Matthew Thorburn is the author of six books, including String, a novel in poems; The Grace of Distance, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; and the book-length poem Dear Almost, which won the Lascaux Prize. His writing has also been recognized with a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, as well as fellowships from the Bronx and New Jersey arts councils. Originally from Michigan and for many years a New Yorker, he lives with his wife and son near Princeton, New Jersey, where he works in corporate communications.
from String (LSU Press, 2023)
Once
there was crusty bread
a last half-loaf a rind of cheese
my parents danced in
the empty kitchen they knew
we would never come back
they didn’t know
I listened in the dark
brush and scuff of shoes
guttering candle
there was no moon there was
a broken oak a silvery rain
pooling in the grass
once in the tall grass there
was a tan captain
chest smooth pants unbuttoned
his holster amazed him
by being empty
Rosie groaned spat clutched
her wrinkled pink dress
pointed the pistol
between his eyes between
the trees I saw how
everyone dies but once I was
a boy who talked in circles
talked in circles I walked
in the woods there was
nowhere I wouldn’t follow her.
Pipistrello
Father called you in the old
tongue used only with Mother
which suits your jaunty
dart and stitch your glide
and swoop much better than
our flat no-nonsense bat
you sew up the night
out and over trees the pond
the field you gather loose endsyou loop around again
zip and stir swerve strike
pluck bugs from air
you fly by ear I remember
the teacher taught us
(I remember the teacher
one night hanged upside down
in a tree) can I say you see
with your ears are mostly
fuzzed wings then vanish
as I would’ve except
I had none and nowhere
to go now it’s dusk
and you one shade lighter
than dusk o bobbin
o fillip of fear flying up
away like the tailor’s needle
a silver sweep and flash
you at home here in the dark
where we groped we worried
we wished for light.
Wouldn’t Hold
Everything is made of
loops made of long
lines Mother said and it
began to unravel
the string of the world
running out of my pencil
she taught me to hold on
fingers’ pressure
against wood could blur
lead to shadow show
the slow darkening
a candle’s flicker making
strange angles of her face
she said it all fades
is lost to the horizon
she snuffed the flame and
I was falling I tried to
slide inside my letters
p’s open window
the low doorway of an h
but how could I know
words wouldn’t hold me
how could I know
they close so tight.
Pale Stars
I saw Rosie suddenly after
looking a long time
into purple irises untouched
beside the burnt wreck
the blackened plane took off
half her house my knees
ached from crouching low
last ribbons of smoke
acrid stink in my throat
days I dreamed green
fingers in the dirt no one
said stop growing no
one said hold your breath
but then I saw her
hair her dress just darker
than irises a bare
shoulder she hunched
purple in the purple-gray
caught the same fading
light in worried folds
at first I could not
see her could’ve stared
hand to brow hand
to brow and never seen
but then the bells
of her sleeves her hands
white stars cut out
everything else was dirt
was broken buried
I looked longer lower long
pale thighs a smear
of blood a handprint
bruised dark she
crouched in flowers
a spreading
shadow on the torn-up
ground I couldn’t
stop looking she
turned she saw me
run Rosie mouthed run.
The Stag
—after Gerhard Richter’s Stag (Hirsch),
oil on canvas, 1963
I couldn’t see a way out
for him the woods
too tangled those arrowing
branches pinned him in
one broad trunk weighed
him down no break
in sight no light shafting
through and what did you do
I lay still among the bodies
and how did you live
I played dead as the dead
grew cold all night
and why didn’t you scream
I did scream down
in the dark I kept it locked
behind my teeth and why
did you close your eyes
so I could see the stag instead
his head turned to me
I watched until he blurred
away into pale gray light
and why tell us this
because I’ve grown old because
my punishment for living
is to keep living.
from The Grace of Distance (LSU Press, 2023)
The Call
Once a boy slipped
down a well in far
Anhui. He surfaced deep
in Mongolia, whispering
through his fever
of the vast, star-clotted sky
he swam beneath.
Once I called down
into that dark glitter—
then cursed, then bargained,
then begged—until
someone called back.
Your New World
You’ll come back as something else,
the monk says, but you won’t
know it, and you think, Okay,
what good is that? Out the window
you keep seeing birds—well, maybe
it’s the same bird over and over
in his gray coat, his little brown cap.
Could be Uncle Jerry. He zips away.
It’s spring: the stone Buddha
with bright sun on one shoulder,
snow on the other. People leave
coins by his feet. To a baby, everything
is a new thing, each time a first time—
he’s adrift in wonder, the doctor
says—while you stumble along
staring at your phone. Where’d
your new world go? the monk says
or you do. Either way, you feel bad
they had to cut down that old oak tree
but the stump’s a good place to sit.
How Every Song Ends
I guess the tune was “Out of Nowhere”
and so it must have been a lark,
a laugh, since the session was already
over, the bass in its case and the piano
lid lowered, everyone headed out
the door for a pre-dawn drink or a bad
girl’s arms and don’t forget to kill
the lights, but then Joe strums
his guitar, picks out those opening notes
and the trumpets, one older, fainter,
one bright and brusque, step up to tell us
what this song’s all about, that time-
less back and forth—what she said
and he said, nudging each other, dis-
agreeing and agreeing about who
was right, who was wrong, who did
or didn’t do what, noodling through
all the should-haves and meant-tos
that make up our lives, the laundry list
of missed calls, closed doors, the letter
unsent, that time he didn’t look back
but wishes he did, and don’t you know
it’s late, too late, that’s what the trumpets
call out, and yet how happy the end
of this night caught on tape, how lucky
the engineer who flipped the switch,
turned the lights back up so he could see
the trumpets’ bells, the guitar’s dull glow,
Doc and Bud and Joe—how this whirl
of notes circles the mic—and how
we who weren’t even alive for these six
and a half minutes—not long,
long enough, long ago—hold our breath
as here they come now all the way
around to play the chorus once more
and remind us how every song ends
by going back to where it began
until there’s only silence and someone
stops the tape, turns out the light.
An Annunciation
Wouldn’t it be easier for the old woman
who gets up each day to bake bread
before dawn, who no longer dreams
of anything, and the traveling salesman lost
in thought, perched like a sparrow
on the motel bed, if an angel came down
and said, This is your life now?
Here is what you must do? The snow
like a heavy curtain falls on our first acts.
Upstairs, a teenager sings to herself
by the frost-starred window. Hear her
walking back and forth, bed to dresser,
dresser to bed? Would it be wrong
to imagine these words are her song?
You might suppose she’s packing
for a journey, but she left long ago.
The Other Side
In the old ink
and brush style of painting
the brush can’t leave
the paper until
you’re done
so that it’s all one long line
that turns and turns and
loops back, taking
its time, and sometimes
standing here outside the door
as snow filters
across the blue-black sky
and I can hear you
on the other side
I can’t remember
if I’ve only just arrived
or it’s time for me to go.
from Dear Almost (LSU Press, 2016)
The Light that Lasts All Summer
Taking out the trash
I stop, bag in hand,
to look up at the moon—
looking up, of course,
being what real New Yorkers
supposedly never do
since we’re too cool
and always in too big a rush,
thank you very much,
though if true
this would mean we’d miss
practically everything. But here
in the northwest corner
of the Bronx—about as far
as we could go
without saying so long
to the city—all leafy
green on a high terraced hill
in the sharp elbow
of two rivers, mighty
coffee-dark Hudson
and skinny smooth Harlem,
where the mumble-grumble
of the commuter
train’s just noticeable
back beyond those trees,
looking up is
what we do. Also looking out,
looking in and over and
even looking hard
at what no one wants to see:
the man collecting cans
for the five-cent
refund, his cart piled high
with garbage bags, breathing in
the sour-sweet stink
of flat Pepsi and stale beer
he can’t wash away
or the grubby-fingered woman
on the 1 train asking
each of us, “Can I get a hand
up, not a hand out?”
When she turns to me I see
she’s pregnant.
My moon-viewing party’s
a quick one—the trash
bag’s heavy, ripe, the night
crisp and shivery. I’ve seen
skunks and possums creep
from these woods. And once
a raccoon, slow and low-slung,
came trundling up
the hundred and fifteen steps
it takes to climb our hill
as the sun was reeling
into the sky and I was trudging
down and off to the subway,
to Manhattan, to work.
His razory claws scritch-
scratched the concrete.
I held my breath: he passed
right by. I’m remembering
trash bags, raccoons,
the steps I retrace
each morning, each night,
because I want to show you
these days and the ten
thousand things they’re filled
with: dirty rivers broken
into shards of light, old oaks
and elms, Amtrak trains,
the bright surprise of Chinese
music, the erhu’s plaintive cry
that makes me lonely for
someone I can’t name,
dozens of sparrows gossiping
in an overgrown hedge,
unleashed dogs, coffee light
and sweet, a shouty blue jay
letting his wake-up call rip
through the morning, darkness
and starlight, the way
even during the day we can still
sometimes see the moon—
a mystery to me,
one I would’ve read up on
so I could explain it to you
when you wondered why too.
I want to show you
what life is like
here where you ought to be
with us, but aren’t:
a not-uncommon story
though few people will tell you
it’s their story too. They choose
not to relive it, relieved
not to revisit what happened
or didn’t. What should have.
What went wrong
for no other reason, finally,
than that it didn’t go right.
Ours is the story of how
is became was and was became
wasn’t, became no,
became not. The story of
our almost girl, our might’ve been.
The doctor closed his chart
and said, “I’m not seeing what
I should see.” The smallest heart
we’d ever dreamed of
wasn’t moving. He couldn’t
hear you. I wanted
to hate him, have this be
his fault. The room was too small
and dark and hot and
then I couldn’t hear anything
either. Summer’s no season
for grieving, it doesn’t
satisfy, it’s too sunny
and warm and everything
keeps pushing
into stalky shoots of green,
frilly leaves, pink and yellow
flowers, it just goes on
and on and on. Even the crickets
chirp away each night
as if it’ll last forever
and they will too, so why not
make music, let everyone know
they’re here
and loving it. You would
have loved the insect market
in Shanghai—that muddle
and crush of booths and boxes
and bins, the pull and push
of an open-air bazaar
but covered over
with scraps of tarp and tin
that let in broken
half-moons, quarter-moons
of sky so that buyers and sellers
alike hunker down,
elbow into the dingy half-light
and bug-hum of commerce.
Hawkers show off
black crickets in plastic vials,
feeding each one
an eye dropper’s worth of sugar
water, the bigger bugs
(what are those?) squeezed into
bamboo cages, insects long
as my thumb with whipsaw
legs, serrated, iridescent black
and green, a flash of red
down the back. The dealers up
and coming, or down
on their luck, are booth-less
and table-less: they squat
on the concrete, clay pots
arranged before them,
lifting each lid to check on
the dark, shiny cricket inside—
Still there? Still ready
to fight for your life?
You would have been
an only child like me
or like so many kids in China,
those privileged
loners, and so many here
adopted from there,
preparing now
for bat mitzvahs or dyeing
Easter eggs pink and orange,
carpooled to weekend
calligraphy and lion dance
classes by blond dads,
moms who teach poli sci
at Columbia, wondering—
loved but still curious, loved
but confused by the odd
escapes that shape
our lives—How on Earth
did I ever wind up here?
You would have been
an only child like me, alone
but not lonely
most of the time, lost
a little, but mostly
okay with it all—
the living inside your mind,
I mean, the wandering
through the woods,
those half-remembered, half-
imagined woods—
and laughed at this old man:
“My dad?” you’d say. “How
weird,” you’d say—every
sentence a question
shiny with italics—“the things
he says?” Wary teen, how
you’d laugh with your friends,
of whom you’d have many
from all over our shrinking
world—smaller still
by the time you got here
and grew up and started talking
like this. “Specs? Records?
Cassettes?” You’d laugh at this
old man from an older world
already mostly gone,
already over with, the way
the music I love was played
by people dead now for decades,
like Joe Oliver, who shouted
and rasped and rushed
golden notes through his cornet,
his many mutes—derbies
and plungers and bottles and cups—
making a wah-wah wheezing
singing crying human voice
out of his hot breath,
so sad and sweet for so long
until his teeth rotted and it hurt
too much to play. He ended up
a janitor in a Georgia pool hall
and died too young,
busted and broke, buried—
How on Earth?—here
in the Bronx, in Woodlawn
Cemetery, not far from Shakespeare
Avenue, where I would take you
to see the green street sign.
And Thelonious Monk,
who got so rundown and sick
he slipped away across the river
to Englewood and told
his sister, “I just don’t feel
like playing anymore.”
Not even “’Round Midnight,”
not even “Crepuscule
with Nellie,” the song he made
for his wife and always
played note for note,
just as he wrote it. So he didn’t
touch a key, not ever
again, his mind and his piano
slowly filling up
with dust. Out in
Ewen Park now, the trees
one shade darker
than the sky, the fireflies
play hard to get
beneath the moon. They blink
on and off, on
and off. They telegraph us
their secrets—
over here
over here
—with their green
glow-in-the-dark bellies.
When we moved here, Lily and I
stopped in surprise
to watch those here and gone
and here again
tiny lights I remembered
from childhood and had never
seen before in the city,
though soon we realized
they appear here all summer.
Someone told me
it’s their mating call
though I never looked it up
to see if that was true
and now we walk right by
in our hurry to get home.
But since this is all
just imagining anyway, reckless
careening around curve
after curve, no brakes, eyes
closed, and since I can hear it now—
your voice, your sweet laugh
that hasn’t hurt anyone—
I want to stop here, mid-
sentence, and open my eyes
so I can look at you:
my slight girl, tall and awkward
in glasses, uncertain-seeming
(like your mother) and too
quiet sometimes (like me)
so that people who don’t
know you, not really, try to
finish your sentences, rush you
along, even though you’re nearly
fifteen, as if they’ve got you
figured out. But you’re steely
underneath—that crease
between your eyebrows
the giveaway you’re sure
of what’s what without needing
to say so. Your long brown hair
lightens to honey in summer,
mysterious chemistry of pool water
and sunlight, something
I would’ve never figured out
the how of and been happy
just to see and love and not try
to explain. Curious about anything
with legs or wings—lizards,
moths and caterpillars, toads, birds,
the broken eggs beneath the oak
that do require some explanation—
you’re only six, I see
now, sharp-eyed and skeptical
before you have any reason
to be: no one’s died yet
you know. You squint when
you smile, you may
need braces, you have a cloud
of freckles across each
cheek, you keep
losing one red mitten
and finding it again, you say
snowflakes taste
like little rivers when
they fall on your tongue
and then a door slams shut
on that other life. What
woke me up? Somewhere
a bell rings. Another door
slams: a literal door now,
wooden and loud. Someone
grinds coffee—whir, whir—
lets the water run until it’s cold
enough. Lights go on up
and down the hill, first one
and then another and then
another. God bless it—
as my father used to
say, angry but not wanting
to swear because
there was a child there—
another day gets going.
What else can we do
but get going too?
So I’m here. Still trying to
make what happens make
some kind of sense.
God bless it, I think, this
painful imagining
and then the cold light
we wake to once more.
What comes after:
we keep wondering when
will that start? So here’s
the rest of the story I want you
to hear: of course we didn’t
buy any crickets. But as we haggled
over the price of a cricket case,
small as a deck of cards
with a sliding lid
of curlicued wood over
a plastic window so you can see
your cricket sitting there
(legs angled in, antennae
aquiver), the cricket-seller—
a young woman who knows
how old, eighteen, twenty-
eight? She was someone’s
daughter, her ball cap
pulled low, her ponytail
sprouting out the back—
offered to throw in
a free cricket to seal the deal.
Perfect souvenir
of a faraway world:
I thought I’d keep my case
pocketed like a worry stone
I could rub to wear away
my worries. I’d keep it
empty, but at the ready.
As I held it and turned it over,
looked at it and tried to decide—
too expensive, I thought, too
wonderfully useless
for me, though if I said no
when would I ever
have the chance again?
—an old man squeezing
through the crowd stopped
and turned back. Two
bent and wiry hairs stuck out
of his cheek: a long life,
this means in China, if
he doesn’t pluck them. He said
something to the woman
and pulled from his pocket—
like a perfect moment’s
magic trick—his own
identical case. He slid back
the cover to show me
his mechanical-looking cricket.
His smile said he appreciated
the coincidence, this chance
to show it off—I couldn’t tell you
how, but I could tell
his cricket was a prized one,
a scrappy survivor.
He was happy in the right now
of this moment. He loved
his cricket even if
or maybe just because
they only ever live a few weeks
and so, unable to fall back asleep,
I step out
empty-handed now
to look once more at the moon.
Innisfree 40
A Closer Look:
Matthew Thorburn
Brian Builta
Nancy Naomi Carlson
Alice Friman
Elise Hempel
John Koethe
Pramod Lad
Michael Lally
Peter Leight
Hailey Leithauser
on Mildred Kiconco Barya
on Annette Sisson