Arthur Russell
The Harmonica
In this poem, my mother is my mother,
and the harmonica is the Hohner
chromatic harmonica she’d been saving
to give me on the last night of Hanukah.
The candles in this poem are the multi-colored,
crayon-shaped candles I arranged
in the menorah so the colors went
blue, white, yellow, blue, white,
with a white one slightly higher than the rest,
in the menorah
on the white Formica countertop
in our kitchen when I was sixteen,
and the flames in this poem
are the flames on those candles,
the tallow-smelling yellow, black,
and orange flames
I’d lit after saying the prayers,
and really, it’s the flames
that connect us to the distant past.
The underwear in this poem
is the pack of white Hanes briefs
wrapped in holiday paper
that my mother excused herself
a moment to bring in
through the dining room door
as her gift to me
on the fifth night of Hanukah.
The tantrum in this poem
is the fit I pitched when
I unwrapped the underwear,
one of the first in a line of angry fits
I pitched at her from
time to time through
youth, adulthood, and marriage,
through her own widowhood,
until she died forty-five years later.
Any effort to reconstruct
the logic of any of those fits
would be embarrassing,
and I’d be happy
to be embarrassed that way
if I could remember the logic,
by which I mean the trigger,
but all that’s left in memory
are the fits I’d pitch
and the knowledge
that whatever caused them
still lives in me like a cramp.
The stairs in this poem
are the beige, carpeted stairs
my mother ran up to get the harmonica,
frightened, maybe panicked,
by that young male anger.
Who knows what she thought of,
who she remembered,
what fears of her own were triggered
by my meltdown,
maybe as far back as Brighton Beach
and the chaos of her own teen years,
the brutal anger of boys and men,
even though I can’t see my grandfather among them,
maybe only as far back as my father’s
secret, bully machismo, hidden under that calm
undertone I heard coming from their room next to mine
the nights when he didn’t get what he wanted
and her whispered entreaties broke into shouted “no.”
She ran to get the harmonica,
but only in the way that she would run
to get a towel if a pipe burst,
panicked and calm,
and handed it to me.
The peace in this poem is the peace
that overwhelmed my anger
when I held the harmonica in my hands,
a peace as deep as morphine
it was, and, for that moment,
and, maybe for the last time,
it brought me all the way back
to loving her.
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Month: August 2019
WCW—Anton Yakovlev and Yuyutsu Sharma—September 4
September 4, 7 PM—The Williams Center, Rutherford, NJ
Poetry in translation reading
The Williams Readings hosted by The Gang of Five in Rutherford, NJ, celebrate National Translation Month featuring poets and translators Anton Yakovlev (Russian) and Yuyutsu Sharma (Nepalese).
Please join us on Wednesday September 4th, 2019, 7:00 PM at the Williams Center, One Williams Plaza in Rutherford, NJ, to hear Anton and Yuyutsu.
About our features:
Anton Yakovlev‘s Russian translations have appeared in National Translation Month, Exchanges, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Lunch Ticket, KGB Bar Lit Mag, and elsewhere. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of Sergei Yesenin, is forthcoming from Sensitive Skin Books in October 2019. Yakovlev’s poetry chapbook Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018) won the James Tate Poetry Prize.
Praise for Anton’s work:
“When Keats read George Chapman’s translation of Homer, he felt like an astronomer when “a new planet swims into his ken.” This is how I felt in reading Anton Yakovlev’s superb translations of some poems by Sergei Yesenin. Yesenin is an icon of early 20th century Russian poetry, communicating the vastness of Russia as a country and a culture, but he is not well known in the Anglosphere. Yakovlev’s translations strike this non-Russophone reader as a triumph of craft in combining a “peasant” simplicity that seems deeply and authentically Russian with piquant, always-tasteful touches of idiomatic American speech. These versions are a gift to readers of English in bringing across the quality and qualities of an original and unforgettable artist.”
—Daniel Brown, author of Taking the Occasion and What More?
Yuyutsu Sharma is a world-renowned Himalayan poet and translator. He is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature.
He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris), Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) and Jezero Fewa & Konj (Sodobnost International) have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian respectively. In addition, Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma has just appeared.
Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma is a visiting poet at Columbia University and edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.
Please note: We must now pay $100 per month rent for the use the Williams Center for our readings. This is in addition to the $100 per month rent the Red Wheelbarrow workshop must pay for the use of their space in the Williams Center.
We need your help to survive and continue to hold our monthly readings. We will be asking for donations. A $5 per person donation is suggested. If we all contribute, we can pay the rent!
You can follow everything about the Red Wheelbarrow Poets at these sites:
Blog – https://redwheelbarrowpoets.wordpress.com
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Twitter – @RWBPoets.
RWB Workshop Poem of the Week—August 6
Zorida Mohammed
August
I was coming up for air
from the loss of my mother,
when Pretty Boy, my pup
chased some sparrows into the street.
Dinner plate hibiscus were in full bloom
when my spritely boy laid motionless in the street.
I covered him with pink blossoms
before I covered him with earth in the backyard.
The dogwood seems to begin turning
color earlier and earlier each year—
the nondescript brown,
like a parasite, overnight
on the green leaves.
Tending the garden beds,
grown so wild and prolific,
it prompted a gardening friend
to blurt, “Lowe’s has got nothing on you.”
August is a weighty month.
Even perfect days are overlaid with lack luster.
Nothing, no thing counterweights
the weight of August.
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