In Writing: Dale Hobson

The Strand Bookstore in NYC is a bibliophile’s dream, staffed with eccentric experts on arcane subjects, populated by floor after floor of every title imaginable. At the very top is the rare book room, a temperature- and humidity- controlled environment for all the books I lust after, but could never afford.

In the Rare Book Room

My daughter Elena turns to me and says,
“It smells like your Dad.” I take a deep breath 
and there it is–all those generations 
the old books have steeped in pipe smoke
in the libraries of bookish men, seeping back
out decades later into the air-conditioned air. 

His dimming face comes sharp in the mind’s eye
again. I see him turning pages.
The smell of his aftershave.

To be taken seriously as a poet, sometimes you have to swim into deeper waters, reckon with the whichness of what and unscrew the inscrutable.

Digging into Metaphysics

What makes humans human–image
of God? Featherless biped? What? 

Some say “the animal that laughs”–
but now we know that apes laugh,
and that cats smirk, if not chuckle.
Language?–talk to the chimps.

On the darker side, other creatures 
also eat their own and make war.

As I lean on my shovel, it comes to me
that none of God’s creatures but humans
will dig rocks out of a field all day long.

What this says about our position on
the evolutionary ladder, I can’t say.

But porpoises and whales gave up
on hands and feet to go back to sea.
I think they got tired of digging.

Another shiny new poem smelted from the rusty ore of old “Listening Post” prose.

Mousetraps

For years I had the dismal duty of adding 
tiny forlorn corpses to the household trash.

One fall, during the first cold snap (the kickoff
of rodent season), I invested in a live trap,
hoping to shorten my sentence in Hell. 

After that, my morning chore took me
out into fresh air, down the trail out back
to perform an act of liberation.

There was just this niggling suspicion that
each morning I released the same mouse,
who saw a long walk back and a warm night
in stir as fair trade for sharp cheddar.

All kinds of music gets stuck in the top of my mind: pop tunes, carols, hymns, blues. I walk to their refrain for half a day, then pass on to something else. But some music wraps around the brain stem, permeates the convolutions, gets in there for keeps. 

No Cure for Leonard Cohen

His songs dig hooks into my memory–
deep, dark, rich, complex as chocolate,
but unsweetened by sentiment.

Transcendence and despair do duets,
celebration and regret. Beauty sheds
her merely pretty clothes; pain uplifts. 

Behind one devastating line, the heart
is hid. His half-destroyed voice demands it:
Chase the holy; seek it in the broken.

EarthSky News explains Genesis

In the beginning,
after the Big Bang,
stars in clusters
formed invisible
to one another through
dense hydrogen gas.
Space was opaque.
And darkness was upon
the face of the deep.

Starshine slowly ionized
the gas, turning it clear.
First one, then many
glimmers could be seen.

Bubbles of transparency
merged to encompass
whole galaxies until
a whole galaxy was
small as a pea inside 
a hot-air balloon
by comparison.

Later (a hundred million
years later) the bubbles
had all merged –the whole
universe transparent
to the light. Fiat lux.

After years of benign neglect, I’ve been spending time and money in the nurseries and garden tool departments of the hardware store. And I find that working in the garden feels satisfying solid in comparison to the airier pursuits of art.

Sun on the Garden

The part that makes poetry has lain sleeping, and now
(after COVID again) tumbleweeds blow through my brain.
So instead, I dig and plant and water and mulch and weed,
thinking of nothing much under the late spring sun, except
how the names of flora make their own kind of poetry:
lobelia and marigold, shrub rose and geranium, salvia.

That would make Adam the first poet, I suppose, sitting
in the Garden of Eden naming all the animals: “Platypus, 
I shall call you platypus.” — and all the others, an arkful
of the newly named for Noah to salvage from the flood.
I name them to myself as they come to check my work:
robin, rabbit, chipmunk, butterfly, black fly and whitetail.

This is the power of word. To name it is to see it, to bring
its smell to the nose, just as the mind mimes each story
even as it’s told, or as we twitch and mutter in dreams.
So small the difference between word and world, a thing
thin as the skin that separates me from thee, a mere tissue.
Yet call it what you will, flesh in fact is fact, and word is air.

I wave the hose head back and forth like a magic wand or
a maestro’s baton, calling up water from below the bedrock.
But one only tends a garden, encouraging life. The maestro
creates no symphony, no matter how dramatically he waves.
The flowers know what powers the upthrust of their lives.
They turn its way each day as it tracks across the skies.