Daniel Tobin
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Daniel Tobin is the author of four books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), and Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), as well as the critical study Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (University Press of Kentucky, 1999). A collection of essays, Awake in America, is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Among his awards are the "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, The Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He is Chair of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College in Boston.
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A CONE OF THE EUCALYPTUS
So many piled beneath the peeling tree
it seems a late polluted hail had come,
some antediluvian, post-biblical plague
that fell and fell and blotted out the sun
and would not melt, but scattered like leaves
across the walk where you bend down, pick one,
then place it squarely in my palm. "Look, Dan,
at the star-shape on the crown, the hollow cone
a bloom of five born out of four." And soon
you're quoting sages—Plato and Thomas Browne—
"the quincunx blossoming from quaternity":
such mystical symmetries, to which you add
bodies in the Kaballah, the Tarot, the Torah,
Christ on the Cross, snowflakes, the human hand.
I run my thumb along the pith. Four scars
ascend to where something—call it nature—
fixed hull to crest, each rough plane perfected
like a fossil browned by centuries in earth,
and five carved points that open into black,
and look like a seal, and are deeply cured.
Mark, my reb, whose name doubles wisdom,
you could convince me to believe in Blake
and his eternity, a heaven encased in words;
this shell the image my own soul might make,
its wounds at seed under bone-white boughs.
From Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008)
MARDUK
Here is the true adamant and will of the world:
out of my mother's body I made the world.
To cut her in two as though gutting a fish,
that is one recipe for making a world.
From her eyes empty rivers, from her breasts mountains,
from the wound of my birth, the release of the world.
The snows are her siftings, each breeze her last breath
that wanders the roads like the lost of the world.
To save them from loss I raise up my cities,
each one a beacon, a map of the world.
On streets I have left no place for the errant
for in every home I alone light the world.
If the gods want to sleep, I will let them sleep
and make myself god, the lord of this world.
I am the grain, the plough cleaving its furrow.
I am the storm that floods the whole world.
I am the singular, and the dispersal.
I judge all the living and dead of the world.
These words were judged by god's judge and given:
whispers through walls, wind, another world.
From Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008)
CHIN MUSIC
that hangs beside the bookshelf in my study, I sharpen
my eyes like a batter
who trains on the curveball bending toward the plate,
trying to judge
its spin. And like a curve it seems
to defy physics, how these two once occupied the same
time and space
and still do inside this frame: The Babe as you’d expect
commanding the center,
Whenever I look at this photograph
the rest of the hunting party spreading out
the lesser of the tribe around their chief;
and there, beside him, his hair
slicked back, no longer a wild clownish ring, looking
the young rabbi:
Larry, the lowliest stooge, third fiddle
after Moe and Curly, the straight man whose antic pleas
always seemed more desperate
for having glimpsed the desperate truth. Forget Petroclus;
think instead of Achilles
in love with Caliban, or Gilgamesh
roving out for battle beside Polonius. Think of the Stooges
beside a beefcake Herakles
in a wacky fifties riff on Homeric myth. Or, rather, think
of Everett Brundage
who owned the lodge where this photo
was taken--it had to be sometime in the thirties--
before the Babe’s moon-shot drives
arced into legend; before Larry starred with Curly and Moe
in their madcap parody
of Hilter’s Germany. I have a tee shirt that reads
“I’ve seen the future, and it’s Fine,” where Larry’s face
shrieks in neon
as if he’d shaken hands with a thousand volts, his whole head
flashing like an absurd Medusa.
Though when I remember Everett,
I think of a man who for years kept this lodge alive,
a taxidermist’s paradise
of deer heads, antlers, bobcats, and one full-size black bear
on the fringe of big resorts.
I remember he had the keenest eyes,
that the whole raucous crowd of locals and exiles
from the city gathered
at his bar, one manifold tribe roaring on into the night.
But I remember, too,
those nights he drank until my father
closed the bar and drove him home; how he lived alone
though he had a wife
who left him; how his help—they were friends—stole quietly
from the till,
and he lost the lodge, the one thing he loved.
And whenever I remember how they found him sprawled
dead in the dive
he’d opened on the highway, it makes me think of the phrase
"Chin music,"
meaning a high hard one, a tough pitcher’s
brush back of the batter who leans too far over the plate.
“Chin music” was what he said
that afternoon my father drove us down to the lodge
just before it closed.
On TV the pitcher reared into his wind-up,
and swooping down fired a fastball that started letter high,
and rose in a perfect
jet stream directly at the batter’s head, driving him to the dirt.
“That’s chin music,”
Everett said, leaning his big body
over the bar, his broad nose and wry grin not unlike the Babe’s,
“it’s how life plays you
before you go down for good." Do I have to say he gave me
the photo for a gift,
that I’m as awestruck now by its sheer
improbability, having watched those stilted newsreels
of the great,
the baffled mania of the stooge who took hammer blows to his head,
who had his eyes
poked out, it seemed, a thousand times?—
the stooges, with their own chin music, that made me think
there was no pain.
In the photograph the turkey splays its feathers before the hunters,
one a hero,
one a thoughtful man who played the fool.
Did Everett take this picture, thrilled to have fame and greatness
come to this unlikely place?
The crowd fans out, mostly smiling, around the kill: Who are
all these nameless men?
From Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008)
