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.