String
by
Gary Gildner
This is Michael Carey for Voices
from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary
tradition. Today’s writer is Gary Gildner a long-time writer and teacher
at Drake University in Des Moines. This poem stems from a time he spent in Poland
just after it opened up to the west. It is long and I will not be able to fit
it all in here, so I will start right in.
String
The women in the Polish P.O.—their
clusters
of bunched-up consonants exploding
and ricocheting off the walls like so many Chinese
firecrackers—sent me reeling in the dark
with my three mailers of books back and forth
between the two stations they commanded,
until this hard fact slowly came through:
neither woman wanted me: my mailers
were too big for one, and for the other
I had no string around them—string
being essential, required by law, without it
everything would fall apart during the journey
and then where would I be? said the string woman,
who moved her pretty Slavic fingers with such nimble
an lacy grace to help me understand this impossible
situation, that I now felt something like the fuzzy
combustions of love burning under my scalp.
I needed to respond somehow, to show her
this time everything was different, not to fret,
that what I’d laid on her scales was tough as nails.
So getting a good grip on my biggest American-
made mailer and then dipping into the classic, slowly
uncoiling crouch that discus throwers have burst from
since the beginning, I flung the unstrung thing up, up
and away, toward the Gothic rafters of that Polish PO
Oh, it flew and flew and no one at that moment
could have been possessed by his power
than I was, and when it almost reached
where no man would ever dream to touch,
I began to reflect on a law I never had much use for
--i.e. objects in motion ten to remain in motion.
I didn’t believe it in my youth when all smacked
baseballs and all spun-off hubcaps soon stopped dead
in the weeds somewhere, and I didn’t much trust it now
watching my discus-mailer of hardbound books, run out of
gas and glory, begin its heavy, necessary journey
down from the ceiling, toward a tiny, ancient, white-
haired grandma, who sat, composed as porcelain,
at a table, writing; surely she had come in
from the cold with only one thing in mind:
to send sweet wishes and high hopes for many
healthy tomorrows to her loved ones far away—in Puck
perhaps, or Lodz—for indeed it was Christmas week
and who among us wants to hear about misery.
I saw myself hauled off by the Milicja,
and I saw the headline: American Brains Innocent Babcia.
They’d throw the book at me, of course, I deserved it,
a hot-headed Yankee off his nut. And no nice poppyseed
cakes, no piwo, no luscious pierogi stuffed
with cheese, meat, or creamy potatoes where I was going—
And then my mailer came down with a great whack
to the floor, landing inches from the little babcia’s feet.
Slowly she raised her eyes and regarded it,
then around till she found me,
then back to her writing as if the flat brown thing
and the man gripping his hair didn’t exist,
that nothing in fact had happened—or if it had,
so what, she had seen bigger noises fall from the sky.
My fires were out, cold; it was time to pick up and go.
Turning to the other two women, I saw that
they had somehow gotten together
and were blushing, blushing like impossible peaches!
And pulling dozens of loose strings out of nowhere.
"String" by Gary Gildner
from his book Clackamas published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Gary Gildner is an award winning writer who taught for many years at Drake University in Des Moines. He lives now in Idaho with his wife and daughter. His works include eight volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a novel and a memoir, The Warsaw Sparks (Iowa, 1990). His latest book of poems is The Bunker in the Parsley Fields published by the University of Iowa Press and winner of the 1996 Iowa Poetry Prize.