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Augsburg Now: The Poetry of John Engman
The Poetry of John Engman
from Temporary Help (Holy Cow! Press, 1998)
(Reproduced by permission of The Estate of John Engman; all © by The Estate of John Engman)
| FAME | FRIENDS | SOBBING UNCONTROLLABLY IN PUBLIC PLACES | A LITTLE POEM ABOUT THE RAIN | WORK | THINK OF ME IN D MAJOR |
FAME
- Putting a page into the old Royal
- gives me a weird sensation, not much else.
One room below they must imagine I'm writing
the great American poem, something very smart
that only I know, but this is my fame: dark ages
measured by mineral rings from my drinking glass,
several pages weighed down with ink, one ration
of light that falls on pyramids built by spiders,
beds you can pull from the wall.
- What can I write?
- "It was a dark and stormy night and I was howling
in the skyhigh streets-Juanita, where are you!
My love will never die or will die in five minutes
without you, we must work fast ..." Oh my.
Once upon a time my life was easier between lines
where the mind stays blank, nothing to confess
but this: everything I know seldom fills a whole page.
"Someday, I'll be dead." That was my idea.
"Someday, I'll be dead, Juanita."
That was my poem.
- And someday my critics will know
- this simplemindedness, and all this aloneness,
was my fame: how I show off all my weaknesses,
a few cents' worth of dust and lost ingredients
who wants to make a good impression, like a leaf
in stone. So what if I stole my emotions: shyness
from the Murphy bed, ardor from the gooseneck lamp,
joy from the wooden chair? At least I let my poems
stay put until the last potluck, little sandwiches
Satan autographs with cheez-whiz. And someday,
Juanita, my fame will just be how useless
I am, beyond wanting and change,
"Baby, ain't no poems tonight,
just wind and rain."
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FRIENDS
- Now there is no getting you back,
- Tom, who crashed. Lona*, of cancer. John*,
of the heart. Thanks to each of you for my share
of falling apart, if grieving is falling apart,
if writing is grieving. I spent time at my desk.
But now that you are dead I will write a poem for you
is a poor excuse only a poet would use, and poetry
is words you can't forget, words said to friends,
who forget them for you.
- Well, it's sad.
- I know a poet is supposed to make people feel more,
but I made people nervous with the things I said.
On Loneliness, I wrote a poem about my sperm,
"You should meet a nice egg and make something
of yourself." On Wordlessness, a poem about
a poem, "Just look at the lines experience
has drawn on my face with a blunt crayon."
Metaphysical stuff like that.
- But your three lives
- escaped me, and I knew you, and I knew you
wouldn't just come crawling back into any old poem
but would enter shouting whoo, whoo, whoo! the way
someone who is loved and unexpected enters a room.
And all I would have to say is welcome. Welcome.
Here you are in this poem that I wrote for you,
this ruined contraption where I should display
a whole range of emotions on a singe page,
but I can't. I let them pass. So memories
- are disobedient like children
- whose impossible demands I can't answer
without words. Although I know someone who can:
the artist who draws a silhouette around the body
of another human being whose breathing has stopped.
Curious fact: the body makes an X of pure white chalk
but the soul makes none. One of those little mysteries
that I can't explain. All I can say is, give thanks.
And let them pass. Or, a poem might begin,
"They were very beautiful. I saved three of them.
I wish I knew what they were."
* Lona and John are believed to be close friends of Engman's who were also Augsburg alums.
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SOBBING UNCONTROLLABLY IN PUBLIC PLACES
- That was the very room that we made
- famous with our love, where our souls flew,
crying out and sighing. And that was the room
in which I wrote about her in my dreamy logbook,
thinking a few pages of blue ink would do the trick.
That was the very room in which, the wonder of love
is how I put it, the wonder of love and I succumbed
to the law of physics and all of her beautiful moves.
"Well, you're sure nobody I would pick from a crowd,"
is how she put it, and gave me a look that ate me
slowly as a poem, no wondering allowed.
- And blah, blah, blah.
- Thankfully, I will never be one of those
who expect too much from a poem, who want the poet
to explode before he goes, leaving the rostrum draped
with glitz. Thankfully, I will never kill time by striking
a pose: malcontent who dreams too much, sullen fugitive
beneath the amber lamps, prince from a fallen regime.
And I don't have to go around sobbing uncontrollably
in public places to get my point across-that is
for those who want cheap thrills and headaches,
the personal touch. Let them read prose.
- Of course, any young poet
- should be able to describe a room,
a few pages of blue ink in a spiral notebook.
Any young poet should be able to describe a room
so poignantly it makes your eyes wet and you continue
reading with heavy sighs. But remember, there was a girl
on the bed, and we were in love, and the room was dark-
I really wasn't a poet yet. Sure, there should have been
a villanelle in her every move, her every look another
blank page torn from the moon, but my mind had a hole
worn through it by her touch, and the funny thing is,
I don't remember much. Oh love, you crack me up.
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A LITTLE POEM ABOUT THE RAIN
There is a chance of rain on Minnehaha Avenue.
That's how a poem should start. But they won't pay
for little poems about the rain-they want "art."
Why didn't you take notes at the poetry workshop?
Don't say you drove the lonely avenues of rain.
Don't say rain whispered harsh words to the moon.
Don't say someone you love has left you nothing
to say but the moon on lonely avenues of rain.
Just put words on paper quickly as the hummingbirds
done by God. Then be happy, you have written a poem.
And maybe you are alone, but it's early, maybe someone
driving through a chance of rain on Minnehaha Avenue
is thinking of you as she sways through a curve, shudders
into the straightaway and pulls over: killing the engine,
closing her eyes, weeping aloud on the soft shoulder.
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WORK
- I wanted to be a rain salesman,
- because rain makes the flowers grow,
but because of certain diversions and exhaustions,
certain limitations and refusals and runnings low,
because of chills and pressures, shaky prisms, big blows,
and apes climbing down from banana trees, and dinosaurs
weeping openly by glacial shores, and sunlight warming
the backsides of Adam and Eve in Eden ...
to make the screen of my computer glow, radioactive
leakage bearing the song of the smart money muse:
this little bleep went to market, this little clunk has none.
- The woman who works the cubicle beside me has pretty knees
- and smells of wild blossoms, but I am paid to work
my fingers up and down the keys, an almost sexy rhythm,
king of the chimpanzees picking fleas from his beloved.
I wanted to be a rain salesman , but that's a memory
I keep returning to my childhood for minor repairs:
the green sky cracking, then rain, and after,
those flowers growing faster than I can name them,
those flowers that fix me and and make me stare.
- I wanted to be a rain salesman,
- carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,
selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour,
but there were no openings in the rain department,
and so they left me dying behind this desk-adding bleeps,
subtracting clunks-and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms,
some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living.
Above my desk, lounging in a bed of brushstroke flowers,
a woman beckons from my cheap Modigliani print, and I know
by the way she gazes that she sees something beautiful
in me. She has green eyes. I am paid to ignore her.
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THINK OF ME IN D MAJOR
- I know everything I know about dying
- (all doctors do
is hope and cut)
- from what I've been told by my own soft brain
while waiting in a waiting room:
- seems to be something living organisms
- do naturally.
You might be next."
- I'm waiting for a doctor to check my pulse
and draw blood. I feel sick, not dying,
- and poor Johann Sebastian Bach is trying
- to comfort me
in D Major,
- soothing with high strings, then coming in low
for a few notes, as if to say,
- "Maybe you think about dying too much.
- Why, even you
could live and be
- swept away by a dose of baroque music."
The doctor who examines me agrees
- reducing all my intimations of mortality
- to medical facts,
psychosomatic
- muscle spasms and gas pains. I am alive,
but the prognosis isn't good: someday I will
- and even the doctor admits that he can't find
- one cell
of my soul
- with his silver instruments and microscopes.
It's hard to believe that anyone can live
- if the body is simply a score written in red
- and white counts,
brainwaves, x-rays.
- But harder to believe that anyone can die
when Johann Sebastian Bach argues
- in D Major, a symphony of goosebumps.
- Maybe what dying
organisms call
- living is learning how to be swept away?
I admit that I feel swept away, somewhat
- with Johann Sebastian Bach in the air.
- So, if someday
I disappear,
- just think of me as a goosebump, or a note
that disappears in D Major, swept away,
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