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    Mahoning
    Mahoning
    Mahoning
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    Mahoning

    By A.F. Moritz

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    About this ebook

    Few artists (one thinks of Rilke and Hopkins) have presumed to evoke the spirit of embodied Nature. A. F. Moritz not only succeeds in thus animating a living world, but he deals with our human presence and assault on it with sympathy and a larger vision than the misanthropy such injuries easily summon. This is nature poetry with a difference: through Moritz's landscapes, from the abandoned industries of the Rust Belt to the decaying monuments of vanished civilization, move the vivid and engaging characters we have come to expect from this clear-eyed and open-hearted poet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateOct 15, 1994
    ISBN9781771310871
    Mahoning
    Author

    A.F. Moritz

    A. F. MORITZ’s entire post-education life has been spent in Toronto; he was the city’s poet laureate 2019-2023. He has written twenty-two books of poetry. His works with Anansi, since 2004, have received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the ReLit Award, the Beth Hokin Prize, and the Raymond Souster Award, and were finalists for the Governor General’s Award (twice) and the Trillium Award. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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      Book preview

      Mahoning - A.F. Moritz

      Mahoning

      A. F. MORITZ

      Mahoning

      Brick Books

      CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

      Moritz, A.F.

      Mahoning

      Poems.

      ISBN O-919626-73-4

      I. Title.

      ps8576.o724M3 1994     c811'.54     c94-931965-1

      PR9199.3.M67M3 1994

      Copyright © A.F. Moritz, 1994.

      The support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council is gratefully acknowledged. The support of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation is also gratefully acknowledged.

      Cover and author photos by Theresa Moritz. Interior photos by Albert F. Moritz.

      Brick Books

      www.brickbooks.ca

      Box 20081

      431 Boler Road

      London, Ontario

      N6K 4G6

      Canada

      … dona laboratae Cereris …

      – Vergil, Aeneid VIII

      (… which earth has given and human hands have made …)

      … verde sueño

      del suelo gris y de la parda tierra,

      agria melancolía

      de la ciudad decrépita,

      me habéis llegado al alma,

      ¿o acaso estabais en el fondo de ella?

      – Antonio Machado, ‘Campos de Soria’

      (… green dream of the gray soil and parched earth, bitter sadness of the decrepit city, have you newly come into my soul, or have you always been there in the depths of it?)

      Why should I move from this place

      where I was born? knowing

      how futile would be the search

      for you in the multiplicity

      of your debacle. The world spreads

      for me like a flower opening …

      – W.C. Williams, Paterson

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Part 1: Egypt

      Egypt (sections I-XI)

      Part 2: The Traveller

      The Two Cities

      I Saw You Exult

      Near Ravenna

      The Gifts

      Le Paresseux

      The Traveller

      Entrance to Tivoli

      Part 3: City Plan

      Morning, Loneliness Died

      City Plan

      Along the Rails

      Secrecy

      Our Sister

      Stoplights

      Fresh Grave

      Omniscience

      On a Screen

      Waiting for a Parade

      Part 4: Founders

      Visit Home

      First

      East Wall

      Shade

      One With the Sun

      Kingdom and Leaves

      Evening

      Centuries Ago

      Founders

      The Upper Stories

      Part 5: The Faithful One

      The Faithful One (sections I-XV)

      Part 6: Following the Mahoning

      Given

      In Niles

      Factory Shell

      A Praise

      Road into Warren: Shift Change

      The Meander

      Mosquito Creek

      Bonham Woods, Bank of the Mosquito

      That You Still Live

      Country Near Lake Milton

      Lost Content

      Notes and Acknowledgements

      I

      Egypt

      I

      I wake up. And it seems to me I am

      in childhood's place again – or still:

      that the far-off Mahoning flows nearby,

      while heat and floating water gather

      and thicken in September's night:

      summer should be over, dead,

      but it rages one more time, and in the fever

      that starts in summer's sleep and breaks its dream,

      making it wake to this oppression,

      the crickets are vibrating, their steady drills

      not music but something older, cool

      and clear: sweet water at its source, in the midst

      of burnt water: this suffocating night like a covering

      of doused ash, sodden but still fiery.

      Silence or the crickets' voice contrives to sparkle

      in blackness, and wind makes its fresh water sound in leaves.

      Now again as at first: I am in an upstairs bedroom,

      skin suffering and hearing blessed

      in the humid dark, and surrounding heads of maple trees

      that bring the river-like voice I seem to know

      screen me away from my river. It's as if the wall

      that the world is were a graceful labyrinth

      of leaves and branches, inviting

      endless transgression: openings, entrances

      everywhere, and numberless winding ways

      leading to forkings into other ways, the same.

      It's as if a voice gave me the key, saying,

      ‘Walk through the wall,’ and I went,

      it was permeable like mist or night,

      but it goes on and on, maybe the thickness

      of that intangible wall is without an end.

      II

      I wake up. The summer is almost dead,

      but still from dead of night it's far till dawn,

      when light will show whether the heat-broken dream

      has taken me back and I'm by the Mahoning again.

      Then I'll see its horizons: the low hills

      and distant ridges violet with factory smoke

      that melts into low blue clouds, and blooms of flame

      from long black mills on the river flats

      in the narrow valley. Closer, a railroad embankment cuts

      a flowering swamp, and the rails end

      in the millyard of the Republic Works: truck cartons

      and boxcars wait, locked,

      by the rusted sheet-metal office hut

      and very near, just beyond the chain-link fence

      topped with barbed wire, is the wealthy ditch:

      still water, purple aster,

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