The Garden of Verse: Words That Roll Through These Marvelous Poems About Bicycles, Hard Times, and 'Guys Like Us'

Some poems make music; some words just work together. These virtues are on display in many of the fine poems appearing in the January 2018 issues of Verse-Virtual, the online poetry journal.

            As, for example, in these lines by William Greenway in his poem "as she watches through the window":

...There are kids, I guess,
who live in a money-feathered nest
of Magic Kingdoms, Disney days
and firework princess nights,
the jingle-belled hooves and snowy thump
of Santa’s’ boots on the roof, every day
three-rings of enchantment until, inevitably,
the circus leaves town.

"Jingle-belled hooves," a musical combination in itself, grooves our ears for the flowing long vowels of 'boots' and 'roof .' And the phrase "boots on the roof" ring in the ear just a like a "snowy thump."

             The language in Greenway's poem "At the Writers Conference" -- a lament that captures the essence of any 'big name' conference (writing or otherwise) I've ever attended -- effectively conveys the poem's sense of the event:

Finally, all this hoopla and high-mindedness
came down to a lobster roll and some tandoori chicken
for this hick from the sticks and the tapped-out steel mills.

 'Hoopla' and 'tandoori chicken' strike me as the kind of words just aching to get into a poem on an oversold event. And the third of these three lines rolls at a pace and rhythm that a 'stick' might make 'tapping' its way home to the mills -- a folksy, fitting sound.  

            In Linda Fischer's "Digression," the magic lies in images that are just right to convey a wintry grinding down sensation. After whacking the snow off her conifers, the poet asks:

...What
would it take for the geese to change
their course mid-flight, the wind
swallow their cries and plow
them back to a creek swollen
with early snow?  Or the sap
to gather itself for one last
shudder before the darkening day
surrenders to one long night? 

            The implicit answer, it appears, is 'nothing we could ever do.' The geese will not change their course, and the sap no longer flows.

            In Christine Gelineau's "Nothing To It," the language of the lines below sounds to me just right for the sensation they're talking about: the temptation (and appeal) of the unforgiving gesture, the burned bridge.

Demolition is the instant payoff
—volatile, thrilling, an aphrodisiac
of power.

In contrast, building something up has a stop-and-go pace. as the words in the next lines suggest:
                   Creation drags along
in slo-mo, a chick flick
of unfolding and relationships

And the language of the lines that follow illustrate their meaning by their own aural attractiveness:

how we’re drawn to the swing, the bang,
the rubble, rubbernecking by the wreck 

This final observation serving as the perfect summary of the lure of 'rubbernecking':

as if we thought
obliteration was some kind
of an accomplishment.  

            Sydney Lea's "1959" is an affecting poem about the power of certain moments to stay with us forever not because anything particularly wonderful has happened, but because their meaning cannot be captured by any clear message or storyline: they don't lead to happy endings, or new beginnings, or obvious crises, or moments of decision in which we take the right course, or the wrong one. They are simply (but also complexly) so real:

If I could just stay right there like that on that bench.
Those slight waves lisping. That gravel strand.
St. Jean de Luz. That breeze and mollusky stench.
That sun melting on the far Low Pyrenees.
If the people around me could just keep keeping quiet
like that, not because the music was good
                                    but because it was long and awful

Sometimes -- this poem says to me -- people, or nature, or the world, or our own minds do manage, in this poem's superbly apt phrase, to "keep keeping quiet."

            Another apt expression, "guys like us," appears in the poem of that name by Alan Walowitz. After a student is killed by a policeman in a minority neighborhood where the speaker teaches school, a previously friendly student begins to draw away:

I swear I saw him eyeing me each afternoon
as the cops escorted us to our cars which would take us home,
to a neighborhood safe for guys like us.

It's the 'the cops' escorting the teachers to their cars to go home to a 'safe' neighborhood that got to me. Though I was never faced with running that sort of gauntlet, I know I'm one of those 'guys like us.'

            In a poem about the pleasures of cycling, "A Bicycle Poem" by Robert Wexelblatt, lines like these below convey the speed and pleasure and sensation of freedom involved in the ride.  

Earbuds pumping out Brahms’ Second Serenade
or Soler’s Fandango as you outstrip mosquitos
on a Sunday morning—a moving Mass, solitary
Sabbath—biking past the SUVs arrayed outside
St. Aiden’s, communing with I-Pod, sky, and road,
the Camelbak preserving cold, sacramental water,
knees, hips, and muscles all in proper working order:
on the seventh day you pedaled and it was good.

All these elements, the pumping music (suggesting, of course, the petal-pumping muscles), leaving the heavy vehicles behind, the 'cold, sacramental water' of the biker-geeky Camelbak bottle, the glancing spiritual references, go together to sell the truth of the last line. We may at some moments in our life, this poem tells us, to be the god of our experience. And when that happens, as the poem persuades us, it surely is good.

             What a ride poems like these offer us.

             See these and more at http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html