David Anthony Sam

Fatherhood

There was the valley,
the Youghiogheny cutting
through rounded mountains,
the red clay my father dug
with pickax and shovel
to force a home from
the grudging hillside.

The time was new, the clay
dark red with iron,
the wind warm enough
for summer, but not so
hot you’d think of death.
My father grunted with
each heft and swing.

He sculpted that clay
with the same careful
touch he used when he
etched our busts in
redwood. He showed me
the meaning of the red clay,
the river in the valley

cleft, the rounded mountains.
He showed me the tracks
of the deer, the shy brown
flash of doe between
green undergrowth. He
showed me how to find
wild onions by their

leaves, and how to
recognize wild cherry
trees by their black
bark and sweet sap.
And with the sunburnt sweat
of his rippling back,
and with each heft and swing,

he showed me how to cut
a home from a red hillside.
So with a shaping word
I have tried to hew
a human place from high sun
and the hunger within
the world’s rich clay.

(Published in the Wayne Review Winter 1987)

Public reading available on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VsYLxIhWl8

Becoming November

Stark trees,
slate blue background
of sky and mist,
grey lake, waved,

green banks and brown underbrush,
a single car on the bridge
going north towards the hill,
a group of gulls

harsh white in the bay
perched on stumps
exposed now that the lake is low,
a single figure

standing on the bridge
observing, becoming
these sensations at the bridge,
obeying his sensations,

becoming wet with mist,
becoming cold in the wind,
becoming stark and grey,
becoming November.

(Published in the Wayne Review, Winter 1987)

Covenantial

More rain. Noah’s rain.
The yard fills
and a river ripples
where grass weaved
in once dry
winds. A new deluge.
A new end of creation.
When the clouds
have cleared, no
dove flies, except two
mourning doves
loosed from the ground
below the bird feeders.
No
rainbow arcs
across sunlit sky.
No covenant is
written in new God’s
spell. But
there are two of us,
three cats,
a house that seems still
seaworthy.
And if God smiles in
the soaked lawn, reflecting
like sunlight
from a lake
where grass weaved
in a once dry
wind, who
am I to doubt
that some faith
has been restored,
some balance
kept, some
momentousness
raised like a lost
son into the heavens.
It may look very like
a cloud.
It may feel very like
the breath
of the divine, drying
our small and grassy
Ararat.

Published in The Huirricane Review (2008) with rights reverting to the author

Driveway Music

On the asphalt, not far
from the orange daylilies
and the garden of bottlebrush
bushes, azalea, and firecracker
fern, the daily lies, wrapped
in neat plastic, but soggy
from a day’s rain seeping
into a torn gap. That’s
okay. The blossoms of
death that litter the front
page need watering too.

It does little good to shake
my head like an old donkey
as I walk back to the house.
The mist of lost lives does
not dissipate like the morning
fog from the garden. The bright
flash of flower coloring
the periphery of my focus
does not pull me from black
ink on stark newsprint. For
this I spend nights weeding
thoughts and images into words.

In a journal, with an anachronistic
pen and more stubbornness than
courage, I nightly pour syllables
into vases, called poems, hard
attempts at sense and significance
from diurnal clashes with all
that is unpoetic: Unordered
corpses, unspoken truths,
unplanted seeds, uneaten meals,
unwanted gestures, unfathomable
strings of empty galaxies.

As the purest music may be
the silence, the purest art that
bit of shadow in a van Eyck,
so the purest poetry may be
beyond sentences that seek
a subject for a verb, a referent
for every reference. In absence
we find something that may pass
for truth in the face of the bluntness
of our angry living against each other.
And yet, here grow more words.

So we aspire to the meaningless
music of the image without label,
the tone without an instrument.
The orange flash without lily.
The rush of a windless air by
an open ear. The brush of lips
against a lover’s face in lieu
of still─ more─ words. All
open us to the great disappearance
that consumes our biography.
So this must end at last in whiteness.

10/12/06