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The Pedestal Magazine -Charles Fishman - A Summer Night
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Charles Fishman - A Summer Night |
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Dark country night,
how clearly I remember you:
grass on fire with darkness
the summer sky streaming
with meteors
and slow-burning flares
at the tips of cigarettes
gripped in my parents’ hands
the cold flames of ice
in their drinks glinting
as if from the signal fires
of distant stars
Such a warm summer night,
I wanted to breathe the darkness
to listen to the sizzling sparks
of words that lifted
from those adult and familiar mouths
to dream as ice made a soft clinking
in each glass I wanted to crawl
through the black flames
of the grass to feel the earth
slowly warm beneath me
I wanted to be bathed
in that radiance
But Father said it was high time
I was sleeping neatly tucked
into that nest of cotton blankets
It was time for me to sleep, said Mother
--wasn’t it long past the hour when a child
falls silent? And so I was sent to bed
in the embered darkness for flames
of the summer night
had entered the cottage with me
the dark beauty of the country night
had wound like a bright mist
around my life
And I called out in anger
through the dark window
to my parents who nursed
their drinks who drew blue wisps
of smoke from their floating fingers
and spoke with the husky intonations
of oracles to their summer friends
I called out I called out to them,
for these were the beings
who had showered me with perception
and I did not dream I was no longer
safe
But then the cottage door
banged open
and I heard the fall of her foot on the stair
and I knew a darkness I did not know
had come in with her and I hid
under the silent blankets where I
forgot to breathe And she swung her arm
as she scolded me
for filling the night with my voice
so that the buckle on my father’s belt
flashed
in the too-still darkness flashed
as its brassy edge caught
the bridge of my nose flashed again
as it sent cold fire
down my mother’s flesh
and again as Father lifted me
from the bed where my first screams
lingered And then they saved me
with vinegar poured on the flaring wound
they saved me with a torn flag
of ordinary brown paper
they saved me with the cold torch
of their love
Charles Fishman is director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at SUNY Farmingdale, where he previously directed the Visiting Writers Program for eighteen years. His books include Mortal Companions, The Firewalkers, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and The Death Mazurka, which was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of the year (1989) and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize from Southern California Anthology, the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Prize from Negative Capability, and a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was final judge for the 1998 Capricorn Book Award and has recently served as Poetry Editor for the Journal of Genocide Studies and Cistercian Studies Quarterly (following Denise Levertov in that position). He is currently Associate Editor of The Drunken Boat and Poetry Editor of New Works Review. His fifth booklength collection, Country of Memory, will be released by Uccelli Press in May, and his tenth chapbook, 5,000 Bells, will be out this August from Cross-Cultural Communications.
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