January 12: Ice Skates, "Sagittarius Agitprop," Matthew Gavin Frank, New Cartoon

One thing about packing depressed me a little.  I had to pack these brand-new ice skates my mother had practically just sent me a couple of days before.  That depressed me.  I could see my mother going in Spaulding's and asking the salesman a million dopy questions--and here I was getting the ax again.  It made me feel pretty sad.  She bought me the wrong kind of skates--I wanted racing skates and she bought hockey--but it made me sad anyway.  Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.

Holden is a pretty sensitive soul, beneath all his bluster and lies.  He's misguided, lost in a world that he sees as pretty hostile.  It's a world that took his little brother Allie away from him.  It's a world he doesn't quite want to be a part of, because it's full of people who lie to impress.  Holden does his fair share of this lying himself, but he's not a "phony bastard."  He recognizes the significance of small things, like ice skates and snowstorms and playing checkers.

My friend, Matthew Gavin Frank, recognizes the significance of small things, as well.  In his debut collection of poems, Sagittarius Agitprop, Matt finds the astounding in oranges and feathers and chicken bones.  In the poem, "Sagittarius at Dusk," a tiny sand crab becomes an instrument of revelation:

Sagittarius at Dusk

In the sand, the crab
turns over, shoots its white belly
to the teenage girl, jogging in yellow
shorts.  She thinks it's a dime

but is too wary of the fat-legged
fisherman with the blue-and-white lure
to pick it up, find out
it's a crab.

The fisherman just became a grandfather
at forty-one, holds in his heart
a scrap of metal the size
of a dime.  The purple he sees

is not real, the egret dies eating.
The strangest things keep us alive at dusk.
From this bench, I can see the power plant,
but not the tired people inside

murmuring their small stories
in between small sparks.

Matt's poem makes tiny, lyrical leaps, from sand crab to jogging girl to fisherman to egret to power plant to the small, quiet stories of our lives.  In all the poems in this collection, the tiniest elements of the physical world propel the reader from thing to idea to music.  That's what's astonishing about his work, that he can find the astonishing in something as simple as a...

Saucer

Here is the saucer upon which my father's head
pools like coffee.  He's beyond medication.
The hummingbirds have overtaken him, bricking
his smile with sugarcubes.  When he speaks to me,
his tongue taps his teeth, a teaspoon gently ringing
the hour against the lip of his favorite mug.  The one
I brought back from Alaska.  The one with three
moose:  mother, father, child.  A cow, a bull, a twig
pulled from a nest, cracked with eggshell and cream.
I adjust his napkin.  I bring him his coffee.  In the bathroom,
a few hairs from his old beard still cling to the sink.

Sagittarius Agitprop transforms its readers, because it transforms the atoms of the universe into the expanding elements of poetry.

Saint Marty recommends Matt Frank's Big Bang of a book.

Confessions of Saint Marty