Rob Casper presents Michael Teig

Ten years ago, as summer started, two friends and I dreamed up jubilat. We did everything, from deciding on a title (early ideas like Pome and String Index didn't make the cut) and a size (we wanted our magazine almost to fit in one's back pocket) to creating a budget and setting up an office at UMass, where we were grad students in the MFA program. (Luckily, the faculty were very supportive -- the late Agha Shahid Ali, then director of the program, cleared out one side of his office for us). My friends, Christian Hawkey and Michael Teig, stayed on as editors for ten issues. As successful as they were in that capacity, they also wrote award-winning collections of poems.

Michael's collection, Big Back Yard, came out first. It was the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and was published by BOA Editions in 2003. Here's one of my favorite poems from that collection -- a poem I got to read the first day of the first workshop I took at UMass! Next week: Christian Hawkey.

THE HOLE WE'VE BEEN DIGGING

Since I've come home, put on all my shoes,
watched lawns, frankly green and unapologetic,
lick up to rickety bridges, the neighborhood houses

come into focus cautiously, like something dropped
from the sky, like memory, the narrow street
sleepless trees, the cars postered in leaves and pollen.

I've come home and the pond is back
in a slate suit, suit of hours. I dig in the yard
with a stick, stop at the grocery, handle produce.

My mother is older, more urgent, less assuring
as she tilts into the stove with a cigarette --
We're rarely as good at ourselves as we imagine

and this could go on for hours
while only the radiator has something to say.
It's always time for work here, about to rain.

In the street, people you don't know
don't talk to you, though they say heaven
is a place of great civility

where a statuette of diligence
stands straight up, or some other
virtue too mystifying to account for.

I'd like to believe it entails not getting dressed
for a day or a week, the rain-soaked and bikini-clad,
the under-employed with a halo of bar-darts.

That it happens here, casual as undressing.
My companions come and go as they wish.
We lay down in the hole we've been digging

and it's a pleasure, really, alone or with a friend,
rarely looking at each other, thinking
you hear the screen-door, some recollected music,

the river and lumber trucks racing out of town.
The past is mostly just that:
I watch it all a bit strangely.

Thirty years ago on this street, my father drove me home
in a blue convertible, wondering like all parents
if he could simply keep me alive

-- Michael Teig

All these years later, I'm still struck by the poem's quiet lyricism -- its subtle stretching and deepening of the domestic, the way it  speaks of home and family so gracefully that you don't realize (or, in keeping with the narrator's understated, offhanded tone, want to realize) what the stakes are until the final couplet.

-- Rob Casper

Comments

[Laura Orem]

Great poem - killer last stanza.

[Stacey]

What a wonderful poem. I agree with Laura about the final stanza but I love the melancholy throughout. And the pond in the slate suit is a terrific image. Thanks.