“This Kitchen Remains Quiet”, “Finding the Lost Boy Before Dark”, “A poem in which my grandfathers meet Lorca”, “Dispatches from the Levant” and “A Flat File Across a Mattock Blade”
By William Prindle
This Kitchen Remains Quiet
This winter wind winnows the few
leaves that cling to the gutter guards,
Whispering loudly in the crowns that
this planet is still alive under the rush,
In the quiet beneath the storm surge
wave crest, even as we count the losses
in human reckonings, still clinging to
the belief that technology and reason
are sufficient to stay the ruination, no
matter how unflinching the winds >>
Waves >> wildfires >> droughts remain.
This kitchen remains quiet but for the
Rhythmic chopping of carrots, turnips
onions, and the mincing of clove, anise,
Cardamom, coriander, their aromas
converging to prod these covid-dulled
Taste buds back to life. Into this stew
I toss flattened failures, diced hopes.
Finding the Lost Boy Before Dark
“There’s a man who walks beside me
He is who I used to be
And I wonder if she sees him
And confuses him with me”
-Jason Isbell, Live Oak
As a boy no one told him
to wander into the woods
below the field, down through
the laurel grove with its ground
pine, the stream falling over
mossy stone to the river. No one
told him to keep this place as
sacred, or that She kept secrets
there that he alone must keep.
After he got the Crosman pump
action air rifle, a colder energy
came over him. Harder-eyed,
he began shooting squirrels
and birds for no good reason,
including the mallard male
with his iridescent neck that
fluttered broken downriver.
I know that he walks this
ridgeline often, seeking
the blessings of bluebird
and pileated. If I hurry
I might overtake him; I
hear Her whispering
that we need to walk
the path of restoration
together before nightfall.
A poem in which my grandfathers meet Lorca
i.
Victor, an original Mad Man who confessed
Later after giving it all to God that he spent
His career trying to get people to buy
Things they didn’t need and couldn’t
Afford. On a Tuesday night in a speakeasy
On 52nd Street Lorca buys him three
Gin and tonics, gets him drunk on the night air
Of Granada, softening the brutality
Of the Depression, kicking Victor
Out of his new religion. He moves Elsie
And the three girls to Spain; my mother marries
A Grenadine guitarist whose arpeggios form
An oasis for the heart of her bipolar, and I am
Writing this at sunset from my veranda.
ii.
Ned, who decided to become a stockbroker
In 1928, found by his 12-year-old son
With his head in the oven in 1929. Lorca
Takes the New Haven Railroad up to visit
Him in the sanitarium where the men in white
Coats took him that night. A Jasmine aroma,
Or a nightingale’s call, slips into that locked
Room on the universal tongue, as the poet,
Speaking almost no English, uses the honey
Of words to melt those layers of capitalist
Despair. Ned becomes a chain-smoking
Detective novelist, his son doesn’t
Have to be the man of the family anymore,
Sails the Sound with his cousin Seymour,
Selling their handbuilt sloops, reaching before
A running sea, tacking into a freshening elation.
Dispatches from the Levant
i. from the Kibbutz
The morning after the shots
and the screams
we dared not go to the mailbox,
fearing to be seen.
They had tried and failed to pry
our door open;
we kept the children extra quiet
in the safe room
by handing out the dozen lemon
cookies we had left a quarter
piece at a time,
making a game
of who could chew them and
then sip their raw goat’s milk
most inaudibly.
ii. from the Hospital
We gathered the surviving plurality
of our family
in the basement
where the building’s possible collapse
might not be fatal.
Yasmin drew our dear little ones
Nadia and Iman and Amir
to her in silence
because their eardrums were damaged
by the explosions.
She had hoped that my cousin Omar’s
portable charger
would let her get through to her mother
in Turkey,
but the connector was incompatible with
her useless phone.
A Flat File Across a Mattock Blade
This earth is my hospice nurse
and now I have vowed to be hers.
I move among trees long felled
by age or rot or insect or fungi
and those that would be felled
by these vines that will not relent,
their plumed festooned foliage
shuttered only for the winter,
unless someone like me rasps
a flat file across a mattock blade
and ambles into a hardwood glade.
Bill Prindle is a Charlottesville poet expanding his voice in the third half of life. He has won multiple Poetry Society of Virginia awards, and has been published in several journals and anthologies. He has studied with Lisa Russ Spahr, Neil Perry, Gregory Orr, Sharon Olds, and C.K. Williams.
