Al Black's Poetry of the People Featuring Larry Rhu!

This week's Poet of the People is Larry Rhu. I think I first met Larry when Curtis Derrick hosted a poetry workshop and Tim Conroy introduced us. Larry and I cohost Simple Gifts and I cherish sitting in his backyard garden to discuss literature and Boston Celtic basketball. He is a generous and humble friend and I am honored to be in his orbit.

Lawrence Rhu is the Todd Professor of the Italian Renaissance, emeritus, at the University of South Carolina. He has published books and essays about the American and European Renaissances and edited Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. His poems have appeared in PoetryNorth Dakota Quarterly, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Poetry Society of South Carolina YearbookPinesongFall LinesOne, Main Street Rag, Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, Jogos Florais, Forma de Vida, and other journals. They have won awards from the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans. 


Instead of a Letter

 

Ever since your scary diagnosis, Jerry,

your Kawasaki Ninja’s helping us

document nostalgia’s hits or misses:

 

Fats Domino at El Casino Ballroom

in downtown Tucson, Oracle Union Church

beyond the Catalinas. Grandfather Ford—

 

an old Ford, he’d say, but still serviceable—

supplied its pulpit with clear messages

he shared implicitly (or I divined)

 

between approach shots on the practice range

when he taught me to golf during junior high

and we began our easy-going exchanges.

 

Nothing oracular about that town

except the name and my experience

of friendship with a kindred soul whose calling

 

required some explanation of its quiet

moments, like golf, when others take their turn. 

Chemo and radiation are still shrinking

 

your tumor while our sunset dialogues

help reconstruct our common histories

with anecdotes and our imaginations

 

in FaceTime calls from two time zones away.

Bits and pieces patched together come

to represent whatever meant the world

 

to me and you, my father’s other son

in spirit and my mother’s other student.

Grammar and medicine, their offerings,

 

helped you avoid English X at U of A

and then through medical school at UNM.

Transcendental brother, Anglo caballero,                              

 

biker, physician, my dear friend, your Ninja

and horses call to mind a life of travel:

happy trails, lonesome roads, and our reunions                    

 

in Rio Hondo, New Orleans, Missoula,

Boston, Prescott—even Italy,

when I was teaching high school there in Rome.

 

In just three months you’ve biked eight thousand miles

in perfect weather on backroads and blue

highways, inspired by sunlight and fresh air.

 

Has anyone lived long enough to be

“almost a native,” as some born elsewhere

used to say after many years in Tucson?

 

May we not homestead in creation, staking

our claims, not taking what’s given for granted,

settling in some ever nearer region?


 

Benefits of Doubt

 

For D. T. S.

 

No inference made, no implication either—

I did not infer what you did not imply,

but thanks. I appreciate your concern.

 

Ghosts haunt words with shades of meaning

difficult to dispel. Slips and lapses

make us marvel at the secret life

 

of language in conversation with itself.

Perfect strangers intrude upon the best

intentions, foiling our plans. Still, we’re thrilled

 

to entertain felicities unaware.

It all depends upon our being being

attuned. So, drop your guard. Speak your mind.

 

Learn what you mean in sync with those awaiting

news of you and yours. I’ll listen up. Online

or off, count on my friendship as a reader.

Arborist

 

Two trees or maybe three I knew for sure:

the fig and sycamore…but now I can’t

 

recall the third. The Church of Rome inspired

my confidence about the first—fig leaves

 

cover places Michelangelo

and Donatello felt the shepherd boy

 

need not blush to leave exposed. A protest

rallied us to save the sycamores

 

along the Charles River by Mem Drive.

But I knew cacti of my desert boyhood

 

well before hope of a better school stole me

away from home to greener climes with all

 

four seasons, ice and snow, and trees Thoreau

once learned by heart alone. The orchard keeper,

 

my beloved, leads me now through arboretums

around the world. Unlike Walden’s chronicler,

 

even in dark woods, we wander as a pair.

Released from rigors of the father tongue,

 

which he so harped upon, the fallen world’s

transformed into a commonwealth we share.


 

Memento

 

No reason for the trip but Sunday free

we headed toward the North Shore on Route 1

— itself a brilliant stretch of salesmanship

where concrete cattle graze invitingly

on green cement before a steakhouse door,

one of many bright commercial fancies

up and down the strip.

 

We toured the infamous Witch House in Salem

where pre-trial interviews were held before

witchcraft and wizardry scared slaughter out.

There must be reasons why the Lord would fail them.

Soon, a host of innocents told why.

Our high school guide recited all the facts

and ushered us about.

 

Then, on to Marblehead where several hills

are strewn with brayed slate gravestones by a pond

the locals fish on weekends when they’re free.

Hourglasses, death’s heads, cross-bones are the frills

that trim the verses written for the dead.

We paused and read their prayers so quaintly rhymed

and lost to history.

 

May her virtues take her where they should

graven on the slate of Mary by her John

invoked the angels she’d soon bide among

To such as she I’m sure that death is good.

We moved from stone to stone like other tourists

till evening took the light and brought a chill

that made us move along.

 

Going back on the same route we came by

we passed a dinosaur at a putt-putt course,

a lowering hazard on the thirteenth hole.

The traffic slowed. A siren gave a sigh

and blinked upon a wreck beside the road.

Three bodies, under cover, lined the pavement.

The cars slowed to a roll.


 

Streetcar through Parnassus

 

Don’t you think somebody ought to pray for them? - How six-year-old Ruby Bridges explained her prayers for protesters against school desegregation

 

From Lee Circle to the Garden District

nine muses cross the tracks,

divinities of total recall

once upon a time.

From history to astronomy

along St. Charles Avenue

the streetcar bumps and grinds

from Clio to Urania, the goddess

Milton summoned puritanically 

insisting on a Christian meaning

for her pagan name. No such

precise distinction here obtains.

That culture clash sounds academic,

the harmonizing rhetoric antique.

The Heavenly Muse now names

some lapsed Presbyterian

daughter of faded Memory. 

           

Yet, in the roundabout, Lee’s empty place

on the Olympian column top

prompts Clio to review her latest draft

—its epic or tragic plot—

with Calliope and Melpomene.

That vacancy makes room

for hope to change the shape of time

imposed by powers that be—

or were and wished to stay.

           

Cycling between the Odd Fellows’ Rest

and the Archdiocesan Cemetery,

beyond the neutral ground,

I turn toward Metairie and soon discern,

from beneath the Interstate,

a marble soldier

ready to read the roll of casualties,

the toll his counterparts memorialize

on a thousand small-town New England greens.                   

           

                                                         

Whatever local muse prompts song,

as I recall, no run of Boston streets

bears gaudy classical names

if you don’t count the Marathon.

There’s no Mardi Gras with krewes,

like Bacchus or Endymion

or Comus’s raucous gang

routed in that Puritan’s court masque.

Yet who’s to say they won’t be coming back?

Here or there, in Cambridge or Fenway Park,

or on the banquette where first graders once

braved mobs with Federal Marshals,

walking to school and hoping

against hope for a fresh start.

 

Mind Gravy Poetry and More Presents Larry Rhu

Wednesday, November 16

7:00 – 9:00 pm

Mind Gravy Presents Poet Larry Rhu and Songsmith, Branhan, Lowther (Slim Pickens)

Cool Beans, 1217 College Street, Columbia, SC 29201

 

This week, Al Black’s Mind Gravy Poetry will be featuring the poetry of Larry Rhu, a USC Emeritus Professor of English and award-winning poet, and Brahan Lowther (aka Slim Pickens) “a picker of great repute.”

 

Mind Gravy is a weekly show an open mic for original content only and hosted by Al Black