RICHARD TILLINGHAST
SMOKE
My schoolteacher friend drove me
in his schoolteacher’s-salary Subaru
from the lighthouse in St. James, explaining.
I liked riding in the wet-wool fustiness
of that car, its car-heater warmth
and up-north funk.
I liked jamming my boots down into
the days-old crumpled-up
fast food wrappers and old newspapers,
and I cleared with my glove
circles in the frost on the windshield
as we bumped off the blacktop.
Then there we were on foot in the mud and rain,
circumnavigating the circle of stones—
I counted thirty-nine. We left offerings
where others had left theirs—coins
and trinkets: a St. Christopher, a couple of jacks,
a lipstick, a rabbit’s foot, a dime-store ring.
Someone had chiseled into one of the stones
what looked like a rune.
Was that a thousand years ago?
The weather had not erased it. My friend said
that on the solstice the rising sun
lines up across the circle’s axis.
And that was when the car full of Anishinaabe
appeared—Ojibwe from the look of them—,
their car even older than ours.
I watched as they took tobacco from a pouch,
lit it and lifted up some words
into the smoke and drizzle.
Did that smoke, did those words
keep their circle unbroken
in the life they lived among us in this America?—
invisible most days, their lives unchronicled
in the newspapers crushed underfoot
inside the schoolteacher’s car.
THREADS
When I say he was a presence
in the house where I grew up,
I don’t mean as a ghost. My dead
grandfather would have had, I think,
too much tact to return
after the dirt had been shoveled, the limousines
parked, the black clothes folded and put away.
Still, his spirit inhabited our house.
He was born the last year of the war
in Tennessee, and he died
the last year of the war in France,
burning up with influenza the troops
brought back from the trenches.
When the Baptist preacher came to his bedside
to pray for him, Grandfather asked him would he
go out and get him a cold bottle of beer.
Grandfather died with his reserve intact.
How little I know of the man!
I touch, wondering, the keys he left
among his things, their antiquated
edges still sharp:
strongbox, cash drawer, lock box,
office door and locks unknown—
keys to nothing.
When I was seventeen I found
in the back of the attic
his silk frayed smoking jacket, his chesterfield
coat with its velvet lapels. I wore
his clothes until
I wore them out, feeling his spirit
breathe through the threads. Here’s his gold
watch on my table. I keep it wound.
REVIVAL
Abandoned on what was a road,
a pickup truck,
blue paint purpled by sun,
and a Model-A Ford
stalled on this shoulder of the mountain,
sumac growing up through the horsehair seats,
rusty seed pods in league
with the rust of the machine.
Creeper interlaces the tines of an antique
harvester in a field,
a cooking pot overturned in the yard.
Inside the house, pictures still hang on the walls,
though they took their Bible with them.
I don’t hear the hymns they sang, do you?
And what has become of their church?
But let this homeplace speak. Let it tell its story
now that the machinery of the world
starts to misfire,
stall out, and begin its slow deceleration.
Maybe it’s time to disappear
down into the creek bed, quick as we can,
ahead of what’s coming over the mountain,
follow the deer tracks
and the strange cries of wild turkeys.
Flakes of obsidian, arrowheads, rusty bolts,
a cannon ball from an old battle,
bleed into the stream
that obliterates our tracks.
Could we ride bareback again,
plow the earth, hunt and trap,
sew and mend,
rig a snare to catch the feral pigs,
build a tabernacle
in the loneliness of the unpeopled mountains?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Tillinghast’s new collection, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, is the winner of the 2022 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Blue If Only I Could Tell You is his thirteenth collection, in addition to five books of creative nonfiction, including Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering, and most recently, Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places, 2017. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Best American Poetry and elsewhere. In addition, he reviewed new poetry for the New York Times Book Review for many years. The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Council, the Irish Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Richard lives in Hawaii and spends his summers in Sewanee, Tennessee.