The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Four): Collin Callahan [by Angela Ball]

Deerfield Crossing

Sheet lightning pulses like blood
vessels in the sky above the post office.

It is Sunday empty. I caress the edges
of failed delivery in my pocket

and continue on the acid-
rain pocked sidewalk to the station.

Down the block, a dog fights his leash
toward the smell of angel hair

and meatballs
escaping from a kitchen window.

Television sets and crickets coalesce
with the steady hum of residential air

conditioning units. The syncopated eyes
of wind turbines blink red in the distance.

Families fold together
their fingers in prayer.

When the thunder claps

like an infomercial
the streetlamps come on

all at once.

                                               (originally published in Blue Earth Review)

--Collin Callahan                              

In the poem before this one in Thunderbird Inn, “Horizontal Tuxedo,” a woman left her address in wet hair on the shower wall. –Collin Callahan

Collin Callahan was born in Illinois. His first collection of poetry, Thunderbird Inn, is forthcoming with Conduit Books & Ephemera. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, SLICE, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors’ Prize in poetry. You can find his work at collincallahanwrites.com.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Four): Collin Callahan

A poem of blended messages, beginning with lightning that strobes itself somatic, “Deerfield Crossing” intersects what Robert Frost called “inner and outer weather”: the limited scope of its interplay a despoiled landscape, a “Deerfield” without deer or fields, only crossings, a Levittown diaspora community far from the animation of Frank O’Hara’s NYC, but nonetheless a place with things to say, and with a poet willing to listen.

The first half line of stanza two, “It is Sunday empty,” may be the most economical, on-the-nose description ever provided for a day of the week. We see the speaker for the first and only time, automatically caressing a returned letter he has received, headed for “the station”—a still place, sieve for travel. We glimpse the ghost of T.S. Eliot, towering figure that the New York School of Poets dismissed, but that John Ashbery received via W.H. Auden.

Ashbery once characterized New York City as a large empty space perfect for poetry, and Deerfield Crossing possesses some of the same emptiness, one that enjoys defying itself, as in  

     Down the block, a dog fights his leash

     toward the smell of angel hair

     and meatballs

     escaping from a kitchen window.

Throughout, this poem is a model of what Paul Fussell calls “vigorous enjambment”: its line breaks faking closure, supplying surprise. In the lines above, we are half prepared for something celestial--and get, instead, “meatballs”—the dog’s eagerness vivid against flatness. Then, the stark loveliness of the post-natural,

     Television sets and crickets coalesce

     with the steady hum of residential air

     conditioning units. The syncopated eyes

     of wind turbines blink red in the distance.

in which nature is unnaturally included in the amalgam of  “Television sets and crickets” and the wind turbine’s robotic “syncopated eyes” that “blink red,” composing a kind of heartbeat “in the distance.”

There’s something prefab about the church services in which “Families fold together/their fingers in prayer.” The thunder near the close could not less resemble that of The Waste Land. Yet the response, as “streetlamps come on / all at once,” surely the result of automatic eyes, contains in its simultaneity an impulse of rightness, even joy. Then Collin Callahan’s abrupt and intriguing “Deerfield Crossing” leaves us to caress, alone, the whiteness of Sunday.

--Angela Ball

Comments

[J. Guaner]

This is helpful: "its line breaks faking closure, supplying surprise"-- Enjoyed reading the analysis and the poem.

[Annette C. Boehm]

Enjoyed the line breaks here in particular, and the many strong images. Sheet lightning - I've never seen it, but can visualize it.

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Angela, for another excellent column. It probably is entirely irrelevant, but Ashbery went to Deerfield Academy preparatory to going to Harvard.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you, J. Guaner, for your apt comment.

Annette Boehm, thank you for your appreciative words.

David, thank you for your kudos and for pointing out the Deerfield Academy connection--uncanny.