with a wrist wipes sweat
that glistens like thirty years’
tears of contrition
upon his blackened face
and he blinks
smooth eyes
polished and blue
his mind in its own place
and making hell
his heaven.
