The Next Day in Babel and Other Poems
by William Welch
Poem for Jane Kenyon
I am not a dog person, but sometimes I wish there was one in my life, a mutt part hound, maybe part retriever, who would go with me on walks along the village outskirts—up that road past Scudder’s house, up that hill, and into the woods. There’s a clearing near the summit, a plateau of gravel, where the town DOT dumps leaves and lawn debris every year. A favorite spot for the turkeys come early September, before hunting season opens, I’ve seen there flocks of twenty birds or more moving in and out of the valleys between hills of mulch. Good for them, no dog is here now, just this odd man looking for a more perfect way of being alone, who thinks a dog would help with that, a dog who has just a little bit of melancholy in his eyes, but enough slobber and smile to still seem happy. A dog who has every ounce of curiosity he was born with intact, married to an almost human intuition… My own has been telling me for weeks there is something wrong. Not wrong… it’s like cutting into an onion and finding the green sprout has begun in its center. At work, one of the nurses told a story about how her friend had a Freudian slip— instead of saying, how’s your brother, she asked how’s your baby? A week later, the woman learned she was pregnant. As in all things, what I have is the imperfect, a partial solitude, a piecemeal sense of where I am. A view of ten feet, at most, into the forest, framed by close-ups of New England asters, and goldenrod. And, along with the turkeys, courage, and a clear awareness that between staying out in the open where there may be food, taking cover in the woods, where there isn’t, and crossing back and forth like a shuttle through a loom, not many good alternatives are left.
Weather Makers
This is vandalism, the way these lake effect clouds steal the sunlight, how they tag houses with a graffiti of ice… It’s part of residing near Ontario and Erie, like living with a pair of rowdy boys who enjoy pranking the neighborhood with two feet of snow. I picture the lakes that way—two kids, two sons of immigrants indentured in the old knitting mills, like my grandfather and his brother, a duo brought up on potatoes, onions, and trouble, who metabolized their corned beef into mischief. They were the weather makers in their village. All the boys were proud of the chaos they caused—how they filched their mother’s clotheslines to knot together into one long rope they strung between telephone poles on either side of the trolley rails— how they taunted the conductor as their trip line knocked the power cable off its guide wire and the trolley blinked and stalled, and rolled backward down a hill—how they hauled a wagon full of manure onto the butcher shop’s roof. They were blizzards, those boys, they were hurricanes in their telling, sixty years later. A very different kind of boy listened to them, and supposed he was not a force of nature the way they were. In the evenings, he would lie on the floor with watercolors and a brush, watching the capillary action pull his aquamarines and indigos through the thin paper, wondering why water behaved that way, uninhibited and willful, as though it were alive, as though each drop was its own sea, full of fish, full of storms. And the wind-jammers he saw sailing on those oceans were well-trimmed vessels. Sailors crawled like ants along the rigging—the captain stood with his sextant measuring latitude and longitude, planning the ship’s route through the uncharted territory of this boy’s world, while in the crow’s nest the lookout cried in excitement and terror as he pointed up to that face in the clouds, and that hand stirring the sky, making it rain.
My Cherry Trees
This must be instinctual, this human impulse to build our homes at the base of some pyramidal hill swathed with berry brambles and choke cherries— to copy the shape of the land and call it architecture, to raise cairns and gables. Maybe it’s the surest sign that we are mammals— we like to dig a little dirt and make our dens, we love places where the earth mounds… Such were my thoughts driving home last night. Across the valley, I could see Smith Hill, distinct compared with the other high ground rising east and west, north and south from the valley floor, shaped like the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, or the mountain above Wādī e‑Mulūk. And at the summit, rising into the air, the four signal antennas of the local television stations, illuminated with red lights, glowed and pulsed in the darkness. My Cherry Trees, I call them. They are to the Mohawk Valley what Eiffel Tower is to Paris, or that big chrome arch is to St. Louis— essential landmarks—concentrated, fierce attempts at abstraction, so far removed from nature, they seem to define it, the way Cy Twombly’s splatters and pencil scribbles define the soul. As I turned onto my street, I saw the post officer, who was working late, trudge through the snow wearing a miner’s lamp on his head, taking big steps, as though he was counting out his paces to measure the length of a tunnel; I saw the avenue lined with houses, as square and tight as bee boxes in an orchard; I saw my cherry trees ripening and dropping fruit by the bushel-full. After ten years of wandering, I found this place. After thirty, this is where I decided to drive myself crazy, counting sixteenths and eighths, mixing water and dust together into mud, fighting with brushes for a straight line, pounding nails, wondering why nothing in my life is ever level… why the autumn fruits bruise so easily, why the winter fruits are sour, and why the fruits of summer always form around a stone.
Missed Chances
The vegetable garden is overgrown with grass that comes up in heavy clumps. Roots, shaken free of dirt, are as fine as hair, but damp and cool. While I work, I’m almost sorry to watch the raw earth dry, and remind myself this could have been my livelihood ten years ago, if I had made a different choice. One summer I saw an advertisement in the paper: “Wanted, Cemetery Grounds Keeper.” My missed chance, as grandpa would have said, his tongue-in-cheek so serious people mistook jest for remorse… After the war in Europe, he found employment in a hardware store, but every so often in old age liked to quip, “To think, I could have been an undertaker…” Maybe he did mean it, thinking of the money a mortician earns—and it’s true, someone offered him a job. Or maybe he was keeping track of every death he caused, humor his solace. He always warned me against false patriotism. He said, “boy, never join the army.” My choice to become a nurse took both of us by surprise, but now it seems to me like part of a cycle of reparation. He knew his lifetime was not enough to make amends for four years of soldier’s work. A judge within him gaveled the sentence— repentance, paid out over three generations. Lifting the grass, eerily like a scalp, I don’t think my grandfather could have done that job, even if he tried. There must be a limit to how many bodies one man can bury. It’s like radiation. Once you’ve reached maximum exposure, you can’t take more. But there are no lead shields to wear when handling human flesh. It doesn’t matter what protection you use— sangfroid, faith in some sort of god, a meaning we can intuit, if not understand— you have to look into a person’s face. For my grandfather, the geiger count was too high. As for my shot at landscaping—I know it seemed romantic at the time. After reading so much Whitman, and wandering through old graveyards, wondering who Mrs. Weller was, and whether the angel praying over her pled an easy case, or begged to be let off the plinth, I thought I’d like something a little macabre, but it wouldn’t have worked out. All this dark grass growing from the roofs of mouths… I would have wanted to stand still and listen to what it had to say, to let it keep growing until the field was full of voices… I would have been fired before the end of June.
The Next Day in Babel
Turkey vultures circle over the woodlot each morning, only once or twice flapping their wings—black with white bands, their primary feathers upturned, splayed like fingers. They teeter as they double back in a motion like the slow-twisting rise of smoke, or liquid spun in a tall glass by long-handled spoons… He doesn’t know what to call it, but something in his chest wheels upward that way—moving with a current— leisurely some days, on others, storm-fretted and terrifying… Often, as he watches those scavengers gain altitude with each turn, he thinks of how the birds look like angels in a medieval painting, soaring over the ruins of Babel, while men on the ground point at them in anger… That morning, when the people of the city woke, they could not recognize the speech of their wives or children. Their closest friends no longer understood anything they said. But more disorienting than the confusion and misunderstanding was how their own voices had changed. They spat out words the way you would gnats that flew into your mouth, and not one of them sounded the way they knew it should. It was as if each person had survived a stroke that made talking impossible. He knew a man in the hospital who had suffered this way. Whenever his lips parted— they drooped slightly to the right—his voice flickered in his throat like a candle flame, guttering, about to go out. And to help this man, he had to find a way to listen to what the man did not say. They sat alone together in a room. He felt thrust upward as the spiraling current in him tightened around its axis. Every word that crossed his tongue he tried to hear the way he thought this man, who could not respond, might hear it. Word by word, the pain of trying to speak became severe enough to make the anguish of silence comfortable. Imagine, he thought, if suddenly, without warning, without explanation, you were unable to say “water,” or “bread.” If you couldn’t remember the word, “help.” The next day in Babel, after people adjusted to the quiet, everyone started all over again learning to express their simplest thoughts. He stood watching those angels revolve in unison over the ruins of his city. And he called them leaves torn from an old book, and called them black petals blown loose from the flowerhead of the sun… Knowing he was wrong. Knowing there are different words for everything he sees, for who he is, and for that motion… Knowing he used to possess those words…
William Welch lives in Utica, NY where he works as a registered nurse. His poetry has appeared in various journals, including Little Patuxent Review, Stone Canoe, Rust+Moth, and Cider Press Review, and his collection Adding Saffron (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming in 2025. He edits Doubly Mad (doublymad.org) and maintains a website of his own, willimafwelch.com.
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