Returning home

The dictionary says the word nostalgia is rooted in the Greek for homesickness, and though often it has taken on a negative pallor I marvel at poems that take me back.
Like this one by Thomas Lux, which I found while re-reading the story "Winky" by George Saunders, which appeared in The New Yorker. Lux's poem appeared in the middle of it.

Refrigerator, 1957


More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.


The thing is, the Perillos had that same jar of cherries.

Vogelsang

There's much to read in this world, and I've finally allowed myself to accept my tastes in poetry, which are somewhat old-fashioned and perhaps put too much emphasis on intelligibility--instead of making myself feel compelled to pursue the vogue. I've read somewhere that someone, perhaps Billy Collins, suggested that the word "accessible" be laid aside in favor of "hospitable"--now this would be an appalling switch. Though "accessible" has become tainted, the uncoolest adjective among the uncool,it usually connotes what Marianne Moore called "plain old English that dogs and cats could understand." Hospitable, on the other hand, carries the whiff of wanting to be liked, to make nice, to not ruffle any feathers. In my own work I do want to talk to the dogs and cats but I want them to be ruffled.

The book that's given me the most pleasure recently is Arthur Vogelsang's collected poems, Expedition. The language is plain, or plain-ish, and yet the poems are at the same time quite loopy and weird. Here is one:

Help

Lay down beside me I signaled to my wolf
Three pats of the sofa in the early morn
Then two pats of the heart to say why.
He did it silently, no reply when one does
What's to do. I must rest my hand on you
For a while for the usual reasons. This
Is easy to say between wolves or wolves and people
And difficult between people. For instance
A person might not want to absorb by touch another's pain
Then. The wolf loves to. The person might say
Oh all right, but clearly a burden to ease another's pain.
If you keep a wolf, there isn't much more they do
But they are specially good at it
Like the surf loves to be splashed with a whole bottle of poison water,
Try that and see if the waves don't turn over embracing without end,
Try that and see if you can find any poison after two seconds,
Or slowly slide your fingers through the first layer
Of your wolf's coat to the second layer and move fingers
Head to tail, tail to head, slower than slowly.
Anything could have happened to you yesterday
And you'd soon be okay. But first get a wolf.