Gaze
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About this ebook
FINALIST FOR THE RILKE PRIZE
Christopher Howell’s haunted and haunting Gaze is a collection of counterpoints, swinging between moments of delicate connection and striking brutality. Howell explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangled, the past living on inside us as we live in the physical world around us, and he reminds us how loss releases us into the present—how in the process of living, “everybody pays.”
Gaze is divided into three sections, focusing successively on the objective world, the world of the inner life, and finally on the “other world” of the imagination and alternate reality. The author speaks through his own voice as well as the voices of other characters, ghosts, and creatures, coming together to question and explore our perception of the world. Shifting between lyric and narrative, these poems proceed incrementally and with humility, offering a bewitching and deeply felt wisdom.
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Gaze - Christopher Howell
PART I
VIEW FROM THE AFTERLIFE
And if you should die, are you not certain of reawaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.
André Breton
Home Stretch
I’m coming home, but it’s a long way. In fact
when I finally arrive they’ll be snapping
my picture and shrugging it all over the neighborhood’s
raised eyebrows, calling me That One Who Only
Resembles. Every few minutes someone will ask,
Can I help you?
But I’m coming home, mud and birdsong
buttering my blamelessly cloud-like steed, saddlebags
weeping with souvenirs from Beyond the world,
surely.
Surely I’ll be home to my sparrow bone memory house
shaking its flags of welcome like the unknown
language of judas trees calling an empty room
to attention. Eventually the mayor will want to know
what I’ve forgotten and just who do I think he is?
And I’ll put on a beautiful headdress and walk out
on the lily pads, just as I always incredibly intended.
I’ll keep saying, "Receive me. Here are my silver
wings, in accordance with custom. Inside of them
leaves have been falling all these years."
Gaze
I gaze through glass
at the red maple by the garage
and the bird feeder
empty of birds.
What is the meaning of life?
Cisco and Pancho are laughing
as they ride, flinging back
their sombreros. The ridiculous
and somber Lone Ranger
fills me with love.
My mother walks through wind
to the clothesline
and I am happily no one
I need to know
trotting up the path
between orchards in a blue
cowboy hat.
I gaze again. The clouds are silver
stallions above foothills of the Cascades
east of us. There’s my mother
again, leaning down to pet the dog,
straightening, shading her eyes
to view the clouds, a stampede
of laundry-like meaning
at which she shrugs.
First Touch
After the movie, the garden golf,
coffee, and long soulful walk,
after the alternating daisy petals
of elation dejection elation, we stood
in the klieg lights on her front porch.
I could hear through the door
the ox-like breathing of her father
poised to fling it wide and pounce.
From the roundness of her green eyes
I could tell she heard it too.
But inside us some kind of execution
was on the way, and we were its last meal,
our mouths beginning to know this
and to open, slightly and drift toward each other
like clouds.
We had been kissing for months.
This kiss was not that
country, this one
had nothing to do with gratitude
or the sort of evening we had had
or expectation
or revenge against parents and the church
or even curiosity.
It was the exclusivity of desire, the dizzy
mutually sudden focus of our young neurons
driving us onto a single unrepeatable moment
of physical revelation fused to a steam
of lips and tongues and interpenetrating breath.
When at last we disengaged from that
eternity, still
holding me, she turned her back to the door, took
my hand and, in a gesture ceremonially exact, placed it
upon her