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The Sensible Present Has Duration

By Dan ChiassonPosted Wednesday, Dec. 15, 1999, at 3:30 AM ET

O blistering cabinet

*

O mahogany, O birch pipes,
pipe rack, hardcover

books--The Last Convertible, Trinity,
The Royal Wedding,

Biography of Patton.
Railroad spike inscribed

On your thirtieth year
as a soldier, from the 73^rd.

Mail-order crest, name etched
in "runic" script.

O photograph

*

swollen
by false cures,

my uncle, age nine, no more
appointments, strawberry-sized

tumors dotting his spine,
O icicle, formed for dissolution,

"pride" or portent. Military olive.
Tuque, wool surrogate.

Lilac, every tree alike,
What name but alabaster.

O window

*

outside, my grandfather wheeling
a pesticide tank

from tree to tree, spraying everything
with thick, white foam,

bark, leaf, apple flesh,
salting the garden

with handfuls of red sand, dissolving
aphid, Japanese beetle, horned tomato worm

as thick as rope. Gone in an instant,
emerging

from his fiberglass outbuilding shed, helving
an axe, bright blade, pine handle,

to eliminate a dwarf orange weakened
by nesting beetles.

O ordinary axe

*

lilac, uncle, window, cabinet,
lost, not lost, mere home

I merely left, look away
made elegy: a book's

fifth edition, its
yellow cover, not the available red--

instruction manual
for an old-world,

Beta VCR, The Way
split by a nylon dividing ribbon.

*

An out-of-print book.

A remainder.

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Dan Chiasson's poems appear in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

Click here to visit Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site. Slate accepts unsolicited poetry submissions. Mail poetry manuscripts to Robert Pinsky, Slate Poetry Editor, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, M.A., 02215.

COMMENTS

The readers respond:

Dan Chiasson's poem is emotionally honest, and technically superb. This poem calls to mind a phrase from Latin, rerum lachrimae. That means the things of tears. These things aren't the big events or emotions like death or loss, but the details which can evoke them in an instant. Dan Chiasson commands his details with strong feeling, and with true prosodic skill. The gesture in a line like "lilac, uncle, window, cabinet" could be in a 16th-century poem by a master like Sidney or Greville. And yet this poet stays true to his own subject, and to his own emotionally committed voice. I look forward to reading more by this excellent poet.

--Peter Campion

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(12/15)