#peter everwine

[apoemaday]

Rain

by Peter Everwine

Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain drummed against our tent, I heard for the first time a loon’s sudden wail drifting across that remote lake — a loneliness like no other, though what I heard as inconsolable may have been only the sound of something untamed and nameless singing itself to the wilderness around it and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father and of good companions gone into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain and the soft lapping of water, and did not know whether it was grief or joy or something other that surged against my heart and held me listening there so long and late.

[nomorechoirs]

fr. “Rain” by Peter Everwine

[bluewillowmoon]

“What ends goes on ending, he thought, waking into his grief.”

— Peter Everwine, from “The Room Was Dark,” Listening Long and Late: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)

[firstfullmoon]

Peter Everwine, “Rain”

[telemachus-detachment]

"A Story Can Change Your Life" by Peter Everwine

Also found here. Text:

On the morning she became a young widow, my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow, looked up from her work to see a hawk turn her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers. That same moment, halfway around the world in a Minnesota mine, her husband died, buried under a ton of rockfall. She told me this story sixty years ago. I don’t know if it’s true but it ought to be. She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt on Sundays when the acolyte’s silver bell announced the moment of Christ’s miracle, it was the darker mysteries she lived by: shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside, a tapping at the door and nobody there. The moral of the story was plain enough: miracles become a burden and require a priest to explain them. With signs, you only need to keep your wits about you and place your trust in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck and grief are coming your way. And for that —so the story goes—any day will do.

writing these explanations about why i like a poem is making me realize how many of these poems deal with life-altering (destroying has been the word i've used) events. disasters, i guess. there's something about the balance that a good poem strikes between emotion and substance that i love to investigate--i personally find this tone very hard to write in without the poem feeling sappy or mushy. everwine uses the language of storytelling to make sense of things; he creates a scene where symbolism exists in the material world and can effect, save, or even take a life. it's easy to imagine this as an original story for his life as a poet, ironically creating a life in exchange for the one destroyed.

[extollingtheeveryday]

Peter Everwine // "Rain"

[starsalvation]

—Peter Everwine, The Kiskiminetas River

[headlightsforever]

Early March, and the warm days have come.

Overnight, it seems, the pear tree in my backyard, which you loved, has surged into blossom— masses of pale green and white, lifting and falling back in the wind.

A world of dew, said Issa.

Some nights when I try to remember your voice, a certain dress

you wore, the way you stood at the kitchen window, a feeling of suffocation overwhelms me

as if I'd swum too far underwater. I have to sit up and light the lamp

and touch the wall by my bed: solid but not substantial.

Year after year you will grow more distant—

a figure in an old photograph returning to the unfamiliar.

If every family has its own language, then ours, with its shadow speech and Old World under-song, has gone into your silence, my forgetfulness, and what was left unsaid will be so forever...

As if words were like the old men I knew as a boy, walking slowly homeward at dusk, bent, their hands clasped behind their backs, pulling an invisible but heavy cart.

It was your last day, the woods, the hills overlooking the valley severe with winter.

We stood in a field among the many dead, among names I had known all my life, and you entered the earth.

You believed in the resurrection of the body,

and in the communion of saints, though Jude you loved most of all,

who intercedes in the name of the hopeless and inconsolable.

Remember her, therefore, who was one of His servants that is among those who preceded us.

So we climb upward into the white dazzle of the world,

each of us tied to the others by the same dark rope.

Who knows what it is the earth swallows?

There is in me, always, you and the absence of you.

There is in me, always, that road that leads to a field of flowers we once knew

in that place where you were young, there, where Memory keeps a life of its own in the dark,

like a plant that waits patiently year after year, asleep and folded inward until the appointed night arrives

when it stirs and wakes and opens out—O dream flowering! Darkness flowering into darkness!—

forms, figures made visible in the sadness of Time.

Peter Everwine, "Elegiac Fragments" from From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)