To celebrate the 82nd birthday of California poet and author, Jack Foley, we are printing his most recent ‘PAIRINGS.’
PAIRINGS is a sequence in which two poems meet on the page in the way that two persons might meet
on the street. For the most part, they stand across the page from one another in the way that people stand
across from one another as they speak. They have things in common and things that separate them. In
many ways they illuminate each other.
LOVE you, Jack! Have a brilliant day of celebration and joy.
PAIRINGS 19: WELCOMING AUGUST, 2022 *
Hail, Birth Month, thou who mad’st me lion,
Thou, for whom the calendar was changed,
Turning the seventh month, September, into the
ninth,
The eighth into the tenth, the ninth to the eleventh,
And the tenth, December, turned into the twelfth.
Names. My own, John Wayne, named for my father’s
Beloved brother, murdered by World War I,
And not for Marion Morrison, the actor.
Welcome, great Month, in Classic, closed-form verse.
Tremendous Time repeats thee every year.
The circle turns, and people all turn with it.
And I re-turn, until it is my turn
To turn into the dark, to close my eyes
And hope that something of me still may live.
I was a man: then I’ll be only––words,
Nothing but these vowels and consonants.
Turn, wheel.
he slowly began to realize
that his poetry was deeply rooted
in the old radio shows
he experienced as a child
and in the tales of vaudeville
his father told him.
it was this demotic,
anything-but-elitist
tradition––
a tradition of diversity,
of multiplicity,
of “voices”––
that he recognized
in the infinitely more
sophisticated
productions
of Modernism––
voices
projecting a loneliness
that gave the medium its depth.
“The gaudiest, the most violent,
the lonesomest mile in the world…
Broadway, my beat.”
voices
telling me of the world
as I listened
in the dark space
of our three-room
apartment
in Port Chester, New York,
in the USA,
in the Northern Hemisphere,
in the world
lit by the sun and the moon,
in the starry universe
in which I
and my entire planet
was only a tiny speck.
“Henry! Henry Aldrich!”
“Coming, mother.”
who knew
who knew
eighty plus years!
.
though the voices are gone
I am still
a “listener.”
* “verse” = “a turning”
Igneus Press will be bringing out Jack Foley’s most recent book of poetry later this year. Browse our titles here, books of poetry and plays by America’s most important writers, historically speaking. Sign up for a free account with us, take the trouble to fill in your information just once, and feel good knowing that you’ve helped an independent small press to remain independent from behemoth book sellers like Amazon. Your support means so much to us.