Roger Mitchell


FORTY YEARS LATER

I went looking in places I had known 
long ago for things I no longer had.
I thought it was the place that had these things
when it was probably something else, the time
perhaps, though what was that time? Or the time
in my life and the lives of those near me.
Of all these things, and I can’t remember
much of them now, it was only the place
that was still there, the huge changes wrought by
affluence and the population bomb
having been more or less contained, held back,
by the remoteness of the place, mountains
mostly, the long winters, and some old laws
from the nineteenth century that said no
to a number of man’s more unlovely
impulses like running a highway up
a mountain, which they have done, of course. Man
(and I mean “people” here) is a busy
and relentless creature interested more
in his busyness and relentlessness
than–well–than he should be. What should we be
interested in? What should we be, at all,
period? I’m not sure that was a part
of what I thought I had on my mind, but
I find there is almost always a gap
between what we think is on our mind and
what is. What is on our mind is often
not “on” it all but underneath somewhere,
or around back. You may think I’m kidding,
but last week the Dalai Lama was in town.
I’m not a terribly Buddhist person,
but I know a few and admire them all.
Between what we think is on our mind and 
what we want to be on it lies the rub. 
Or between the price of asparagus
and our hunger. Or between you and me.
Whoever “you” might be, or whatever
you might think about the Dalai Lama.
It took a while, but I got my nerve up
to go out and stand around by the gate
and try to look a little Buddhist. Or,
serious in some impishly wise way.
I don’t think I succeeded, but I bought
a yakbone bracelet from a Tibetan
or Mongolian, I’m not sure which,
a nice man from Massachusetts who complained,
accurately, of the unholy heat.
Jesus, it’s hot, he said. Maybe I said it.
Whoever said it should have left Jesus
out of it, but they were damn well correct
about the intensity of the sun.
That’s all gone now, as is His Holiness.
I reached the place (see l. 1) finally,
but I was so sore from riding around
looking at various houses and views,
ten years of it, I just took what looked good
on that day in August when she said stop
in front of a field full of goldenrod
and we walked across it like you would
in a movie, only this was not
a movie, but a field full of stick-tights,
which we spent the rest of the week (the year,
really) pulling out of our socks, but there
in front of you is the mountain you had
out your window as a kid, only this
is the other side of it, exactly
one hundred and eighty degrees around
and about forty or so years later
and the people have either moved or died
or turned unrecognizable with age.
And since you have, too, you can all pretend
life is sweet and shapely and made for you.



A DREAM (WOMAN IN A WHITE CAR)

I was having a dream
in which I had to walk from one supermarket
to another
because I owed the one I was not in
six dollars
and the one I was in
didn’t want me to eat any of the scallions
I had bought there
there.
So, I rebagged the scallions
and, remembering that I owed the other supermarket
six dollars,
began going through my wallet
and discovered in it a new type of money,
a sort of padded bill
that also served as a kind of open envelope—
for carrying money, I suppose—
and as I had a five and a one
in this strange currency,
I left my groceries in the one store
and ran across the parking lot to the other,
almost getting run over
by a woman in a white car,
and when I reached the other store,
the store I owed the money to,
I thought, this is silly,
I should have brought my bag of groceries,
which I had already paid for,
with me. Even in the dream I thought this,
and, as I was turning to go back,
someone called my name,
someone whose voice I recognized
from the world outside the dream,
someone real.
I turned to see who it was
and was just beginning to make out a face
and a waving arm
in a crowd of people in a checkout line
when I woke up.

I do not know who it was, even today,
never will,
but someone I knew,
from a long time ago, I think,
reached me, as they say, by dream.
I’m not the kind of person who says this kind of thing
easily. Or ever, really.
I tend to be suspicious of dreams,
maybe just annoyed with them,
since they all seem to be about the same thing.
anxiety, frustration, a world
that won’t, as a parent might say, sit still.

I’ve come to expect things to be
pretty much the way they are.
I don’t need wings
to fly out over the night
or a wave to rise up in front of me
with its blank brow,
and I suppose the reason I stay with
this dream, let the words
slide easily across the page,
hoping they might coax
the voice I heard and the face it belongs to
out into the open, is
that the voice was real to me,
that buried in the slurry of the dream,
the ridiculous padded money,
the running back and forth between two supermarkets,
the scallions I couldn’t wait to eat,
was a real person,
a person who had known me long ago
and remembered me as I was then,
a person who if we were to meet again,
in a supermarket,
even a real supermarket,
would call to me, 
call out to me, even,
and whatever person I had been then,
which I have difficulty remembering,
he would greet me in the joy of finding me
and we would talk amazed
for fifteen minutes or so,
each of us bringing the self back to the other,
self we had sloughed off somewhere in the past, 
self no longer useful in the world
or plausible even,
but once, as I say,
real.
	I realize
that the real person in this dream
might also be a fiction,
no more real
than padded money,
that it was to get me to see the real,
the real itself,
that reality, perhaps, is not the same as the real,
that the dream served up the fiction
of a person from my past
who, when it came time to say,
my god, you,
disappeared.

Outside,
two total strangers
bat a tennis ball back and forth
across a net.
This is the condominium complex
where my mother spent her last winters 
with people like herself
who long ago decided that reality
was a few things practiced
in an emptied space.
I can’t tell who’s winning out there,
or if they’re playing a game at all.
In the late afternoon haze,
two people seem content to disappear
into bounce and counterbounce,
into crouch and lunge and swing.

Today,
I am having another dream,
only this time I am not asleep.
I am looking out the window
of a house in the mountains
and trying to imagine myself here in these mountains
forever. Looking out the window,
summer and winter, at this field,
which now, at the end of November,
is covered in gray sky and a thin layer of snow.
The mountains in the distance, though small,
have their tops buried in cloud.
Like dream, cloud takes whatever shape it wants,
including none at all,
and, except for that,
never repeats itself.

A raven passes the window.
I can tell it’s a raven and not a crow
by the slow descent,
by the ease with which it rides the air.

Yes, I did say “forever,” but you know what I mean.



TOWARD DAWN 

the dream came down. In it 
I was taken somewhere,
as though there were layers or stages
of dream in a dream that dream seems
to be about. Or, since “about”
is never what a dream 
can manage or be,
beyond its disjointed sprawl, 
I was taken, or made,
a kind of prisoner, away
from myself or away from what
I thought the self I was was.

I was shown things and taken where
the law of gravity, the rules
of being in a body, on
an earth of certain shapes and inclinations,
elemental possibilities,
had vanished, leaving carcasses
of what we were, and where, open
and scattered like wrappings
after Christmas had come 
and gone, the toys lying
on their sides or stacked to be taken 
into lives already burdened with gifts.

Friends I knew and some I didn’t
drew us there. A road cut deep
up into hills and into places
I’d never seen. A friend came by
announcing herself by singing
the perfect note of a song, 
a signal that it was time to make,
or try to make, or be,
in a new place, not far
from here, except in the way
roads or dreams take you
up from under the ground
you live your life on,
into and out of a cabin
in the woods to a large house
of many wings, some
no longer lived in, broken
by use and weather, neglect,
but still holding the sense
of having been lived in
once, twice, or a tumble 
of many instances,
a piling of lived lives
held in the cracked lintels
and broken windows, glass
scattered in the unmowed grass.

In other parts of what
was less a house than a 
convolution of tunnels,
people were talking
in small groups or sometimes
humming odd melodies 
made simply by opening the mouth.
Others joined them, singing
short indeterminant songs,
songs made of two and three notes
repeated endlessly,
songs that went nowhere songs
seem always to go, 
out into the atmosphere
like smoke or a gust of wind
or back to a first note.

I tried humming with them.
It was what they did 
with the great spans of time
given them, that and discussing
matters I couldn’t understand.
Where are we, I asked.
Someone said beneath Mount--
and though the word was blurred,
I knew it, a mountain 
I’d never climbed and knew now,
after endless attempts,
since you can’t see a mountain 
from itself, I would
never climb it. I would
camp across the valley 
from it instead, keeping
a keen eye on the rivulets.  



NOTES FROM UNDER THE SHELTERING BUSH

I woke up this morning thinking of Broadway.
Not the one in the middle of Manhattan
where I sometimes sit in a metal chair
at a metal table and drink the coffee
I bought at Broadway and 37th.

Don’t go looking for it. That’s the kind of thing
I would do. Besides, before you get there,
it will be gone, probably changed names
or been turned into a bank branch 
or the site of a sidewalk suitcase boutique.

I’ve just gotten off the train in Penn Station
and I’m on my little march north to 42nd
and Fifth Avenue where I will spend the day
in a room reading letters and journals
of someone I never knew and is dead.

She wanted the impossible, day
itself to stop somewhere in the middle,
the ignorance or innocence come back
out of the trees. It wasn’t far from here.
She could see it in a doorway, a glance.

I love this person I never knew. She was
a poet, about the age I was
twenty-five years ago when she died
in Boston. I was born there, near where friends
placed her under a flat gray stone

forty-eight years ago. To put it differently,
she was about the age of my mother when both
she and my mother were alive and living
in this world. I now realize she died 
in the same hospital I was born in.

Life is made of tricky coincidences,
some of which we never learn about
and so cannot do any more than play with.
I know that something immense
and immeasurable occurred one day.

It was in my lifetime. It could have been 
last week when I was up on the mountain
looking down on the valley I live in now
and wondering how long a life truly is.   
I was skiing with people I love

and feeling a trifle loose in the tethers
and obligations to others I was bound by
and wondering as always whether
we will ever survive our restlessness
or just use it to make a fantastic exit.

The Broadway I was thinking of was the one
in the Cotswolds, a village I made a point
to visit once because my grandmother had
and had never forgotten it. I wanted to see
what turned my grandmother into a child.

Or the nearest thing to it a woman
of seventy or so becomes when she speaks
of a place she would happily die in
and knows she can’t, never will, but sends
the message out across the room anyway,

the one she lived in at the end of her life
in a tall building in downtown Denver,
thinking maybe I or someone I will meet
somewhere will catch the tone in her voice,
and go there and find the version of life

she was sure had not been lost, the one
she had read about once or heard praised
in a low tone by someone she knew telling
its features or describing the way light
reached it, gently, as though not to wake it.

I was living in England then, one of the times
I could take a break from work. Which time
escapes me, but I went into a pub there
and drank a pint of bitter. I made it last,
chatted with the publican, and then left.

I’ve never gone back, but recently 
an email came to my inbox, urging me
to join a self-guided rambling tour
of the Cotswolds, places like Stow-on-the Wold,
Winchcombe to Stanton, Stanton to Broadway.

They have Footpath Societies there, paths
tramped by Picts that keep The Pict among them.
You can walk where the Isles of Scilly spill
into the Atlantic all the way to 
John o’Groats off Pentland Firth south of the Orkneys. 

We’ve almost lost track of the Neolithic.
A few sites of intense but remote meaning
laid out on the land. A long horse of white stone
dug into a hillside. The giant squared pillars
of Stonehenge framing the sun’s return.

Under and around these silent monuments
or stones that speak like fragments of sculpture
or broken lines of appeal to lost gods,
the faint record of a people whose walking
was its way of thinking and thanking life 

for giving itself away.  

It’s the dead of winter now and the Jays
attack the feeder one or two at a time.
The chickadees zip in quick between them,
snatch a seed and flit back to the center
of their sheltering bush and start pounding.

It's soothing to think it might be the birds 
who outlive us, if anything live can.
I’ve thought of space, but such a crowd of stars,
and the constant tuning of the ether.
Give me the chickadee and the small seed.

Roger Mitchell is the author of 12 books of poetry, most recently Reason’s Dream (2018) and The One Good Bite in the Saw-Grass Plant (2010), poems written in The Everglades while on an AIRIE Fellowship. New work can be found in Stand, Tar River Poetry, Blueline, Poetry East, On the Seawall, Mudlark and other journals. He has recently published Their Own Society: Prose on Poetry, a collection of his reviews and essays. His biography of the poet Jean Garrigue is making the rounds among publishers. He lives in Jay, New York, with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy.

 
 

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