Soaking up Sun

Editor’s Note: The evocative details of Hennen’s poetry steep us in the special sights and smells of farm life, the blessings of rest, and those magical moments of silence between two people when something important is communicated.

Today there is the kind of sunshine old men love, the kind of day when my grandfather
would sit on the south side of the wooden corncrib where the sunlight warmed slowly
all through the day like a wood stove. One after another dry leaves fell. No painful
memories came. Everything was lit by a halo of light. The cornstalks glinted bright as
pieces of glass. From the fields and cottonwood grove came the damp smell of
mushrooms, of things going back to earth. I sat with my grandfather then. Sheep came
up to us as we sat there, their oily wool so warm to my fingers, like a strange and
magic snow. My grandfather whittled sweet-smelling apple sticks just to get at the
scent. His thumb had a permanent groove in it where the back of the knife blade
rested. He let me listen to the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep, while his
own silence taught me every secret thing he knew.

Born into a big Dutch-Irish family in 1942 in Morris, Minnesota, Tom Hennen grew up on farms. After abandoning college, he married and began work as a letterpress and offset printer in 1965. In 1972 he helped found the Minnesota Writers’ Publishing House, printing work with a press stashed in his garage—work that included his first chapbook, The Heron with No Business Sense. He worked for the Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division in the 1970s and later worked as a wildlife technician at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. Now retired, he lives in St. Paul near his children and grandchildren. This poem, is from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems. It is reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Spy Poetry: Work by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Editor’s Note: When two people work intimately together over time, their work takes on the quality of a carefully choreographed dance in which both go about their tasks without seeming to take note of the other yet seem to move to the same music. This poem wonderfully captures this relationship in action. I especially love her phrase “in the quiet of the long familiar.”

Work

I could tell they were father and son,
the air between them slack, as though
they hardly noticed one another.

The father sanded the gunwales,
the boy coiled the lines.
And I admired them there, each to his task

in the quiet of the long familiar.
The sawdust coated the father’s arms
like dusk coats grass in a field.

The boy worked next on the oarlocks
polishing the brass until it gleamed
as though he could harness the sun.

Who cares what they were thinking,
lucky in their lives
that the spin of the genetic wheel

slowed twice to a stop
and landed each of them here.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn is a poet, teacher, and associate editor-at-large for Plume. She received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches at Manhattanville College and the 92nd Street Y. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including the Paris Review, Plume, and the New York Times. She has published three collections of poetry: Talking Underwater (2007), Second Skin (2009), and Galapagos Poems (2016). “Work” appears in her most recent publication, Echolocation (2018). Posted here with permission of the author.

Editor’s Note: A wonderfully evocative poem by one of Ireland’s best. There are many things to appreciate here: how the title does so much work to explain the true subject of the poem; how line 8 underscores the perpetual nature of the stone-water relationship; how her skillful use of the word “under” in line 15 makes a clever association with the expression “under our noses;” and especially, how she uses the image of the stone to represent her long marriage, and the action of the water on the stone to represent the many events that have shaped the relationship over time.

Lines Written for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary

Somewhere up in the eaves it began:
high in the roof – in a sort of vault
between the slates and the gutter – a small leak.
Through it, rain which came from the east,
in from the lights and foghorns of the coast –
water with a ghost of ocean salt in it –
spilled down on the path below.
Over and over and over
years stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought, of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.
It happened under our lives: the rain,
the stone. We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder:
all those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures.

Eavan Boland (1944-2020) was a prominent Irish poet, author, and professor known for her exploration of Irish national identity, women’s roles in history, and the domestic sphere. Her work often addressed the intersection of personal experience and national narratives, particularly focusing on the experiences of women in Ireland. Boland’s poetry collections include A Poet’s Dublin (Carcanet Press, 2014); A Woman Without a Country (W. W. Norton, 2014); New Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2008); An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987 (W. W. Norton, 1996); and In Her Own Image (Arien House, 1980). This poem is from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 2001 by Eavan Boland. Posted here with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Editor’s Note: This is the poem that happens when you’re a poor young writer subsisting paycheck to paycheck and someone gives you an outlet for your creativity. What poem would have arisen, I wonder, if he had worked at a waffle iron manufacturer? DL

Tester by Edgar Kunz

I catch a bus out to the county
and check in at a beige terminal

and they ask me about the smells
and textures of various dips

and I click appealing
or not appealing, then elaborate

in the text box below. Artichoke
and French Onion. Spicy Three

Bean Queso. I got in
on referral. I live with seven

other people. I measure rent
in how many sessions I have to do

with the dips. I start testing
what I can get away with: notes

of bright espresso, mouthfeel
of a sun-ripe plum.

I write longer and longer.
I don’t think they read a word.

It’s weeks before you’re entered
into the system, more weeks

to get your tiny check. Aline says
If you think it’s a scam

why do you keep saying yes?
In the fluorescent room I receive

one dip after another from blue
gloved hands, always the same

plain tortilla chips to dip with,
the same hands clearing away

the tiny plastic cups. I tinker
with my descriptions. If I need

water, they bring me water
in slightly larger cups.

Edgar Kunz has been an NEA Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, the American Poetry Review and the Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College. His poem “Tester” is included in his second book, Fixer (Copyright© 2023 by Edgar Kunz). Posted here with author’s permission and courtesy of Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.