Sample Poems by Vivian Shipley
Driving with My Father in Winter Park, Florida
Unexpected, the rain, sand taking on the depth of slate
in this, a state for tourists, or others like you waiting to be
boxed for the trip home to Kentucky. Spiral of palm, no
coyotes to background, quail to startle, just reek of urine
and needles of tamarisk rooting to hold what cannot be
held, the dunes draining like an hourglass. You point out
the tree’s small leaves, like blue-green scales on a fish,
cluster of pink flowers in spiky racemes, feathery
as ostrich plumes. Like father, like daughter, I say.
Here you are using similes just when I had gotten used
to your bragging about never writing a love poem, never
reciting Longfellow on the gym stage. I’d like to think
that a poem is beating in you, the rhythm ventricled
and pumped into arteries by your heart. You still treat
me like a child, your voice kind, your talk simple, like
the day you didn’t want me to see the heifer that slipped
through the fence, got hit on the interstate, bloated, four
legs up like a table on its top. I keep trying to turn talk
to death, afterlife, angels with stiffened wings starched
like the doll your mother crocheted to cover extra rolls
of toilet paper. You remember how we hung on diamond
chain links at the Bluegrass Airport on the weekends,
watching the planes land for something to do at night.
Mother taught me to embroider hankies, but you let me
smoke candy cigarettes while you belted out, When
the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.
Not knowing there was one muse, let alone nine, you
recited order of planets, names of every state flower, bird,
and capital on the road trips I hated. Today, it’s as if all
words were stuck back with you in an Appalachian hollow.
Never a one to read books, it’s not titles or plots of Twain,
Hemingway or Austen that go, but names for leaves of purple
loosestrife, bull thistle, spotted knapweed. All, invaders
like cancer, crowding out white cells, marrow in your bones.
Their roots, leaves, shoots and seeds run roughshod over
native plants, changing soil, water, landscape, wiping out
microorganisms. Even mammals, warm-blooded like you,
can not withstand the onslaught. Battling yellow star thistle
and star of mum, both weeds from the Mediterranean
strong enough to kill a horse outright, other farmers outside
Elizabethtown abandoned their land, but not you. There is
always hope, always the statistic. Mats of alligator weed
choking the Everglades have been gnawed into scattered
strands by flea beetles and moths. Who knows what scientists
will find tomorrow? As if the dead have need for clothes,
I pack your suitcase with thermal underwear, a maroon robe
and unfold the wheelchair like Merrywood’s daycare
entertainer undoing rice paper wings of origami. I want you
to write a poem for me, to let your heart stay where your body
cannot, but you are down of hawk as I lift you, so light you
will soon soar. I want someone to tell me where you will go.
I want to know that you will not cry out as you sleep.
Kachino, Russia: Perm 36
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I’ll holla ‘Mortimer!’
Nay,
I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.
Henry IV, Part I
Vasyl Stus, were guards reading Shakespeare outside
your cell door? Fearing your poems more than bricks,
they may have learned power in a word from Hotspur
as he trained a starling to gall and pinch Bolinbroke.
Touring Perm 36, a stop on a summer boat tour
of the Gulag and a fifty mile bus ride from Lysva,
I see why Stalin never allowed photographs or films
of Soviet labor camps. Vasyl Stus, a guide will not allow
me to sandpaper my hand on cement walls of a punishment
cube where you died. No cause, just: September 4, 1985.
No death camp like Kolyma or Magadan, you did not
expect to be killed one month before the Nobel Prize
you were nominated for was announced. Buoyed
by hope your poems would speak for you in Stockholm,
you did not live to hear the name Claude Simon called.
Ukrainian, you earned the Russian title for inmate, zek—
a badge I can’t pin on. Your body tied you to earth, hooked
as if on a rod held in hands slowly reeling you to a death
that must have been your salvation. Blackened with rot,
wooden shacks cluster at Perm 36. Green on green,
painted guard towers seem to be the only life in this camp.
Natan Sharansky, Sergei Kovalyov, Vadimir Bukovsky
and Sevko Lukyanenko. All ghosts, all vanished
like you, Vasyl Stus. Hanging over rails of a tour boat,
I saw no sign of the twenty million other bodies
bulldozed or smothered by snow drifts in the chain
of prisons and labor camps that link the Gulag, wind
Ural Mountains like lights on an evergreen. Walking
into a maximum security room, a tourist, I can’t imagine
being starved, flayed, my eyes being toed like glowing
coals by a boot and my legs, a forest fire being stamped
out. Unrecorded, a voice without throat to channel it
disappears, memory of a name thickens to amnesia,
then vanishes if there are no words to print it, no starling
Hotspur coached to speak it. Each morning, four to six men
from each cell crossed this narrow corridor where I stand
to finger workroom bars as if feeling for a weak spot.
Vasyl Stus, when you were a free man, you walked about,
opened, closed books, sat down in a chair, then another,
fingers hooking a pen. Here in Perm 36, your hands hung,
meaty growths from your shoulders. With no thought
to scissor it, each day was like the next, pointless. Rubbing
thin striped-cotton uniforms you wore even when cold
pared down to your bone, I sit down on an iron bunk bed
you might have coiled on, kneel at the hole that served
as both sink and toilet. In the exercise yard, six by six feet,
my neck cranes, I try to spear sky slivering the crosshatch
of barbed wire. Vasyl Stus, did wood splintering a nail
remind you of light around a star, of what you would not
see again, moon washing a field to bronze, show of deer,
light from a bar over the street? What can I know of what
is done in cement-walled rooms to break a man’s spirit,
what is done to break a man’s body? What can I know
of what was done to you, how your breath was taken
in this room I visit? I see the wall you saw before you
passed out. A starling, a construction worker’s wolf whistle,
I will call, arousing every ear that sleeps. Vasyl Stus,
Vasyl Stus, Vasyl Stus, echo and anger, still.