Tony Piccione and the Woodstove

Tony Piccione belongs to a tribe of people who are easily wounded, who clamber along in the raccoon darkness, who never entirely get over it if you shout at them. I never did shout at Tony, so what would I know about it? But I did feel him rumbling through the dark, as passionate for truth as a baby bear for honey. He is never really at home in the tops of trees or at academic parties.

The cabin silent again, the woodstove gathers speed,

and there is no work to be done. I say to them,

my brain-lodged selves, I love this unwavering place,

my days and my death so near and so openly mine.

He goes along, with God not far away. It seems to him the dead are all around him; it is some dense cloudiness they carry around them, like a willowy swamp, like the sound of flutes in Bali that accompany the mourners, like the dimness one senses at nightfall in the forest, that darkness close to the ground. His eyes are gleaming; he is not complaining about what he doesn't receive; he is a lively companion of what will happen next.

How easy, to awake into the powering world

and turn at once to God, the orphaned saint,

the madman wrestling through, or to it,

my own thick-shanked homespun life

grinning into the face of what may happen next.

This is my time, my footstep, my stalled

and spongy witness on earth.

So it's like the route, where there are always checkpoints. Everyone has to know what we are doing. When you are twenty-five, it's the brain that becomes heated over what may come and what may stop; but now it's the lower body that knows what is going on, the stomach oven that registers what is ahead on the forest path. "One birth, one death," someone cries out, "Place your bets!" So we each have a house in which we were born, then we are impelled by hope and fear into a new house, and then comes the third, the saving presence, which is neither in our parents' home, nor in the absence from our parents' home, but it is a solid place, right here, with our wife, our gladness, our work, our desire.

How we gain and fail at every checkpoint

and all the while the belly flames with hope and fear.

One birth then, one death, so says the companion

of the first day. One home, one hurtling exile,

and one reckoning only, arisen, in the center,

in my shoes, shaped by all I yet desire.

This collection of poems gradually builds until it reaches in the last four or five poems a "mind of place arisen and complete." Go well, oh anyone awake and marveling,

pray hard for what you are about to receive.

Let's do one more poem without any good-willed interruptions this time. I have done some interruptions so that the poem will pass more slowly the spot where we are standing, but this poem goes as it goes. I walk on out into the blur of things

until my heart surrounds a faint belonging.

What attends at birth has turned from us,

I am guessing, or waits nearby

for a kind of return. I don't know. Is it true,

neighbor? I have heard your cries. Uneasy in this, sent out from myself,

what drops away and rises just ahead

is a lonely joy winding back to the sea.

But I'd root down if I could, if there were time,

learn the ways, joke with those who abide.

There's a pale hand over me pushes me along. I keep staggering about, wrong name, wrong face.

I'd like to stay for once inside a town,

to fix cars or want to, or work for the railroad,

deliver the mail, consult seriously with others.

I want to come in, start over, forget altogether

that the star giver breathes in us, that we stumble on.

In the last line, we hear words that James Wright might have written, and that is good. Wright was a mentor of Tony's, from a long distance, as is proper. Toward the end of his life, Wright would not allow anyone to depress him or to say that all this misery is confused. It is going somewhere! We all stumble on, but so does the star giver.

How easily we take life to ourselves, what we wished for, even the trouble, love, children, calling, all of it pulling us to our knees in feverish good play. It is a great gift, that kneeling, no matter what we've done.

We have to say goodbye now to this sweet man, worthy of his children, of his wife, his struggles and his language! Farewell!

ANTHONY PICCIONE (1939-2001) was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and raised on Long Island. He taught English and creative writing at the SUNY College at Brockport. He was the author of Anchor Dragging and Seeing It Was So, both from BOA Editions.

ROBERT BLY'S most recent volume of poetry is The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (HarperCollins, 2001). He wrote this essay as an introduction to Piccione's Guests at the Gate, forthcoming from BOA Editions.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 2002
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