You pass again that curb in Eden
  and smile, and I am always turning
  to see you in the moving sky.
  Mystery is a long ride,
  but there's a warm seat next to you
  and a prairie far as the sun.

  My father rides too. He is waving,
  the luggage of his heart at last put down.
  I'll be with him soon,
  take his workman hands, young as lions
  in mine, and look back to the lot
  in spring where I turned and stood once
  with new clothes in the mud of innocence.

Joseph Enzweiler was born in 1950 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up there. He was educated in physics and mathematics and began writing poetry at seventeen. He moved to Alaska in 1975 and built a cabin north of Fairbanks, where he still lives.  He works seasonally as a carpenter, stone mason and photographer and continues to write. A Curb In Eden is his third book of poems.  Two previous books are Home Country and Stonework of the Sky.
 
 

An Excerpt from: A Curb in Eden

The Wind

All my life I've been waiting here
and never knew till now, for the day
long ago in March the phone lines
held their breath, and doors
about to speak, hammers raised
in the strenuous sun that had no echoes,
when running children froze across the lawn
with their lives as thin as cups.

Each troubled car intent on evening,
faces blurred toward cruelty or truth,
the clocks and mirrors of their eyes,
when every destination stopped

the second you smiled at me
from the bus window. I stood there
on the pavement in a black roar of diesel
at four o'clock, a day like any day
until I was visible. Around me the mud
smelled cool with spring and sour straw
and the potholes shivered with rain.

We were fifteen that year, strangers
to ourselves. I must have smiled too,
waved when you did. As the engine
wound up and pulled away, clouds
in the glass swept over you,
bright hurried countries of the sky,
faster till at last your very thoughts
were clouds to me, your face
a window to another day.

When I turned for home, my chest
caught the wind and I was gone,
reciting the shape of love
past the locust trees through the gate,
feeling in your dark eyes as my steps grew bigger
I'm as large now as my happiness.

I never saw the hammers fall and build
the world. I thought I could come back
and always find you there, your hand
in the green coat sleeve, not knowing
we are the wind itself.

That night at supper, my family
ate the same in their same chairs.
But for me the fish was beautiful
and sweet I opened with my fork.
They did not see. I never spoke of you
though my blood was curving to the sky.

This all was long ago.
But I sit outside many days with coffee
or look up from my tools.
These thoughts are holes where the wind blows.

© Copyright Joseph Enwzeiler 1999
 
 
 

Salmon Poetry, an Irish publisher, has recently released two books by Alaskan writers:  Story Hunger by Jerah Chadwick and A Curb in Eden by Joseph Enzweiler. This is Chadwick's first collection and Enzweiler's third.  We owe Jessie Lendennie of Salmon Poetry our gratitude for publishing these two collections. I know of no Alaskan publisher who will even read a poetry manuscript, and that includes the University of Alaska Press.

Chadwick, who has lived on Unalaska Island for many years, has a keen interest in history and myth, two things that are missing from most contemporary poetry. Chadwick's language is terse and for the most part devoid of ornament.  He uses simile and metaphor sparingly but to great effect.  His world is one where water is 'fractured slat'' and falling snow is 'like static.'  It is a harsh world with a brutal history.  This collection includes several powerful poems about the Russian conquest of the Aleutians and their near decimation of the Aleut population.  One of the book's strongest poems is based on the diary of Nebu Tatuguchi a Japanese physician who was killed during the battle for Attu during the Second World War. Tatuguchi's diary was found and translated by Army Intelligence after the battle, but it is too lengthy to quote here.

While his world is often comprised of, all the shades of grey, the local incantatory color, Chadwick believes in the redemptive power of story or myth. For Chadwick, a story is  the everyday and ancient rewoven.'  It redeems the world.

A fair number of the poems in Story Hunger have an Irish setting, but Chadwick's concerns remain the same; it is interesting to note that the Irish, as well as the Aleut, came very close to losing their language and culture because of foreign conquest, but their stories survived.  In the following poem, Chadwick weaves
elements from Aleut and Irish culture to great effect.

  Selchie:  Seal Man

  Perhaps he has surprised the red headed woman
  wandering the beach, or she him
  resting among the rocks, the stranger
  emerging from shed skins, his hair black,
  face less flat without its halo
  of hide, his dark eyes
  gentle or not.  What happens next

  anyone's guess:  attempted flight
  or conversation.  And their grappling,
  gentle or not, she remembers the ocean
  smells of him, his squat legs stepping
  back into fur, wizened leather
  for his feet, the hood
  drawn up over his head
  as he walked off into the animal
  dark core of her story.

  So the story's told,
  not of some Inuit drifter, but seals
  nudging a brother's boat from the rocks,
  his nets laden, the child
  born out of wedlock, his liquid dark gaze.

While Chadwick's language is often lean, Enzweiler's is usually lush and sensuous. He is a poet who loves the sound of words and their many levels of meaning.

Enzweiler's A Curb in Eden is a book length poem of innocence and experience.  It begins with the poet looking back to the first time he fell in love.  He writes, '"Around me the mud/ smelled of spring and sour straw/ and the potholes shivered with rain."  He was fifteen; however, his world was soon to change with Vietnam and the death of his mother:

  After my mother died, my father
  waited in his years, obedient to despair.
  The house went with him;
  the grass grew long and bloomed.
  Our apple trees rotted in sweetness.
  A thin ghost moved in everything he knew.
  His pigeons vanished too, a whir of wings
  that was once the sound of evening.
  Only the sky remained, a curving silence.

Innocence leads to experience which returns to a tempered innocence again and again.  The following stanza is from "Aeneas" a poem that begins with the youthful poet feeling 'immortal in my white tuxedo':

  Then you, father in front of me
  cigarette in your mouth and one eye shut.
  Each step ever taken led us here,
  each bit of love forgotten, all the nights
  I fell asleep in the ships of your storied
  to the moment left to right  you cinch
  down the sash below my coat, pin it
  at the side as I wait with arms raised
  like a gull.  I watch your hands move,
  how young they are, forearms thin and muscled
  from your work.  You straighten my collar,
  pull back from a curl of smoke to look at me.

At the end of the poem, the now middle-aged poet addresses the two central figures of the poem, his now deceased father and his first love who has become a symbol of redemption:

  You pass again that curb in Eden
  and smile, and I am always turning
  to see you in the moving sky.
  Mystery is a long ride,
  but there's a warm seat next to you
  and a prairie far as the sun.

  My father rides too.  He is waving,
  the luggage of his heart at last put down.
  I‚ll be with him soon,
  take his workman hands, young as lions
  in mine, and look back to the lot
  in spring where I turned and stood once
  with new clothes in the mud of innocence.

This is a powerful poem.  After reading a book of poetry, I always ask myself if it is worth reading again.  My answer is yes to both of these books.  Chadwick and Enzweiler are Alaskan poets worthy of our attention and admiration.
 

(You can remove it later if you change your mind!)