phillip crymble

@phillipcrymble.bsky.social

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poet | phd | umichwriters alum | fiddlehead poetry editor | record collector | author of not even laughter | one-armed bandit | he/him

Community College in the Rain Announcement: All pupils named Doug. Please come to the lounge on Concourse K. Please join us for coffee and remarks. Dougs: We cannot come. We are injured by golf cleats. Announcement: Today we will discuss the energy in a wing and something about first basemen. Ribs will be served in the cafeteria. Pep Club: We will rally against golf cleats today. The rally will be held behind the gymnasium. There is a Model T in the parking lot with its lights on. Dougs: We are dying in the nurse's office. When she passes before the window, she looks like a bride. Karen (whispers): We are ranking the great shipwrecks. Announcement: In the classroom filled with dishwater light, Share your thoughts on public sculpture. All: O Dougs, where are you? Dougs: In the wild hotels of the sea.
THE END OF THE LIBRARY When the coal Gave out, we began Burning the books, one by one; First the set Of Bulwer-Lytton And then the Walter Scott. They gave a lot of warmth. Toward the end, in February, flames Consumed the Greek Tragedians and Baudelaire, Proust, Robert Burton And the Po-Chu-i. Ice Thickened on the sills. More for the sake of the cat, We said, than for ourselves, Who huddled, shivering, Against the stove All winter long.
Phillip Crymble Threnody Westbound on the highway from Chicago and the traffic slows. Sunspots flare and fade behind the road crew, blurred mid-summer fields of wheat against the oats and beans. We know the world's too close to see - mixed grains grow in furrows that a plough-team might have made in eighteen-fifty. And the sunlight strays behind the fields, its threnody in gold and red so faint it's as a candle-end left burning in a settler's pan. Floodlights hum, illuminate the caution signs in orange, shine fluorescent. And my friend, you know, I wonder why I waste my time - remind me what I must have done, or might. Cake | 67
The Empty Church They laid this stone trap for him, enticing him with candles, as though he would come like some huge moth out of the darkness to beat there. Ah, he had burned himself before in the human flame and escaped, leaving the reason torn. He will not come any more to our lure. Why, then, do I kneel still striking my prayers on a stone heart? Is it in hope one of them will ignite yet and throw on its illumined walls the shadow of someone greater than I can understand? R. S. THOMAS
The Invention Of Writing It is true, all things flake and flow. The breathing horse will disappear. But the trees do root and bear out. In its different way, memory holds what we are and what we have known. When I go into the water and swim, I feel the presence of my body walking back. When I go up on the hill for the stars and hear the sheep bells, they remain. This evening the dolphins jump dark from the shining of the ocean, hang in the air and are gone. But what interests me is that they last such a long time after.
Quiet Nights I go to sleep on one beach, wake up on another. Boat all fitted out, tugging against its rope. RAYMOND CARVER
1 It may not be written in any book, but it is written- You can't go back, you can't repeat the unrepeatable. No matter how fast you drive, or how hard the slide show Of memory flicks and releases, It's always some other place, some other car in the driveway, Someone unrecognizable about to open the door.
ABC Any body can die, evidently. Few Go happily, irradiating joy, Knowledge, love. Most Need oblivion, painkillers, Quickest respite. Sweet time unafflicted, Various world: X = your zenith.
THOMAS HARDY She at His Funeral They bear him to his resting-place- In slow procession sweeping by; I follow at a stranger's space; His kindred they, his sweetheart I. Unchanged my gown of garish dye, Though sable-sad is their attire; But they stand round with griefless eye, Whilst my regret consumes like fire!
Bargain We paid him next to nothing--less than the little he'd asked for--to lead us at dusk from the pyramids on camels into the desert. Such slim wages to take us, without complaint, all that way— so far, without a star. We were in the middle of nowhere, or at its edge. Friends, he asked, from out of that blackness, what will you pay me to take you back?
Self-Portrait with Eraser I drew the eraser first because I knew it better than I knew myself and because it had been around the block before me and because it would, after having its way with me, rub up against everything I'd ever loved.
All This Time You've Been Driving The rain is not falling rather we are rushing up to it Translucent wingless insects vanish into the thought The night grinding backward overhead swallow slow the black honey flows through you a road that keeps moving as later we're reading or talking or asleep.
HEARD IN A VIOLENT WARD In heaven, too, You'd be institutionalized. But that's all right,- If they let you eat and swear With the likes of Blake, And Christopher Smart, And that sweet man, John Clare.
And Then What Then with their hands they would break bread wave choke phone thump thread Then with their tired hands slump at a table holding their head Then with glad hands hold other hands or stroke brief flesh in a kind bed Then with their hands on the shovel they would bury their dead.
Wish You Were Here BY SADIQA DE MEIJER Where the seedling body, wearing a smock or a backwards old dress shirt, makes a map: two wells of colour in an egg carton, glossed paper, thick-handled brush. Start with a burst of solar egg, streak with sea. That clotted bloom of overlap, beheld -duckweed, algae, moss-paint's a skin and then it's a sinking dream for the gaze. Verdant island blotting at the shores, and the grass is nowhere greener, nowhere is it greener than this place.
LOVESICK I found an apple. A red and shining apple. I took its photograph. I hid the apple in the attic. I opened the skylight and the sun said Ah! At night, I checked that it was safe, under the giggling stars, the sly moon. My cool apple. Whatever you are calling about, I am not interested. Go away. You with the big teeth.
DRUNK Suddenly the rain is hilarious. The moon wobbles in the dusk. What a laugh. Unseen frogs belch in the damp grass. The strange perfumes of darkening trees. Cheap red wine and the whole world a mouth. Give me a double, a kiss.
CAROL ANN DUFFY Wish But what if, in the clammy soil, her limbs grew warmer, shifted, stirred, kicked off the covering of earth, the drowsing corms, the sly worms, what if her arms reached out to grab the stone, the grooves of her dates under her thumb, and pulled her up? I wish. Her bare feet walk along the gravel path between the graves, her shroud like washing blown onto the grass, the petals of her wreath kissed for a bride. Nobody died. Nobody wept. Nobody slept who couldn't be woken by the light. If I can only push open this heavy door she'll be standing there in the sun, dirty, tired, wondering why do I shout, why do I run.
170 Poppies in July Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns. And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth. A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts! There are fumes that I cannot touch. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules? If I could bleed, or sleep!- If my mouth could marry a hurt like that! Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling. But colorless. Colorless. 20 July 1962
Da Capo Take the used-up heart like a pebble and throw it far out. Soon there is nothing left. Soon the last ripple exhausts itself in the weeds. Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery. Glaze them in oil before adding the lentils, water, and herbs. Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt. Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat. You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
"NOTHING LASTS" "Nothing lasts"- how bitterly the thought attends each loss. "Nothing lasts"- a promise also of consolation. Grief and hope the skipping rope's two ends, twin daughters of impatience. One wears a dress of wool, the other cotton.
Oil & Steel My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum, watching a portable black-and-white television, reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he preferred to Modern Fiction. One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease, except the one that guarded his corpse found holding a tumbler of Bushmills. "Dead is dead,” he would say, an antipreacher. I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet and some motor oil-my inheritance. Once I saw him weep in a courtroom— neglected, needing nursing-this man who never showed me much affection but gave me a knack for solitude, which has been mostly useful.
Because of Bears I'm told to fill out a form in order to qualify for another form. Do not sit here says a sign on an otherwise perfectly calm chair. Don't speak do wah diddy even if spoken to. Plastic flowers in dusty derangement, last gasps of a dry-docked mermaid but no, it's just no one on the other end. On TV, a spaceman gets covered in sinister goo. I'm told to hang the food from a tree. Hypnotic the rain, heavy the heart in the hand. During the interview, I'm tossed a small blue rubber ball. I catch it and zing it right back. I let it bounce off my face. I catch it and put it in my pants. I attempt to catch it and miss then burst into tears. You can keep your crappy job.
Not The Moon Nor Pretend If this woman is simple do you love her less? Is she less important? If she looks like sadness but is love itself do you want not to see her? If you see only face and hair, don't you imagine the hands lifted in some larger scene? Can't you tell she will last until the world is done?
I Faster and faster, They vanish into darkness: Our years together.
I Hear America Singing I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck- hand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter sing- ing as he stands, The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day-at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
Empire DEAN GORMAN The start was the end, of course, a dream of perfection. And finally the procession of average ghosts. But before all that I was young enough to change the players I was the center of. Looking back, I seem bound for summer anguishes. And now my eyes sweep along, for metaphor, for difficult models of empire. Relief when I find none.
GIRLHOOD was when I slept in the woods bareheaded beneath jagged stars and the membranous near-misses of bats, when I tasted watercress, wild carrot, and sorrel, when I was known by the lilac I hid beside, and when that lilac, burdened by my expectations of lilacs, began a journey without me, as when the dirt road sang, O, rugosa rose, farewell, and ran behind the clipped white pine hedge into the immeasurable heartbreaks of the field. --Cecily Parks
Phillip Crymble Luminology It doesn't mean that much to me-people on a trampoline, their roadside garden, sunlight, grades of summer green all chosen as if entries in a catalogue. Field notes leave me wondering what we're afforded. Is it plain to see? Faint laughter, open motion caught, a beat-up truck, enough to please, enough to make the table-cloth the women shake out thoughtlessly toward the fields seem golden. Mist as fine as chalk- dust on the corn rows now—a slow explosion settling. It travels down the furrows, twists and breathes the night, moves deeper still. Fireflies crowd the underside of leaves, lay eggs, cast yellow protein-light that glistens in the nebula. New constellations burning free, a back-drop ... but I'm one to talk, it doesn't mean that much to me. It doesn't.
FIREFLIES IN THE GARDEN Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.
The South Bank Poetry library, London This is a pleasant library. I'd enjoy every minute But for the danger of meeting other poets in it.
There must be a painless way to remember the way the apple trees tangled up, and rain came down on the Gulf station, or the pastures on the back of a nickel like the decimals in our initials, falling hard and clean upon everything.
English Weather January's grey and slushy, February's chill and drear, March is wild and wet and windy, April seldom brings much cheer. In May, a day or two of sunshine, Three or four in June, perhaps. July is usually filthy, August skies are open taps. In September things start dying, Then comes cold October mist. November we make plans to spend The best part of December pissed.
The Breath of Night The moon rises. The red cubs rolling In the ferns by the rotten oak Stare over a marsh and a meadow To the farm's white wisp of smoke. A spark burns, high in heaven. Deer thread the blossoming rows Of the old orchard, rabbits Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows From the tree by the widow's walk; Two stars, in the trees to the west, Are snared, and an owl's soft cry Runs like a breath through the forest. Here too, though death is hushed, though joy Obscures, like night, their wars, The beings of this world are swept By the Strife that moves the stars.
Proletarian Portrait A big young bareheaded woman in an apron Her hair slicked back standing on the street One stockinged foot toeing the sidewalk Her shoe in her hand. Looking intently into it She pulls out the paper insole to find the nail That has been hurting her
Nantucket Flowers through the window lavender and yellow changed by white curtains— Smell of cleanliness— Sunshine of late afternoon— On the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying—And the immaculate white bed
THE WALRUS MAP BY PHILLIP CRYMBLE The trays of coloured pencils on the table. Your list of lakes and waterways. Careful not to come too close to coastlines-I crudely shade the bigger bays and basins-surround the land you've laboured at in Copenhagen blue. Another year of middle school-and now- like last October-I try to help out how I can- attempt to be of use. On Sundays-back in '82- I'd waken with the chickadees-their chorus- snip the strapping on an outsized bale of papers-— get them loaded for my morning route. My father never lay in late. Unshaven-with a picnic mug of Folgers-he'd sit and thumb the funnies-pull his boots on in the entry when I ambled into view. Together-in our solitudes-we'd throw the last few bundles in the hatchback-cruise the boulevards and crescents as if looking for a runaway-the old man slowing down for me to bring the world the news.
ROBERT HAYDEN Those Winter Sundays Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?
Poem Composed in Santa Barbara The poets talk. They talk a lot. They talk of T. S. Eliot. One is anti. One is pro. How hard they think! How much they know! They're happy. A cicada sings. We women talk of other things.
The Heavens From mind to mind I am acquainted with the struggles of these stars. The very same chemistry wages itself minutely in my person. It is all one intolerable war. I don't care if we're fugitives, we are ceaselessly exalted, rising like the drowned out of our shirts...
"Cheever remarked that he could always recognize "an alcoholic line" in a writer's work. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by this but I think I know. When we were teaching in the lowa Writers' Workshop in the fall semester of 1973, he and I did nothing but drink. I mean we met our classes, in a manner of speaking. But the entire time we were there-we were living in this hotel they have on campus, the lowa House-I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters. We made trips to a liquor store twice a week in my car. [...] He lived on the fourth floor of the hotel and I lived on the second. Our rooms were identical, right down to the same reproduction of the same painting hanging on the wall. But when we drank together, we always drank in his room. He said he was afraid to come down to drink on the second floor. He said there was always a chance of him getting mugged in the hallway!"
White, White Collars We work in a building where we are hideous in the fluorescent light, where our clothes woke up this morning and wrapped us up like jewels and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us, turning and returning like the spray of light that goes around dance-halls, among the dancing fools. This office smells like a theory, but here one weeps to see the goodness of the world laid bare and rising with the government on its lips, the alphabet congealing in the air around our heads. But in my belly's flames someone is dancing, calling me by many names that are secret and filled with light and rise and break, and I see my previous lives.
For the Graduation: Bolinas, 1972 Round and round again, and up and down again-always these days do go by, and this one is yours to go by. This walking on and on, this going and coming— this morning shines such lovely light on all of us. We're home.
Detail from the front cover of the Hockey Night in Canada double LP released in 1972
The Rowan Berries of Winter ------for Robert Lowell At Roosevelt, the orderlies were forced to break your wrists the large brown-paper parcel that you clutched against your breastbone held in place by rigor mortis. That it should end like this -- your death and final moments thick with parable and irony. Your briefcase filled with notes for poems you'd never re-arrange -- an illustrated postcard of the Vinalhaven Islands -- the salts that they prescribed to help you fasten down your brain. A yellowhammer stiffened on the newsprint in its cage -- your heart-- undone by injury -- gave up without complaint. Magnolia and ginkgo trees were breaking into flame. Your taxi like a solar barge. Its nose against the waves. Phillip Crymble
ON THE DEATH OF ROBERT LOWELL O, I don't give a shit. He was an old white-haired man Insensate beyond belief and Filled with much anxiety about his imagined Pain. Not that I'd know I hate fucking wasps. The guy was a loon. Signed up for Spring Semester at MacLeans A really lush retreat among pines and Hippy attendants. Ray Charles also once rested there. So did James Taylor The famous, as we know, are nuts. Take Robert Lowell. The old white-haired coot. Fucking dead.
THE MAD SCENE Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry. In it, the sheets and towels of a life we were going to share, The milk-stiff bibs, the shroud, each rag to be ever Trampled or soiled, bled on or groped for blindly, Came swooning out of an enormous willow hamper Onto moon-marbly boards. We had just met. I watched From outer darkness. I had dressed myself in clothes Of a new fiber that never stains or wrinkles, never Wears thin. The opera house sparkled with tiers And tiers of eyes, like mine enlarged by belladonna, Trained inward. There I saw the cloud-clot, gust by gust, Form, and the lightning bite, and the roan mane unloosen. Fingers were running in panic over the flute's nine gates. Why did I flinch? I loved you. And in the downpour laughed To have us wrung white, gnarled together, one Topmost mordent of wisteria, As the lean tree burst into grief. --JAMES MERRILL (1962)
Leaving for Dick and Afkham Next summer? The summer after? With luck we've a few more years Of sunshine and drinking and laughter And airports and goodbyes and tears.
VAGUE MEMORY FROM CHILDHOOD It was the end of day- Vast far clouds In the zenith darkening At the end of day. The voices of my aunts Sounded through an open window. Birdspeech cantankerous in a high tree mingled With the voices of my aunts. I had been playing alone, Caught up in a sort of dream, With sticks and twigs pretending; Playing there alone In the dust. And a lamp came on indoors, Printing a frail gold geometry On the dust. Shadows came engulfing The great charmed sycamore. It was the end of day. Shadows came engulfing. -DONALD JUSTICE
Poetry It isn't brain surgery. But then again, what else is brain surgery. Besides brain surgery. Two dogs are company. Three's a lot of shit. Isn't lingerie a great word? I mean, it's got linger in it. What came first, the nook or the cranny? A dead squirrel was the first heating pad. Ice it, or heat it? Even the doctors get confused. That leads me to inflamed. See, that's a great word because it's got med in it. And lamé! And inf, an obscure name for a Danish elf. I want to be a Danish elf in lamé who's finally off his meds. I picked three flowers today. They quietly share the same vase.
Because We Are Not Taken Seriously Some night I wish they'd knock on my door, the government men, looking for the poem of simple truths recited and whispered among the people. And when all I give them is silence and my children are exiled to the mountains, my wife forced to renounce me in public, I'll be the American poet whose loneliness, finally, is relevant, whose slightest movement ripples cross-country. And when the revolution frees me, its leaders wanting me to become "Poet of the Revolution," I'll refuse and keep a list of their terrible reprisals and all the dark things I love which they will abolish. With the ghost of Mandelstam on one shoulder, Lorca on the other, I'll write the next poem, the one that will ask only to be believed once it's in the air, singing.
Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors What they undertook to do They brought to pass; All things hang like a drop of dew Upon a blade of grass. 1932
ROSS GAY Alzheimer's She stood in her doorway, asked my name again—something she would never remember. A breeze loosed some cherry blossoms, petals flipping through her open arms as she whispered, Look what God has done, look what God has done.
II Darkness, darkness. I grope and falter. Flare of a match.
Photo-image of the cover of Curtis Mayfield's CURTIS/LIVE! (1971).
PHONE CALL You were saying her death was for the best Though you didn't want cliché You were saying No one was to blame I was watching the sky: pale, eggshell blue; dark, ink blue Talking and talking Night lighting the brightening city Wanting to ask something I had forgotten to ask That I couldn't now, on my mother's life, remember --HUGH SEIDMAN
The Way Things Are in Franklin Even the undertaker is going out of business. And since the dime store closed, we can't get parakeets on Main Street anymore, or sleeveless gingham smocks for keeping Church Fair pie off the ample fronts of the strong, garrulous wives of pipefitters and road agents. The hardware's done for too. Yesterday, a Sunday, I saw the proprietors breaking up shop, the woman struggling with half a dozen bicycle tires on each arm, like bangle bracelets, the man balancing boxes filled with Teflon pans. The windows had been soaped to frustrate curiosity, or pity, or that cheerless satisfaction we sometimes feel when others fail.
MY SON THE MAN Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider, the way Houdini would expand his body while people were putting him in chains. It seems no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper, guide his calves into the gold interior, zip him up and toss him up and catch his weight. I cannot imagine him no longer a child, and I know I must get ready, get over my fear of men now my son is going to be one. This was not what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson, snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains, and appeared in my arms, what I had always wanted, my son the baby. Now he looks at me the way Houdini studied a box to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.
JOHN BERRYMAN 'I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum' I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum Straight after lunch; we stood then at one end, A sort of cafeteria behind, my friend Behind me, nuts in groups about the room; A dumbwaiter with five shelves was waiting (some- thing's missing here) to take me up - I bend And lift a quart of milk to hide and tend, Take with me. Everybody is watching, dumb. I try to put it first among some worm- shot volumes of the N.E.D. I had On the top shelf- then somewhere else... slowly Lise comes up in a matron's uniform And with a look (I saw once) infinitely sad In her grey eyes takes it away from me.