June 20: Any Good, "Flame," Terry Godbey, Piece of My Mind

He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the name of it.  "Any good?" he said.

Holden's suite mate, Ackley, is speaking and once again he asks the exact question I want to answer today.

I recently got my hand's on poet Terry Godbey's Flame, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press in 2012.  For those of my disciples who remember my review of Godbey's book Beauty Lessons, it will come as no surprise that I'm a little obsessed at the moment with Flame.  Like the poems in her previous collection, the poems in Godbey's chapbook are stunning heart breakers, hot as lightning strikes, leaving behind ashes that linger and haunt.

The subject matter of Flame's poems are moments in life when difficult choices are made.  Those moments are white-hot and brilliant.  They hurt, sometimes leaving scars, sometimes fostering new life, like oleanders blooming in Hiroshima.

The speaker in "Trouble," one of my favorite poems in the collection, reflects on difficulties she's caused--lies she's told, doors she's opened.  It's a poem about injury and survival and the heavy costs of each:

Trouble

At the chichi restaurant in Delray Beach
we gorged on merlot, scallops
with blood orange glaze, jokes
about all the trouble I cause.
Later, leaving the unisex bathroom,
I hit an old man in the head
with the door.  I heard a crack
like a baseball bat, his groan.
Another man down.

My husband feels unlucky, too.
Says I used him up.  Left him
hollowed out, bitter.
He could count my lies
on one hand, but he counted them
over and over
till they numbered in the hundreds.

The lies I told myself
were worse.

I don't miss him
or the boyfriends,
the men I spun like plates
in my youth.
I miss their kisses, those small fires.
But I hate
the ashes,
those goddamn ashes.

Godbey is fearless, taking the ugly aspects of a life and searching them for beauty.  Her verse is full of light and heat, soot and cold.  Her lines connect on a level deep as the San Andreas, where all of us groan and split against the shifting plates of the heart.

Another of my favorite poems from Flame takes on the mythology of one of the quintessential voices for women in the twentieth century, Sylvia Plath:

Sylvia

The children's faces were not enough.
Gone, her husband,
the gilded Devon days, daffodils,
apple orchard, hum of bees.
Even hoarded honey could not help
her swallow grief,
and London so cold
it stalled her blood.
She wept in ink, mind swarming
till she could not see past
the endless falling snowflakes
filmy as her beekeeper's veil.

Terry Godbey's Flame is hot.  It burns the fingers, scalds the tongue.  And it leaves afterimages, bright ghosts that hover in the corners of memory.

And that's a piece of Saint Marty's mind.

It's worth the third-degree burns