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Two
poems from Scott Coffel's Mild Worlds Elsewhere
followed
by a note on the author
Tonight
Wallace Stevens
Tonight Wallace Stevens seemed deep to me as Crater Lake
and bluer, if possible: who on this planet without a God
defeats death so easily, cuts it down to size,
devours it like an omnivore of oblivion?
Are
not the propagations of death bars to pleasure? If you
could wake up tomorrow uncrushed by grief, wouldn't you
feel less foolish? Tonight Wallace Stevens seemed
deep to me as Crater Lake and bluer
than
I could stand – for I am drained of blueness,
a boy's face buried in gray fur as winds from the northwest
scour the pneumatic Chryslers of 1959 with sand and snow
and my parents kiss in the street as they did in life –
yet
I concur with Stevens that such embodiments of death
impoverish the imagination, that the only paradise
suitable for breathing forfeits its pales and deeps of blue
when ghosts take it upon themselves to burst into passion.
Light-Years
From My Redemption
Catholic in my envy, I crucified every rival –
the satyr, the encyclopedist, the dwarf
Apollo with his rhythm sticks, the diplomat with his pimp's eye
for local talent and Gerard, that non-practicing
atheist with his transuranic lisp and ties to the Vatican.
All for the love of Horst (her nickname since childhood)
who taught me German and other delicacies of Middle Earth
in a railroad flat off Second Avenue,
light-years
from my redemption on Mount Rushmore,
the pines tipped with fire as I perused the face of free will
blasted into the granite text of The Critique of Pure Reason
–
my mind losing opacity, skidding past its music
into deep space where the Big Bang, enfeebled by expansion,
bleated like an act of grace in sheep's clothing.
©
Scott Coffel was born in New York City in 1956,
and educated at York College, a senior college of The City University
of New York. He lives in Iowa City, and works as Director of the
Hanson Center for Technical Communication in the University of
Iowa. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, amongst them
Antioch Review, Salmagundi, Paris Review,
The Wallace Stevens Journal, The American Scholar,
Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner,
Margie, Seneca Review, Barrow Street, Bridge,
The Paumanok Review, and The Adirondack Review.
"Tonight
Wallace Stevens" first appeared in The Wallace Stevens
Journal, and "Light-Years from My Redemption" first
appeared in Salmagundi.
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