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[with 3 poems by Michael Gaspeny]
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Dr. Petway is Retiring, 1962
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My husband’s such a ball of pep,
if I shot him, he’d pluck out the bullet, eat it,
slap Old Spice on the hole in his chin,
leave for work whistling.
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My boys will follow their fishing rods
to the rock-and-roll backseats of panting cars
and into sleepwalking marriage.
Fritz the dachshund lies in his basket licking
his parts. Hear his slurping all over the house.
If only I’d had one daughter.
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How do you tell love from guilt?
How real is your love when you can’t trust yourself?
Lie around so much, I should be upholstered.
My life’s a song: “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette.”
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What do you do when you can’t buy a dream?
If I drift in my nighty through Fantasy Park,
Cary Grant hides in the bushes.
When I close my eyes, the curtains rise,
but the film splits. I wait in the dark, clutching
my ticket. What good is it?
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Dr. Petway listens. He doesn’t tell me
to count my blessings, polish the silverware.
He says my pain is justified, arising from the good inside.
He says my chance to heal will come.
He has to pass me on. Dr. Petway will soon be gone.
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Michael Gaspeny
from The Tyranny of Questions, Unicorn Press, Greensboro NC, © 2020
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I see you watching me. In fact, there’s never a moment I don’t notice you. Paying attention is not a pastime – it’s staying alive.
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Not that I can imagine what you’re thinking, standing there at your discrete distance. I couldn’t even try, you and I are so unlike. I know what I’m thinking, though. I’m just here making sure. Yeah, making sure.
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But what do you say let’s try it, just this once, both of us try to imagine. You hear my chatter, follow my swift flitting. Do I seem frantic to you, pressured? Maybe you imagine me exhausting myself with motion and anxiety. It’s not really in my vocabulary, but don’t you recognize projection when you see it?
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This is who I am. This is why I am. Defending my territory. Building and growing. And now these three youngsters. If yours were crying out to you like mine do, wouldn’t you be back and forth every three minutes making sure they have everything they need? And after dusk, when they finally nod off, maybe you’d lean back and say to no one in particular, “I am exhausted,” but I’m thinking you’d be saying that with a little grin on your face and more than a little joy in your heart.
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If you said it in any other way, you wouldn’t make much of a wren.
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Taking After Mom
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Each day Tommy whips a rubber baseball against the house
from a homemade mound. He’s throwing his heart out.
Whump. . . Whump. . . Whump – ball against brick for hours.
High school senior, no team wants him. If he could hang
that wind-up on a hook in the garage, I’d pitch it in the trash.
“Mom, where’s my motion?” he’d ask.
“Haven’t seen it, son.”
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In English class, the book he chose to analyze was
The House of the Dead. It must have sounded familiar.
I read it behind his back. I couldn’t put it down.
I got hooked on Dostoevsky novels
from Crime and Punishment, to The Devils.
In Tommy’s book, I underlined the passage
where the author says useful work ennobles
a prisoner, but if you give that convict two glasses,
one full of water, the other empty, and force him
to pour back and forth all day, he’ll lose his mind.
I wish Dostoevsky could counsel my son
about pitching to no one.
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Michael Gaspeny
from The Tyranny of Questions, Unicorn Press, Greensboro NC, © 2020
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Addie Zampesi recounts her life. Confesses and raves. Gripes and pines. Hides then finds the truth inside herself, misses then discovers what’s truly inside her husband and sons. Forty years she tells it, 1933 to 1973, opens it all to us in lines on the page, even grants us a brief glance back as her family casts her ashes into the bay. Oh my goodness, Addie, how we have come to know you!
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Oh my goodness, Addie, how Michael has spoken your voice! What do you do when you can’t buy a dream? The Tyranny of Questions – such an apt title. Every poem asks, “What does it all mean? What am I to make of this? Why am I here?” And is there an answer to be had? None, not a one, except in discovering forty years and forty pages of how to ask the question.
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Outside the book I ask, “How has he done it?” How has Michael Gaspeny discovered, or created, Addie’s voice and kept it sure and true through all these poems? It reassured me a little to have him tell me it took him over five years to write these, and it reassured me more to learn that Addie shadows the quietly desperate life of his mother. I told him that if I had found out he created this persona de novo, as pure imagination, I was going to burn all my old drafts and scribblings and bow at his feet, my demigod.
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But I defy anyone to ask this: How can a man be permitted to write in the voice of a woman? It is the writer’s ultimate gift, to step outside themselves. It is the ultimate gift to the reader, to open us to experiences outside ourselves. Thank you, Michael Gaspeny.
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Maybe I won’t thank him, though, for one thing. As I corresponded with Michael about discovering and acquiring voices that transcend our own, I joked about writing in the voice of the asparagus I had just cut for brunch. Michael assured me he had no doubt I would be able to do so. Now I can’t pick up the shears without hearing a small green voice saying, “Oh shit, not again!”
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Purchase The Tyranny of Questions and learn more about Unicorn Press HERE
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Michael Gaspeny has also authored the chapbooks Vocation and Re-Write Men. He has won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and the O. Henry Festival Short Story Competition. He taught journalism and English for almost forty years at High Point University and Bennett College
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I Had to Do Something
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With Tommy off to college near Richmond,
Ben wheedled his father into sending him
to private school in Charlottesville
(we’ll see what comes of that experiment).
My smoke veiled the rooms. Always a Camel in hand,
another winking wherever I left my drink.
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Dear Reader, come one, come all. Meet the model
for the mystery woman etched in the pyramid
on the Camel pack. Roy grumbled, “You’ll burn us out!”
I bit back:”I’ll stop when you take that foul Pall Mall
out of your mouth.” He went cold turkey, begged
me to quit, left cancer pamphlets under my whiskey.
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My breath grew halt. I drank and dozed
on the sofa curled around silver-muzzled Fritz,
cherishing his whimpers. After years of crotch-licking
and finger-nipping, he was baby sweet,
with breath Queen Elizabeth would crawl for.
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At Brentaldo’s, I tore in a First Family of Virginia harpy
hissing because a Negro customer tried on a scarf.
That Scarlet O’Hara fright stabbed me with her eyes,
said, “At least they’re not in the changing rooms yet.
You must be a carpetbagger fortunate to kiss
the earth in God’s country of Virginia.”
I shoved her. She swung her purse.
The manager wedged between us.
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On easter, I saw her at First Colony, where self-esteem
was thicker than perfume. I thought, “If Jesus came,
they’d offer Him Communion. What have I belonged to?”
Dr. Schwepson gave me new tranqs nd the Serenity Prayer.
I raved, “I will no longer accept the things I cannot change.
This prayer is Sleepy Time tea justifying lying down
when you ought to stand up, even if I haven’t done it yet!”
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Michael Gaspeny
from The Tyranny of Questions, Unicorn Press, Greensboro NC, © 2020
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V E R S E ❦ I M A G E 