The Blurb on the Back of a Poetry Book Compares a Terminal Diagnosis of Cancer to Being Dealt Four Aces
but maybe instead of stewing about what those words claim
about poetry and luck and the cost
of inspiration for any rattletrap mouth-filling song
wrangling with the fact of being done for and done for
too soon, it would have been far better to ignore
the sentence on the dustjacket somehow intended
as praise and just open the book that appeared not long
before its author died from metastatic prostate cancer
to any of the poems inside, especially that last one—“Obituary”—
which begins with lines I’d botch if I tried to paraphrase
so I won’t, but there’s that moment where the words stop
and, as a means of trying to explain what it felt like to live
in Rome, give way to a musical score
with cascades of notes and bird-like flute trills
and four fancy-looking lowercase fs that diminish into
two ps, meaning everything must be played
very very very very loud and then become
very very quiet, as in barely heard, as in on the verge of falling
into silence before the book offers its last words:
he has been survived.
In truth, though, I did what I always seem to do
when I don’t know what to do: I turned to Google,
conjuring up the site’s blank oval space with its free-floating
tiny magnifying glass that’s never not there
waiting for us, ready to explain anything at all,
and because I wanted to chase after the metaphor a bit more,
I typed the words “four aces,” then clicked on the button
that reads “I’m Feeling Lucky,” which brought me
to that painting of those poker-playing dogs
or rather, to be more exact, four Saint Bernards
deep into a night of five card stud
with one of them on the cusp of revealing
the four aces wedged between his paws.
I’ll admit this is nothing
close to what I was hoping to find, although it’s true
there’s a strange kind of luck to be sitting here
at my desk with its view of backyard trees
doing their scrappy stick season thing
and me not doing much more than snacking on Chex Mix
and, it turns out, peering into this American schlock
with its inscrutable dog-centric world
jam-packed with meaningless showboating details,
like the crescent glint of a coin purse clasp, or the husk
of an ice cube drifting in a glass of whiskey,
slowly loosening itself from what it once was,
or that worn leather chair studded along its edge
with what looks like brass asterisks. Poetry,
a poet once wrote, is just the shadow of the dog.
The dog is elsewhere and constantly on the move,
much like these dogs who at some point will need
to move on from this moment of fleeting booyah beyond-
belief luck and a room bustling with what is more dog
than anyone can handle. Soon enough,
when the game is over and all the guests have gone home,
one of them—in what must feel like a bit of windfall in itself—
will be standing alone in the mint patch
for a piss before bed. He’ll be looking for shapes
in the sprawl of stars when he happens to glimpse
the way moonlight slips through the pin oak’s branches,
casting a wild scribble of shadows across the lawn
that make it seem wholly unleashed
from this world. If someone were to try to transcribe
the silence of this moment, the dog never once thinks,
there’d be no end to the amount of verys that would be needed.
It's a Wonderful Life Ranked Again as the No. 1 Most Inspirational Movie of All Time
Is that the word for what quickens
within us during the opening scene
as the camera pans skyward to reveal
a black sprawl where planets dangle
from fishing lines and little stands-in
for stars pulse on the beat of each syllable
as they decide whether or not to intervene
in the life of some white dude back on earth?
Give us some petals crammed into a pocket
and a final rom-com sprint through acres
of fake snow, and we’ll find a way to forget
hours of a man big-spooning despair
and that business on the bridge when he gazed
at the river churning below, hearing it
coo his name. Inspire: to fill the heart
and mind etc. with grace etc., from roots
that mean to breathe in or blow, and this
year like every year what we must want
to inhale once again is ta-da and a change
of subject and the river becoming a stream
of folks from all over town, pouring over
the threshold and packing into his home,
unstoppable, waving fistfuls of cash.
Matt Donovan is the author most recently of The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA 2022) and Missing Department (Visual Studies Workshop, Fall 2023), a collection of poetry and art made in collaboration with the artist Ligia Bouton. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.