The Alberta Clipper
The fall of 2008 featured particularly rainy months, netting more than four inches of precipitation above average, including one of Lincoln’s ten wettest Octobers on record. During this soggy autumn, Marvin Bell’s “The Birth of Ulysses”—a poem later nominated for a Pushcart Prize—was featured in Prairie Schooner.
by Tory Clower
The Birth of Ulysses
Marvin Bell
They were asking, “What have we come to?”
when they first saw Circe, and were bleeding
to learn what was out there. They flinched then,
when the boat knocked, and when the waves rose,
it led them to question who among them
were hands fit for the whiteouts of storm water.
They latched the latches and buttoned down.
They pulled on sleeves to sheathe their tattoos
and sat beneath decks riding it out, affecting calm
while milking each story for a hint of landfall.
These who were so earthy sat now in a ring,
each of them locked in fear. Not one who might
incline to an expression of it dared to say so.
They had used all the words they had been given
and now had to invent the story of Ulysses
and picture in their minds the beautiful Circe.
Breaking a drought dating back to 1999, Nebraska’s Platte River reached “flood stage” in late May of 2008. July in Lincoln was fairly hot, with temperatures up to 10 degrees above the average high, but August was mild and September was cooler than normal. Maxine Kumin, the United States Poet Laureate of 1981-82, was published in Prairie Schooner that summer. “Coleridge’s Laundry” was later nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
by Tory Clower
Coleridge’s Laundry
Maxine Kumin
I wanted to talk about Coleridge
who was anything but handsome
and was always leaving his wife
to walk amazing distances
for conversations with his pals:
Poole, Lamb, Wordsworth, et al.
I said, so what if the Pantisocratic
ideal was just another hippie
utopia where everyone labored by hand
in the morning and studied or wrote
in the afternoon? So what if the project
conceived in poverty went down
in unexpected endowments,
the Lannans and MacArthurs of their day?
I wanted to read about laudanum:
how many drops at bedtime and
did he add them to water or tea
or something stronger.
When I closed my book I fell
asleep as instantly as if I’d downed
50 drops in two fingers of scotch straight up.
In my dream this poem was given
a communion wafer
and a blood transfusion.
I woke with baked cotton on my tongue.
My pulse was vigorous, my heart
was with Sara, the mountain
of laundry, her always absent Coleridge.
Domesticity and migraines,
miles and miles on foot.
According to a study of the Midwest conducted by the Illinois State Water Survey, the summer of 2004 had a disproportionately high number of clear days. In Lincoln, the departure was 110% above average! Strangely enough, all those clear days added up to a summer that was about four degrees cooler—and with precipitation of two inches more than the norm. Gabriel Spera was the winner of the 2004 PEN Center USA West Award for poetry; during that summer, his poem “All the Rage” was published in Prairie Schooner.
by Tory Clower
All the Rage
Gabriel Spera
Only psychos and felons got tattoos back then,
which covered everyone I worked with on the truck -
Fitch, who lost a rose-twined dagger with half the skin
on both legs when his bike jumped a median, struck
a street lamp, and combusted. Or Pete, with the mermaid
he still showed off like a new bride, trying in vain
to make it shimmy on his arm, blind to the grayed
green tail and blur of what years back had been a smile.
Even Blatz, with his army-navy drabs, wound
a thread around a needle tip, dipped it in a vial
of India ink, and pecked out across the fat mound
of his thumb a skewed gunmetal-green-black
swastika. That should've been enough. And yet I found
myself strangely tempted, watching Donny with his slack
side-eyed saunter climb the loading dock,
indifferent to the diesel and seven o-clock cold,
setting his coffee on the punch clock, a hard pack rolled
in his shirt's short sleeves, baring the rocks
of his biceps, lit up like a beach-side casino
in blues and vermilions, bright forms that stole
from his knuckles to elbows, elbows
to collarbone. And while the rest of us, blessed
with nothing to hold out for anyway, cashed
our paychecks at the pool hall Friday nights, he stashed
what he could of his away, saving up, obsessed,
evidently, with gemming over the arms he'd once
used to beat a decent man to near death
in a life-staining minute that bought him nine months
in Riverfront. And we few of no design, who knew less
beauty than truth, who would always equate
violence with strength, could not help appreciate
how the foreman gave him space. How suddenly foolish
I felt, when I asked him, one such morning
he showed up, skin swollen beneath a jewelish
sheen of baby oil, some new tensed beast adorning
his already busy forearms, when I asked, because
I could picture him with his fist flopped
like a blood donor's on a vinyl table top,
the walls papered with available designs, the buzz
like a streetlamp on the fritz, when I asked in
all innocence if it hurt, having that needle pop
again and again and again the drum of his skin.
Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg” was selected for The Best American Poetry 2009, but was first published in the Winter 2007 edition of Prairie Schooner. 2007 was Lincoln’s fourth-hottest year on record, with an average temperature of 48 degrees Celsius. In contrast, St. Petersburg, Russia, experienced snowfall on two-thirds of the days from November of 2007 through February of 2008—quite a frosty winter!
by Tory Clower
Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg
Susan Blackwell Ramsey
For years they floated in adjacent jars,
two heads on a dusty storage shelf,
abandoned in a back room of the palace:
Mary Hamilton and Charles Mons.
We want to make things last. Salt, sugar, sun
will work, and tannin from chestnut bark, and brains
spread on the skins that toted them, and sometimes
words. But new two hundred years ago-
these "spirits of wine." (Fermenting's nature, but
distilling's art.) Not all steam is water,
just as not all passion's love. Boil wine,
catch what evaporates, trap that alcohol
and it preserves whatever you drop in,
the head of your wife's lover, for example-
Peter ordered his queen to display it on her mantle-
or your mistress, killed for infanticide.
They say Great Peter kissed the dead head's lips.
The bodies sinned, the heads were saved. Don't be
distracted by stories of Joaquin Murrieta
glaring in a jar in California.
Though he was gunned down by someone named Love,
his problems were political, not erotic.
He really should remind you of Evita,
beautifully embalmed, better than Lenin,
then passed around, hot political potato,
hidden in attics, propped like a doll behind
a movie screen for weeks, deaths unfurling behind her
like a red scarf from Isadora's car.
And even if Jeremy Bentham's head was found
once in a luggage locker in Aberdeen,
once in the front quadrangle being used
as a football by medical students, he died
a natural death and landed in that cabinet,
stuffed, propped, dressed, through his own will,
wax head on his shoulders, catastrophe in the drawer,
still convinced Utility was his goal.
The uses the dead are put to by the living.
Peter saved one for hatred, one for love,
and they outlasted hatred, love, and Peter
to become flip sides of Death's two-headed coin.
Heads win. Maybe the story
isn't the heads but Peter, unstoppable
monster consuming youth, a Minotaur
trapped in the labyrinth he built himself.
Finally Catherine freed them. After decades
she found them, observed how well their youth and beauty
were preserved, and had them buried, though no one says
whether bottled or free to stop being beautiful.
After Lincoln hit a record high of 75 degrees in January of 1990, the following fall was also quite warm. An average temperature around 57 degrees over September, October, and November put the fall of 1990 over five degrees warmer than normal. Reynolds Price’s icy “Spirit Flesh” was featured in Prairie Schooner that fall, providing a frigid counterpoint to the unseasonably warm weather.
by Tory Clower
Spirit Flesh
Reynolds Price
Horn Branch, its homely pond, accept the snow.
Weeds and scrub hunker their winter crouch
This last gray week before the darkest day.
Same branch, same pond and these weeds’ hardy forebears—
Three decades back we lay in summer dusk
And counted fish: their skittish leaps for bugs,
Their agate eyes. Still nothing we saw was half
As fine as we—our coal-black hair, our eyes,
Your seamless skin, pure and taut as a bolt
Of creamy silk. Just at dark a snapping
Turtle surfaced, big as a tub;
You named this Turtle Spirit Pond.
He’s down there still, realer by the year.
We’re here, still hot to yoke on this white page.
The spring of 1959 featured some huge weather fluctuations in Lincoln. In April alone the temperature ranged from a low point of 26 degrees to a high of 86. May was nearly as variant: from 37 degrees all the way up to 93. A poet published in the spring issue of Prairie Schooner that year had experienced much of this kind of weather as a young man. Weldon Kees, who had disappeared four years prior, was a native of Beatrice, Nebraska, and an alum of the University of Nebraska.
by Tory Clower
A Musician’s Wife
Weldon Kees
Between the visits to the shock ward
The doctors used to let you play
On the old upright Baldwin
Donated by a former patient
Who is said to be quite stable now.
And all day long you played Chopin,
Badly and hauntingly, when you weren’t
Screaming on the porch that looked
Like an enormous birdcage. Or sat
In your room and stared out at the sky.
You never looked at me at all.
I used to walk down to where the bus stopped
Over the hill where the eucalyptus trees
Moved in the fog, and stared down
At the lights coming on, in the white rooms.
And always, when I came back to my sister’s,
I used to get out the records you made
The year before all your terrible trouble,
The records the critics praised and nobody bought
That are almost worn out now.
Now, sometimes I wake in the night
And hear the sound of dead leaves
Against the shutters. And then a distant
Music starts, a music out of an abyss,
And it is dawn before I sleep again.
April 4 of 1978 was unseasonably warm. At 82 degrees, it set Lincoln’s record high temperature for that date. In stark contrast, June 8 set a daily record low of 47 degrees. The Spring 1978 issue of Prairie Schooner featured a poem by a then-unknown writer by the name of Sharon Olds. Olds’ first collection of poetry wouldn’t even be published until two years later—proof that no matter how unstable the weather, Prairie Schooner’s pioneering spirit is a certainty.
The Feat
Sharon Olds
I see your son at school since your death.
He is so vivid, he is burning with life for you.
His jokes in the elevator have lost
their mean edge. His face looks caught
in the blaze of headlights.
He is swimming on into the glare; with his head up
he is taking on a whole life without you.
Into his sleep you dive from the high board,
the white bandage from your head uncurling slowly in the air
like a bon-voyage streamer.
The distance between you looks steep
as the side of an ocean liner.
Death pulls out from the dock. The gap spreads
rapidly as black scorch.
From the high metal side you dive neatly
right into his heart.
The autumn of 1993 was Lincoln’s second-coldest on record, after keeping track for 125 years. With an average temperature of 48.4 degrees Fahrenheit and nearly a foot of rain per month, the residents of Lincoln were missing summer quite a bit. Charles Bukowski was featured in Prairie Schooner that fall with some words of encouragement for the downtrodden, mere months prior to his death in March of 1994.
the laughing heart
Charles Bukowski
your life is your life.
don’t let it be clubbed into dank
submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the
darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you
changes.
know them, take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death
in life,
sometimes.
and the more often you
learn to do it,
the more light there will
be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have
it.
you are marvelous.
the gods wait to delight
in
you.
In the fall of 1971, on-campus newspaper the Daily Nebraskan featured a series of articles on homosexuality. Robert Prokop, future University of Nebraska Regent, submitted a guest column in which he discussed homosexuality as a disease. In his column, Prokop plagiarized Edmund Bergler’s 1957 book, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life. Bergler contemplated what he saw as a “neurotic distortion of the total personality.” That same fall, Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Nightmare” was published in Prairie Schooner, a poem that deals with awareness, fear, and misunderstanding of a somewhat different sort than Prokop and Bergler were concerned with.
The Nightmare
Joyce Carol Oates
She wakes from the pillow
body hammering to the hovering
above her
like the withheld beating of wings
don’t move
it is a whisper
she can’t quite hear
she goes rigid with its certainty
a child’s clear fatal sense
of proportion
don’t move
a careless move will unhinge
the universe
a network of deadly wires
she lies rigid waiting
for the presence to withdraw
for the withdrawal of the vibrating
of dim words passing
the noise of terror passing
a curious beak in the dark air
of the dark empty bedroom
poking about her face
amorous of her opened eyes
her head
where no one is home
Lincoln’s weather during the spring of 1988 was mild. With scant snowfall and temperatures ranging from the mid-40s to upper 60s, it was an ideal time for planting. On April 1, the Lanoha Nursery was selected to provide and plant trees for the spring Master Street Tree Planting Program, which laid out a plan as to the location, quantity, and diversity of trees to be planted on Lincoln’s streets.
The 1988 spring issue of Prairie Schooner featured Rita Dove’s poem “The Buckeye.”
The Buckeye
Rita Dove
We learned about the state tree
in school – its fruit
so useless, so ugly
no one bothered to
commend the smudged trunk
nor the slim leaves shifting
over our heads. Yet
they were a good thing to kick
along gutters
on the way home,
though they stank like
a drunk's piss in the roads
where cars had smashed
them. And in autumn
when the spiny helmets split
open,
there was the bald
seed with its wheat-
colored eye.
We loved
the modest countenance beneath
that leathery cap.
We, too, did not want to leave
our mothers.
We piled them up
for ammunition.
We lay down
with them
among the bruised leaves
so that we could
rise, shining.
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