This page last updated: November 27th, 2001 |
About the Poet David Staudt grew up in a Pennsylvania German family in rural northeastern Pennsylvania. He has spent eight years in the Navy as an enlisted submariner and as an officer on a frigate in the Pacific. He graduated from Princeton and later studied at Cornell, where he received an MFA in writing and won the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize as well as an Academy of American Poets Award. He taught writing at Cornell and at Susquehanna University as a Lecturer before earning a law degree at the University of Virginia in 1999 . For the last twenty years, his poems, stories, and essays have appeared in literary magazines, and he has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize. The Gifts and Thefts is his first book-length publication. The Chrysler Our parents were always fighting, in a Chrysler like a steel cell, the summer we saw every state. It got to a point, just by saying our names our father brought bruises. His sigh left a hidden red burn. Mother's hands tearing her dry hair out of absolute frustration were young hands in pouches of seed that labored throughout that August to plant pain across a continent. Fifteen years later, we can hear madmen still shouting from bathtubs in Route One Florida motels, madwomen weeping in shame in small Pennsylvania towns where all the hell's night long kitchen lights are burning. Sisters, if there was life on Mars I'd hock everything I owned to take that rocket. But all we have is California, where the winter rain which whitens the streets is too simple, too rare to sustain the larger voices. Coop The boy comes home to find the chain limp on its stake. He picks up one end and pulls, unzipping the link from the frozen dirt. Then he takes a stone and breaks the ice surface of the dog's dish, pours the water and uneaten food's soft larvae on the ground. Inside the coop, nut-like sacks of spider's eggs cluster in the slack corner webs. The straw has been trampled to powder, and in it the boy finds prehistoric bones, mildewed knuckles, licked to a polish. The bones retain a varnish of spit, and the straw feels warm though the cold outside pricks the boy's ankles, and his kneecaps sting. He thinks: a dog's life begins new each day, starts in hunger, ends shivering into sleep, the black night starless and the sleep broken by distant sounds. Morning comes, dog wakes, hungry. One day the boy's father unhooks the heavy chain from its collar and leads it to the car where it musn't go, whispering encouragement. The boy cleans out the coop that night, discovering among the things the dog carried there, an argyle sock from his newest and favorite pair. Waterfall Ithaca, NY Radiance has come to my mother's face. Up from Pennsylvania for a day trip, she hasn't stopped praising the waterfalls, thrilled by the slow white river spreading in skeins down the black shale face of mountain oV the highway; thrilled by the park's gutted grist mill, millshaft broken in its pinions; the trees whose names I teach her; the question of baldy cypress I ask that cradles her south to a blacksnake swamp two barefoot girls ran heedless, the thought of which, just for a moment, stills the little tune of her shivering. We have driven to the top of this mountain in a boatlength Chrysler Newport, a blue rose tablecloth covering the good front seat. I have buttoned my mother's coat at the collar because her hands won't do right in this cold, and walked her across the park's brittle lawn toward the really steep falls I have promised her. Today, she must keep both eyes on her feet, for they balk like two bad pets in tow, one pulling, the other refusing to come, interrupting her story of her best friend Jean, lost in the muffled, sudden sleet of an old world war's first shrapnel. "I've gone this far, I'm not going back!" she says. Two hundred yards down a path around a bend where I have gone ahead to count the steps, my father has come to tell me what facts I've avoided: it isn't asthma teased by cold, but a heart the both of us imagine grinding slowly down in disrepair in that uneasy place where he and I have learned to conserve old feuds, alone. How many months will I relive the walk back by the muddy, half-frozen creek to the place where this tiny woman turns, alone and pleased? She grins up into the frozen burst of a single yellow poplar, whose lovelier name, tulip tree, I have- reversing the protocol of age and teaching names-taught her. A hundred yards behind, creek, woods, shale inexplicably let go in a sudden resignation to gravity, freefalling in beauty, just beyond our range. |
