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Selling Short
The winter wind’s a shot across your brow,
An addend to the sense of deficit
You wrestle with inside the here and now.
You’re happy only in the preterit
Or future tense—because you hate the cold
And you believe a sleight of handy grammar
Can save you. Face it, man: You’ve gotten old,
And soon enough the unforgiving hammer
Of time will smack you down. Although you knew
Already that a reckoning was coming,
You stayed the course as if you had no clue
How soon you would instantiate the dumbing
Down and the other mortifying states
That you are heir to. Drowsy sheep accept
What’s given, letting gods control their fates,
Though God Himself has often seemed inept
At neutralizing existential pain.
You fear you’ll die with dreams still unfulfilled
Like everybody else, and you’ll complain
Until at last your diaphragm’s been stilled.
first published in Umbrella (2011)
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Test of Faith
a villanelle
When I am lost I gaze into the sky
To see what new horizons might be found,
But every now and then I wonder why
I bother. Yes, it’s always worth a try,
Though sometimes saving graces aren’t around
When I am lost. I gaze into the sky
Because my heart is like a butterfly
That never feels at home on solid ground,
And every now and then I wonder why
Good people and their children have to die,
Their resting place a slowly sinking mound.
When I am lost I gaze into the sky,
And if it’s raining you may hear me cry
For innocents the rising water drowned.
So every now and then I wonder why
The pantheons of deities on high,
Instead of working miracles, just frowned.
When I am lost I gaze into the sky,
But every now and then I wonder why.
first published in Mӧbius (2011)
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Metabiology 101
A sailboat scuds across a wind-blown lake
beneath the glancing rays of August sun,
and harried loons resurface in its wake,
untroubled by the need to dive down un-
der, for their livelihood is based on this.
The bathers treading water near the shore
take little notice of the dark abyss
beyond; they float there, seeming to adore
the curvature of earth that’s evident
to eyes mere inches from the water level.
The natural order may be heaven-sent
and not entirely random, but the devil
is in the detail. From a nearby hill,
observers with Olympian perspective
suppose that predators will only kill
the prey already weakened or defective,
but citizens disporting in the shallows,
like animals of every other kind,
are subject to the world’s impartial gallows.
How fortunate it is to lack a mind
that harbors thoughts of possible demise
without the expectation of a sav-
ing hand; how troublesome, to realize
the only promised land’s an unmarked grave.
first published in The Pennsylvania Review (2011)
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C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden. Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India. His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.
The amazing thing to me about your poetry is how facile and adept you are at dividing words and thoughts to make creative rhymes. This is enjambment to the nth degree.
“Selling Short” is a great title for what you wrote concerning out eventual failures to perform to our own ideals and standards up until our “diaphragm’s been stilled.”
“Test of Faith” portrays those thoughts that we all have about being lost and staring at the heavens for some relief and questioning the demise of other good folk who seem to die for no reason.
I am thankful you used “Metabiology 101.” I have a future poem likely to be published with “101” and identify that as the first course at a university of a subject (our foreign friends likely do not know this). Your observation of danger not being that far away at any instant is a great message. You employ throughout your poetry some rarely used vocabulary words that enhance your writing credentials and make us pause to ponder and sometimes to look them up.
If, Roy, we can have something called metaphysics, then why not metabiology? Rhyming is a habit I can’t seem to kick. As far as dividing words at the end of a line goes, it’s sometimes helpful and even necessary, but I don’t recommend the practice, and nowadays try to avoid it.
Familiar, classy, adjacent pieces that I carry inside at this point.
You are welcome to the advance notice, Stephen. Apparently 2011 was a gloomy year for me.
CB, these are quite wonderful, particularly “Test of Faith.” Thank you for a most reflective trio today. Best wishes to you.
I don’t know why “Test of Faith” needed an epigraph (Editor’s decision), because at this point I think everybody here knows a villanelle when they read one. Thanks for reading and for the good wishes.
All three of these seem to carry the “Timor mortis conturbat me” theme, and yet they are (at least) thirteen years old. That means the writer has already had over a decade of solid life ahead of him when the poems were published, and maybe has a lot more right now.
But you can do anything you want in a poem. Pretend that you are a young man, pretend that you are an ancient sage, pretend that you are of the opposite sex, pretend that you are an angel, or pretend whatever the hell you like. All that matters is the aesthetic effect that you produce.
Here’s a worthwhile quote on the subject:
“Truthfulness is a necessary attribute of genius, but not of statecraft or government, or of poetic effusions of the imagination.”
— George Pitt-Rivers, Conscience and Fanaticism (1919)
Your comments, Joseph, are not just choice, they are prime. Yeah, back then I was already considering my mortality, but now I am just a dead man walking, talking and writing. Any connection my poems have with the truth is purely coincidental.
Enjoyed all three, C.B., especially “Test of Faith”. The last one made me think of the many people who stand, beer in hand, at the edge of ocean licked rocks during hurricanes.
ps I like the use of the “epigraph”. Someone who may not be familiar with your excellent output may find the classification to be a draw.
OK, jd. But how long can such non-essentials matter, and how much weight do they carry?
C.B., I haven’t had enough free time but wanted to comment on your three excellent poems. You had me with that faux nautical “shot across your brow” which immediately drew me in. Your themes are all bittersweet and moving, but it is your technique which I find to be astonishing. I know of no poet who uses enjambment and subtle rhyme as masterfully as you. Your structuring of repetends in the villanelle is a master class on how to do it.
You once pointed out to me that my use of repetends in a poem had been rather pedestrian. You were right, of course, and although that bit of criticism stung at the time I needed to hear it to help me get to a higher level of competence. Now when I attempt to use repetends in my own poetry I invariably think of your work as the gold standard. And, by the way, that bit of criticism from you was so important to my development as poet that I wish we would see more of on SCP. I appreciate how supportive we are of each other but I have, on occasion, read poems which I thought would benefit from a candid critique, the good as well as the “it needs work.” I have found myself holding my tongue on occasion and then wondering if that self-censoring actually did the poet any good. I’d be interested in your views on this.
I can only hope, Brian, that your accolades are deserved. Both of us do a lot of things right, but when we do wrong we are seldom made to account for our mistakes. Years ago it was decided here that harsh criticism went against the grain of the SCP’s overarching purpose, and since then I have often felt compelled to bite my tongue and temper my pen in the interest of participation trophies. What I have found is that criticism that is very specific and grounded on firm principles flies free, and that serious authors usually appreciate cogent advice. Let your tongue fly free when it needs to. Not everthing is as good as it should be.
I enjoy and always look forward to the reliable quality of your work.
In “Selling Short,” at S4L2, was the echo of the Bard unconscious? I almost read it, “that flesh is heir to,” anyway. In “Test of Faith,” always a sucker for a villanelle, I most enjoyed the clear logical flow that embedded all the structural requirements with not just a natural voice, but a poetic one. It’s easy to make something look hard and hard to make something look easy, which you do here. Great craft!
BTW, there are probably enough new folks flowing in from time to time that declaring it a villanelle is useful. Plus, perhaps at later times, if the SCP crew want to query up a list of all villanelles, adding the epigram sure makes an automated search a lot easier.
In the final poem, there’s something about this inter-stanza enjambment that I really like but can’t put my finger on.
and not entirely random, but the devil
is in the detail. From a nearby hill
Cool stuff. Always looking for you.
Thanks, Daniel. Everything you write is subject to debate, but I’m not in the mood. I was not aware of echoing the Bard, but that is due to my ignorance of Shakespeare and to the fact that the Bard’s pithy tropes have thoroughly penetrated the English language.