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In Progress
We adjust the background
so that I am still in a forest,
but the traditional kind,
not one made of cement and glass,
but composed primarily of wood
and auxiliary vegetal matter,
aerated with avian sonorities,
and partly veiled by more “air products”:
innocuous mist or fog —
for there is such a generous
spacing between predators
that it would make our Paleolithic relatives,
wherever they might be watching from,
think that living in our world
would be a safe and wonderful thing.
I pause in the mist or fog, because
it is a good place for retrieving ancient data
to supplement the present with;
that is, what’s left of the present
after the morning news
has finished most of it off —
and I found something: When Phil Niekro
retired from the Atlanta Braves
there was no longer anyone
playing in major league baseball
older than I was. He achieved
this distinction in 1987
and will never relinquish it.
What has happened since then?
Honestly, I don’t keep track of him.
Oh, you mean to me? Well, lots of things,
really, but I’ll get to them later,
since I’ve often admonished myself
for living in the past, although
I only did that when living in the past.
The Phil Niekro discovery
came through one of the newspapers
I perused during the eons of down time
consequent to proofreading at Forbes,
where in two years my only noteworthy
“catch” was pointing out that Luxemburg
was not a principality, as written—a synonym
for a minuscule polity—but a grand duchy.
In the following week, while
resting imperceptibly on my laurels,
I missed a typo so egregious that my luster
was tarnished beyond reclamation.
So back to the present, or what’s
left of the present after the evening news
has chewed it to pieces —
but there was not a word
about the Somali pirates
who attempted to seize my poems
and hold them hostage.
What were your poems doing
in the Strait of Hormuz?
You mean the Gulf of Aden.
You may well ask.
I wish I were at liberty to say.
*
So that’s as far as I got with the first draft on my laptop,
while sitting unnoticed for an hour in the shoe store
except by the guy in the chair on the other side of the aisle,
who was keeping an eye on me until my contact showed up—
2 o’clock was that approaching hour—and then he abruptly left
a minute before she, the no-nonsense-taking Mrs. Blackstone,
walked in from a long-past-due assignment,
and when I mentioned the departed observer, she said
that he wasn’t one of hers; and I looked down at my watch
to evade the stare that italicized my blunder,
and saw it was a quarter to three—I had just lost 45 minutes!
but in fact it was 55 years that I needed to go back and fix.
Those alterations will never fit in the space at the end of the file,
though they set off reflections enough to beguile the obfuscating eye.
2019-20
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Tony Towle began writing poetry in 1960. His connection to the New York School dates from 1963, when he took workshops at the New School with Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara. Since then, he has published thirteen books of poetry, most recently Noir (Hanging Loose Press, 2017); as well as a book of prose: Memoir 1960-1963 (Faux Press, 2001). My First Three Books (Vehicle Editions, 2020), combines an interview, photographs, and a CD of Towle reading some of his early work. More of Towle’s poetry, interviews, readings, etc., can be found at his website and at Penn Sound.
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Vintage photo of men in shoe store
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Author: Terence Winch
