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    Selected and New Poems
    Selected and New Poems
    Selected and New Poems
    Ebook253 pages2 hours

    Selected and New Poems

    By H. D. Wagener

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    About this ebook

    The poetry of H. D. Wagener has been written from several perspectives, including the skeptical Western scientist. an expatriate from the old South, an emigrant to Maine, and a long-term student of a Hindu age. Now, he presents this new compilation, sharing his best work from previous collections, plus his inspiring new poems.

    Including poems from The Entire Packet and Gleanings and Giftings, Selected and New Poems follows Wageners evolution as he travels the eastern seaboard and experiences eye-opening life changes. Using primarily free verse, Wagener provides his wisdom on man and mans relation to physical and spiritual reality.

    The collection is eclectic, and follows a broad range of themes and subjects, from academic or metaphysical to the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany. In the midst of this, he travels to his own memory of a 1954 Chevy and a lost love. Intended to entertain and enliven, Wageners poems paint life in bright colors.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateJun 27, 2012
    ISBN9781475928396
    Selected and New Poems
    Author

    H. D. Wagener

    H. D. WAGENER has written poetry on physical and spiritual reality for thirty years, beginning with his stint as a teacher and consultant in geology. He now lives in Portland, Maine, with his third wife, Marion Lundgren. His children are scattered from Maine to New York to California.

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      Book preview

      Selected and New Poems - H. D. Wagener

      Copyright © 2012 by H. D. Wagener

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-2838-9 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-2839-6 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2012909137

      iUniverse rev. date: 6/18/2012

      Contents

      Preface

      Part 1: Poems from the Entire Packet

      Rain on Friday Afternoon

      Cape Elizabeth

      Barrier Island

      April

      …. all that lot of land with the two-story wooden house thereon, distinguished in a plat of these lots duly recorded by the No. 1, bounded and bordered by ….

      Winter Swash

      Waterfall

      Primer on Oscillographic Lines in Walls of Marble Toilet Stalls

      Interstate 26

      A Rhombohedron of Calcium Carbonate

      Forty-acre Rock

      Class Break

      Clifford Eubanks

      The Nameless Messenger

      Classic

      Architecture 201

      Evelyn Absalom

      The Cleric of Clinton Avenue

      I Have Observed

      Decision

      Fragment

      How the Deck is Stacked

      The Floor of the Indian Ocean

      Truth/Self/self

      Easter Message

      Escher and the Night

      Before the Race

      Stroke

      Edging from the Unreal Toward the Real

      Narrative and Psalm

      Christmas Day

      Eightball

      Summer Concert in the Square

      A Two-dimensional Fragment of the Universe

      Pete and the Cap’n

      Essay: Modern Mythology

      September 18, 2001

      Two Photographs

      Glory in the Grass

      The Predation of Innocence

      Perspective

      Essay on Nothing New

      Effacing the Separate Ego in Performing Schumann

      Mantrum Walk

      Meeting the Master

      The Rosenstrasse Protest

      Nikolai

      Fear Dreams

      Bottom Fishing

      Maximilian Mary Kolbe

      Self-Reliance

      The Latter Part of Spring

      Silence

      Elizabeth Leddy

      Cumberland County, Maine

      The Maiden

      March 20, 2003

      The Purposes of Patterns

      On Being Sketched

      West Bank, Palestine, 2003

      Herb

      The Secret of Work

      Ramana Maharshi’s Question

      Yeshua Ben Miriam Converses with Saul of Tarsus

      Bowing to You

      Part 2: Poems from Gleanings and Giftings

      The Apostles’ Creed

      Graffiti

      Low Priority

      Homo Faber

      Augustine and Einstein

      Contemplating Marion

      Acceptance

      Change

      Pigeon Class

      Bat Mitzvah

      A Display of Nineteenth-Century Glass

      Flights of Reverberation

      Therapy Session

      Ray Charles

      Prenatal State

      February Sunrise

      Dinner at the Brunswick Diner

      American Legacy

      Ruth Farabee Clark

      Darkness and Light

      The Pulling

      In a Photograph

      The Tower of Emptiness

      That Which Is

      Speculation

      Street Ball

      Healing the Thumb

      A Replacement for Hanley Denning

      Gleanings and Giftings

      Photograph on the Prairie

      Epiphany of a Physicist

      Euclidian and Other Dreams

      Girl Child

      Lesson in Patience in April

      J. Sherrard Rice, Churchman

      Intelligent Design

      Luna

      God Is

      Cards and Other Games

      Bringers of New Things

      August Morning

      Part 3: New Poems

      Bicycle Trellis

      The In Is the Out

      Moran’s Market

      Inventory

      I Speak As One Guilty

      Fran Steals the Peas

      How to Accept that Fran Stole the Peas?

      To Myself at Age Four in a Family Photograph on the Lawn Above the Rappahannock

      Night

      Zip

      Celebration

      Gleanings and Giftings

      Still Life: Juxtaposed Antitheses

      After the Movie

      The Storm of Life

      Disembodied Dynamics

      Eknath Easwaran

      The Techies

      In God We Trust

      The Birds

      The Brain and God

      Motiveless Malignity

      Thought Beyond Thought

      Train Lines

      John Woolman Walked Among my Predecessors in Virginia, 1757

      Last Stop Before Home

      Preface

      The poems in Parts 1 and 2 are what remains of the author’s first two books of poetry, after the removal of a few poems thought objectionable by some, and others found dispensable by the author. The remainder is an excellent and comprehensive representation of the author’s poetic work to date.

      The new poems offered here are the retainable poems written subsequent to the publication of Gleanings and Giftings. The author’s intent prior to writing the last half dozen or so of these was to determine how close to an expression of the nature of That Which Is (which most call God) one could get by using an intellectual process; the writing of poetry. The answer soon became apparent: not close at all. God (or That Which Is) lies beyond the bailiwick of the intellect, and thus of theology. The author, therefore, would try a new tack, but none is available. If the author should have an experience of That Which Is, this would, of course, be inexpressible. We are back at the beginning, and you are on your own.

      Part 1:

      Poems from the Entire Packet

      Rain on Friday Afternoon

      Rain wets the chilled wind.

      Bathers desert the boardwalk.

      Strollers disappear.

      A woman walks in the wind

      wet hair blowing.

      She and the surf and the wind are one.

      Beneath the boardwalk

      a pebble drops from concrete

      leaving a chink.

      A hairline crack in the seawall

      darts another quarter of an inch.

      Cape Elizabeth

      Lashing with spray and salt-tinged sheets of rain

      pounding the headland with cobbles

      the gale struggled with bench and cliff

      half the night, all day, half the night again.

      In an afternoon break in the rain

      we fought the wind to the cliff head.

      Feet braced on rock, facing violent water

      we lay upon the wind

      and took great drafts of life

      while the bench encroached

      upon our everyday remoteness from the sea

      and the crescent in the cove received new sand

      the salt of our reliance on the land.

      Barrier Island

      With inaudible rustle

      or stinging whisper

      sand scuds in the wind

      from drifting shoals

      to the dune line, and rests.

      Advance of the flood enlarges upon

      or sweeps to sea work of the wind.

      The slipping ebb bares on its flanks

      a muddied reef, barren shoals

      and a scattering of the dying.

      The wind whines and moans.

      Water explodes against retreating dunes

      and claws the mud-lump roots of marsh.

      The wind subsides but the still-familiar

      shoreline lies transformed.

      Land owners are discomfited.

      Their stick-legged cabins crowd the dunes.

      Their music shatters the whispering

      rushing, vastness of the night.

      With pilings, timber and iron bolts

      they dam the flooding sand.

      Quartz, glittering mica, black sand trailing yellow

      sand-sized fragments of the dead

      each takes and then relinquishes its place

      as shoal and dune line drift apace as one.

      The timber bolts will follow

      and corrode, as the wind rises

      the shoal whitens, the dead collect

      in heaps behind the strand.

      The wind falls, the dead whiten, the sand drifts.

      April

      Black

      trunk of oak

      gray-green

      splotch of lichen.

      Trash of woodpile

      splintered

      scattered

      flat.

      Khaki lawn grass

      patch of green.

      Earth

      flat black

      puddled.

      Sharp

      line of wall

      length of log.

      Packed, brown

      leaves of woods

      ruffled.

      Splash of traffic

      drip of eaves;

      cold.

      …. all that lot of land with the two-story wooden house thereon, distinguished in a plat of these lots duly recorded by the No. 1, bounded and bordered by ….

      wrinkled pane

      thin-worn treadle

      hand-blown cut glass

      tarnished metal

      brick-up cistern

      ivy-smothered

      opal bottles

      undiscovered.

      Winter Swash

      Tiny tidal bores

      lap over

      as coverlets

      in haste

      to shield

      them-

      selves against the cold.

      Waterfall

      Forty-thousand gallons a minute

      rip into the rock below

      excavate a pool in which to plunge

      then blackly boil along downstream

      as though the river were an afterthought.

      Primer on Oscillographic Lines

      in Walls of Marble Toilet Stalls

      Water and Light

      Light sparkled in a shallow sea.

      Oscillations of swells

      and white-topped turbulence

      cycled oxygen to the bottom

      where brachiopods extracted

      from the water calcium

      for valves of the carbonate of calcium.

      Storm surges darkened the water.

      Titanic seas bulldozed stunned brachiopods

      into malodorous heaps.

      Shells clacked emptily together.

      Fragments were distributed uniformly

      over the planed remains of older heaps

      that was then the floor of the sea.

      Generations buried preceding generations

      under the accumulations of their existence

      until the sea floor sagged beneath them.

      Water

      Beneath a hundred million years

      of dead weight of fragmented shells

      fragments dissolved at contact points

      precipitated in voids as interlocking crystals

      and vast accumulations

      of broken brachiopods became rock.

      Water squeezed along planar invertebrate generations

      irregularly dissolving mottled rock

      leaving behind on the now oscillographic seams

      insoluble residua: feces of brachiopods;

      carbon from the soft parts;

      terrestrial and cosmic dust.

      Darkness

      Having quarried, cut and polished a miracle

      we sit in semi-darkness, scratching obscenities

      across the marbled face of Earth.

      Interstate 26

      I

      The meadow that reaches from spring to winter

      beckons, with quilts and tufts of flowers

      and concrete warping skyward

      as leaves regress into buds.

      II

      In heavy warmth of lowland spring in early afternoon

      a man blacker than the loam turned by any harrow

      plows and sweats behind a mule.

      In the shadow of a lean-to

      half a mile away beside the access road

      his wife weaves sweet grass into baskets.

      Children disperse from a school bus

      like ants from a kicked mound.

      Three of assorted ages amble through wisteria

      arched in bloom and leaf

      and thump across a loose-plank porch

      to the cool interior of the plowman’s house

      where Jesus, framed in gold

      hangs alone on dark walls.

      They head for an icebox

      of yellowed enamel, rough from scrubbing

      down colored sugar water

      cavort briefly in front-room shadows

      and report to the weaving shed.

      They will not see their father before dark.

      III

      A wisp of dust, rising beyond the arc

      of a swell in grain land

      traces the course of a tractor.

      The tires will dwarf the driver’s children

      when they engulf him at the barn at evening.

      But now, in the late afternoon

      of dogwood and red bud time

      two children play at homework;

      a third idles talent at the piano.

      A hired cook prepares the evening meal

      over which the driver’s wife will preside

      making it her own.

      IV

      Mists billow and cling to the ridge crest.

      Black crags rend a lace of whitened twigs.

      In a trough in the sea of ridges, a man

      bent and frosted as the twigs

      works his mule and plow around a rock

      he would have carted off not twenty years before.

      In a cabin crimped into a flat between ridge and creek

      his wife unseals the last jar of blackberry jam

      and muses; the children would have been upset

      at running out of jelly stores before the first buds open.

      She calls her husband in

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