Poems by W.T. Pfefferle

I Am Pop Thorndale

2011-02-24T03:53:00.001-08:00

I am mad about five things today:
the size of my belly,
its shape,
these new freckles on my feet,
my inability to walk long distances,
and the way my FedEx guy leaves my packages in plain view.

I’ve been Pop
since I was a young boy.
Pop, short for Poppa, I suppose.
Because mine was a bastard and rarely around.

These pages in your hands make up my memoir.
Memoir is just memory
with a little switch of letters.

That’s how this book got started,
this mad desire to chronicle the things
that have happened.

My wife.
My only son, Grease,
misunderstood and beautiful.

A staggering memoir.
Heavy enough to conk a cockroach,
but light enough to carry with a beach chair
and the last four bottles of Amstel Light.

This is not the opening I had in mind.
I begin today in a panic.
My previous beginning, my salvo,
my mesmerizing opening shot has been lost.

12 brilliant entries in a weblog.
12 riveting treatises about why I’m mad about the world, etc.
But I did not bookmark it, so it’s gone forever.

I start again here.
My life up until this has been modest.
I have wandered personally and professionally.
I’ve been a genial companion along life’s road to Judith.
I’m a father who might have made errors with my son.

I’ve not left a mark here or anywhere else.
My hair is thin.

I have at times been kind to old dogs,
patted the heads of dimwit children.
But I have no trophies to show you.

I have never sat down with Matt Lauer or Chris Matthews.
I have lived marginally and happily.
But then these things happened.

It’s as if after spending a lifetime
wandering an endless and disappearing beach,
discovering my name on a note
in a bottle in the sand.

I have made sense of these things.
I am writing it down for you tonight.
I am Pop Thorndale, no great man.

Pfefferle, W.T. The Meager Life and Modest Times of Pop Thorndale. Rochester Hills (MI): NFSPS Press, 2007.

Allowances

2011-02-24T02:50:00.000-08:00

I write in the basement in the wee hours,
and I plan on putting it all together.
I want files upon files on the hard drive.

I store the files and then open new ones.
I don’t revise.
I don’t look at the old stuff.
If I told one story, I’ve told it 100 times.

Just now I hit alt+save
to guard against a lightning bolt.
I have just now changed the formatting of the font
and then did alt+save again.

I will name names. I will talk about my first kiss.
I will run down the events of my father’s disappearance.
I will showcase a handful of happy memories of childhood,
the racy love affairs of my 20s, my marriage, our son.
I will pair the large issues of marriage and family
with the minutiae of my hobbies.

I will be endearing.
You’ll learn why I am the character I am.
You will weigh that against larger quirks,
some of them a little unsavory.

I have made allowances, and so must you.

I will focus on the big and the small of my life.
Not because it was all such a masterpiece,
but because it all led to the events of the past year
that have given my life some clarity, some precision.

Its meaning.

Pfefferle, W.T. The Meager Life and Modest Times of Pop Thorndale. Rochester Hills (MI): NFSPS Press, 2007.

Somewhere Else

2011-02-24T02:41:00.000-08:00

We’ve lived in Somethingville
since Grease was born,
his lifetime and ours and the town’s
all tied up.

On the street I see pals from the diner,
the video store, two ladies who know Judith.

The comfort and kindness of Somethingville
suffocates me on days like this
when all I dream of are the western states,
the crumble-sided two lanes outside Havre, Montana.

I see a motel with a cowboy motif
where I might write this book’s aching dénouement.

My fantasy makes me a giant in Pocatello,
the new mayor of Boise,
a man who will trade every short-sleeved shirt he owns
for one decent set of winter tires.

Pfefferle, W.T. The Meager Life and Modest Times of Pop Thorndale. Rochester Hills (MI): NFSPS Press, 2007.

Wedding

2011-02-24T02:01:00.000-08:00

Best man’s arm in a cast,
“dumbshit” in blue ink as big as a freeway sign.

Earlier, with my buddies,
smoking in a vestibule,
shooing away a kid in a smock,
my car keys hot in my pants.

Really, the only chance you’re ever given
to just go for the two lane.
A done deal after the vows, the holy consecration,
the smoked salmon, the dollar dances.

Judith’s family fills her side and some of mine.
My grandmother in the front by herself,
long widowed, flowing white hair
like a 40s movie star.

The minister reading a mimeographed sheet
stuck in the middle of Deuteronomy.
Judith at my side, her arm through mine.
I see the painted glass behind the minister’s head still.

Where would I have gone?
No road was long enough.
I stood still that day.
It was the bravest thing I’d ever done.

Pfefferle, W.T. The Meager Life and Modest Times of Pop Thorndale. Rochester Hills (MI): NFSPS Press, 2007.

News From Home

2011-02-24T01:45:00.000-08:00

On a dreary Friday afternoon,
an uncle calls my office,
a voice not heard for 15 years,
the number obtained from an old school friend.

My old man in a hospital somewhere,
two strokes overnight,
and more coming.
A last opportunity for a wayward son.

The hum of long distance delays each word,
and they come to me
as if bouncing down a dirt road.
Did he ask for me, I hear myself say.

And then more details of the family gathering,
cousins from miles away,
the shame of it, the only son,
the brave family huddled around a phone.

I find the fear in myself, and feel my gut twisting
as I set the phone down on the receiver,
the thin voice of my uncle still coming through
after I hang up, the voice becoming

that voice of my old man’s, thick, meaty,
shouting, reaching, pushing me into a corner
in a basement when I was 11. His open hand
as big as a car door.

Pfefferle, W.T. The Meager Life and Modest Times of Pop Thorndale. Rochester Hills (MI): NFSPS Press, 2007.

The Third Thing

2011-02-24T01:01:00.000-08:00

That it is remarkable,
the change.

In these days
which now seem to extend,
expand to something other than minutes or hours,

I find myself mute,
able to hear my own voice,
the voice from my youth,
a voice to recognize,
but unheard outside.

I am motion without completion.
I call to her but she does not hear.

At one instant I am with my son,
and he is happy,
and I reach out to touch my boy on the shoulder,
but I am unable.

And then that is gone.

I recall a sweet taste in my mouth from childhood,
and it is there again.
I wonder about a friend and I am beside him
on a park bench from 1973, smoking a cigarette.

Curving light bringing me to it and then back
without the slightest understanding.

Then at other times
I find myself on unknown streets
where I walk on colored wet pavement
that crackles under my feet.
A world I am trying on for size.

And I can call to her but she does not hear.

Sometimes I find myself in a crowded room,
my friends, old and new around me.
And there is laughter and there is comfort,
and a day passes of this,
stiff drinks at a padded bar,
a meal, a game of pool,
a paperback’s broken spine,
a pretty sunset, a little boy singing a song,
the feel of a highway wind.

All the time I feel a pull.

And Judith.

She is sometimes at home,
in a way I remember her from when we were young.
When the world and she
seemed open and untethered.

Sometimes her secret life is still a mystery to me,
the frailties unknown.
We are pushing a stroller,
shopping for vegetables, young,
still reaching.

And sometimes she is as she was at the end,
a sort of impostor who arrived in our marriage
with a cartoon face, a funhouse reflection
of who I believed her to be,
and who she became.

And my old man.
He is there, too.
Sometimes as he would have been
at the end,
as an old man ready to be forgiven.

And other times as he was.
He at the wheel of a station wagon,
a cigarette between his fingers.
Terrible scenes in countless boyhood homes.
A night with his car on the front lawn,
my mother’s broken nose,
bloody clothes.
Him sitting on a toolbox
in the basement,
his rifle to his head.
His face, my face,
staring past the barrel,
always saying, but not saying,
this is for you, too.
This is what I leave you.

But other times there is no one I know.
And those times now outnumber the rest.

My aimless plans, my diffuse ambition, gone.
I think sometimes of these pages, and by thinking,
I see them, spilling out like October leaves
onto a table in front of me.
The stories make me laugh. I find it wondrous.
The heartbreaks seem small and vain.
I sweep the pages to the floor and
in an instant I forget everything that was on them.

And then I lose time. It has no hold on me.
I am in one place and a hundred all at once.

I sizzle with energy and the taste of metal in my throat.

I stretch and twist to make sense of these new images.

Yet some part of me still holds onto a small memory,
a moment before all of this.

In a room, on a couch,
in early morning,
someone said my name.

Flashing lights,
Judith on the periphery,
the sound of machines
and then my son reaching through.

It pulls something of me back,
and feels like something to save,
something that was mine that remained.

So I repeat my name until it begins to feel strange.
Until it is just a sound.

But it tires me, annoys me,
and what has held me down is gone.

I am surrounded by things I have
no names for
in a place which I cannot describe.

And there are arms lifting me.

Pfefferle, W.T. The Meager Life and Modest Times of Pop Thorndale. Rochester Hills (MI): NFSPS Press, 2007.

Halloween 1970

2011-02-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

for WMP (1938-2010)

My dad’s Buick parked and running,
heater on, us inside.

Between his legs a squatty bottle of beer.
In my bag just nine Oh Henry candy bars
he bought me at the liquor store.

Ahead of us on the sidewalks we see
Gerry Fiske and Alan Byl,
dressed up like cowboys.

“Your mother turned me into this,” he says.
He drinks from his bottle
and I open the candy.

Gerry recognizes our car
and taps on the glass. I wave at him,
removing my tiger mask.

My dad honks the horn once
and Gerry runs off ahead.

Later, sitting in the car
outside my grandparents’ house,
Dad smokes filtered Camels
and we watch through the back window
as the rest eat at a big table inside.

He punches the cigarettes out on the heel of his hand,
then flicks the butts out the window.

“Your mother…” he says. But he doesn’t finish.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Halloween 1970,” Cortland Review. (Spring) April 2011.

Highway Song

2011-02-01T03:46:00.000-08:00

I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
seventh son of a son of a bitch.
When I was thirteen we moved to Arizona,
and I fell in love with the beautiful sand.

When I was eighteen I moved to Nevada,
and I met a woman there and I married her,
and I'm married to this very day.
About once a month we get in her car and we go driving,
we get up on that highway, roll down those windows,
and pretend like it's yesterday.

She says,
“Let’s go do something bad in my car.”

Now I dream about moving.
Just me and my wife.
We won't ask any questions like,
“Where to?” or “How far?”

Four wheels on the asphalt,
four wheels on the road,
four wheels on the black.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Highway Song,” Exit 13 12 (Winter 2004).

Florida

2011-01-07T03:44:00.000-08:00

She's gone back there,
picking up pieces.
The phone number is changed,
and there's no new address.
I don't know where anyone is anymore.

As I sit here and look out at this city,
my new city,
with its own light and its own ways,
I think about them all the time.

I know that one of them is in Florida,
and that the other one isn't.
I dial information and ask for
my own number.

There are few things in this world
that are true.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Florida.” Aura Literary Arts Review 29:1 (Spring 2003): 67-70.

Driveways

2011-01-04T03:37:00.000-08:00

One

It's a new haircut she comes home with.
Behind her in the trees is just the same fog
that I've seen in front of me
all these past months.

It's the first time she's smiled
at me in a very long time,
and it's probably accidental.
Her head is down-turned,
looking at something
from a happy time, perhaps,
or maybe like me,
not thinking anything at all anymore.

She's wearing a blue sweater
that I don't remember.
That and the haircut shake me so much
that I feel that I stand on this driveway
I am seeing a new wife.
One who hasn't seen inside
the various hollow places
that make up my resolve.

Two

It's on nights like this
when we feel the most at ease.
The two chairs are close enough
for us to touch hands at some reminder,
but far enough apart for each of us to breathe.

Underneath us the planet is spinning,
and we, just like everything else,
spin along with it,
compliant, trusting.

As the sun sets
at the far end of our driveway
we both remark on the tremendous orange color,
and how it seems different or the same
than the night before.

In a few moments she will grow tired
of the quiet and the spinning,
and she'll go inside.
As always, I'll watch her bedroom light go on,
and then off.

There was a time in this house when
we would go in together,
and one of us,
sometimes me and sometimes her,
would have to go and retrieve
the lawn chairs from the driveway
before the soft summer rain began
to wash them clean without warning.

Three

The sounds that this house makes
sometimes wake me.
And at times like that I wander from
room to room, just checking.

Sometimes I take a lawn chair
and go back to the driveway.
Out there at night you can
count stars as they move above you.

You can feel the planet moving,
moving in whatever is the way of these things.

Tonight, if I stay awake just a bit longer,
I might wake her up and show her
how beautiful it is out there.
I might tell her that none of it
ever happened.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Driveways.” Santa Fe Online -- Poetry Forum (Summer 1998).

Laramie

2011-01-03T03:49:00.000-08:00

We’ve found a green hotel.
Carry me across, she says.

She’s pretending.

Drop her on the bed,
but she’s already up,
hopping around the room,
letting her hair fly,
white socks on red bedspread.

When it is dark we look out the window.
Big Sky country, she says.

I don’t tell her.
She doesn’t know the difference.

She smokes her Marlboros,
warming her hands around them,
while I sleep underneath the Indian pictures.

Dial 6 for wake up.

In the morning I take the car to a 7-Eleven for gas.
As I drive back toward the hotel,
I remember why I married her.
And I forget why we got divorced.

Outside the hotel,
she is standing by a Coke machine,
waiting on the curb.

She’s swinging her arms,
balancing.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Laramie,” Alternative Press Magazine 7 (1991): 24.

Careful

2011-01-03T03:36:00.000-08:00

Just tell me one and one is two.

We don’t have to walk the floor.

When we were young,
I was salt upon your tongue,
you were rain outside my door.

Careful, we were walking on clouds.

You can make promises
until it’s light.
You’ve mistaken
love for pride.

I won’t pretend to understand.
I’ll just keep standing in this rain.

Careful, now we’re walking on glass.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Careful,” Verse Libre Quarterly 5:1 (Winter 2005).

The Sad Ponies

2008-08-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

Rescued from
Bourbon County
and delivered into
square pens on Hwy. 25.

The grass here is
as good as any grass.

One keeps to himself
near the road,
watching passing trucks,
waiting.

When it rains the rest
find cover,
but the one sad pony
stands by himself.

The grass here is
as good as any grass.

Pfefferle, W.T. “The Sad Ponies.” Kentucky Monthly (August 2008).

Second Marriage

2007-11-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

Leah marries Ken on a stormy October afternoon.
We pass gifts then huddle around with strangers near the bar.

Leah is my oldest friend, 20 years running.
Ken is a new thing. A new husband.

Leah has on an avocado dress, short, bare legs.
My wife says she looks great for 40.

I stare up at the front during the ceremony,
wondering where Leah’s first husband is now.

That first wedding I watched from a distance,
in a rented car, half mad on some lovely red wine.

Ken shakes my hand, then clutches me close.
“It means the world to Lee that you came.”

At the reception I make five trips to the buffet,
for assorted relatives jetlagged for the journey.

During the first dance I nod at Leah as she swirls past.
I imagine the nod is full of endearment and grief.

Later, when the band plays something herky jerky,
Ken comes over and dances with my wife.

He claps me on the shoulder, and spins her out of her chair.
Just once around, he says, then they disappear.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Second Marriage,” Antioch Review 65:1 (Winter 2007): 116.

Night of the Pig

2007-04-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

We smash the ceramic pig
on a still April night.

I prepare the hammer
and you prepare the pig,

green, hollow, its snout
as big as a beer stein.

There is no incantation,
but the ceremony

has a queer flow that we lose
ourselves in.

The crashing, the release, the empty last gasp.
The pieces and shards that will remain.

Consequences of the
porcine nocturne.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Night of the Pig,” Cottonwood 65 (Spring 2007) 21.

Bad History

2006-09-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

Columbus liked to wear giant plumed hats,
and was fond of a woman he later sold for beads.

The Civil War started sometime in an early morning rain,
and continues to this day.

Nietzsche said that all that glistens is gold.
Chaucer told tales of lovers without conscience.

The houses in heaven have several rooms.
God ran off Lucifer because of my pride.

I wrote a bad check to buy the ring
and later, she sold it to pay for the U-Haul.

The railway opened the country,
the automobile dispersed the populace.

The television was invented in the 1930s,
and then later thrown down the stairs

of the Sunflower apartment building
on a day that looked like rain

but when no rain came.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Bad History,” Virginia Quarterly Review 82:4 (Fall 2006): 209.

Losing Clare

2006-04-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

I prayed for a foggy morning,
one that would somehow shield me
from the inevitable.

A little plane can’t leave this island in the fog.
Even a wind will change schedules.
It happens all the time.

All night I stood on the shore
prayed for clouds,
made deals with the angels.

When the sun came up the next morning,
it was clear.
The water lapped lazily.

I talked about some bad movie and some bad seafood
and you ticked off in your head
all the reasons you were leaving.

Perfect sunny morning and you wore
tortoise shell sunglasses I had paid too much for
years and years before.

Later, on the beach,
I looked up and cursed the clouds
that arrived too late.

I watched children and mothers.
I drank white whiskey right out of the bottle,
and pretended you would be emerging soon

from a cabana behind me
whispering something funny
ready to lead me back to where we’d been.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Losing Clare,” Nimrod 49:2 (Spring/Summer 2006): 209

Cigarette

2005-10-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

When I look in a mirror, I see my life receding.

You don’t even have to know my name.
You don’t have to treat me nice.

If I didn’t have fever, well I wouldn’t be waiting.
But it’s cold in the night, the fear of gravity saves me.

I line it up on the highway,
with the heat and the headlights.

I’m going to burn something before they burn me.
I can smell the gasoline.

The sound of the world on fire.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Cigarette.” Verse Libre Quarterly 5:1 (Winter 2005).

Map Reading

2004-04-01T12:55:00.000-08:00

In a beaten down road atlas we mark places to go,
not vacation spots, but new homes,
homes away from this one.

My wife uses red pen and I use blue.
She makes neat circles around town names
and I make wiggly lines around entire states.

These decisions are not entirely our own.
There is a sick father somewhere, and
there are hard feelings and money owed.

During the day my wife works. And I,
too frail from these thoughts in my head,
pop aspirin and stare at the map.

At night we lay on the bed and let
the evening warmth pour in here.
When I dream, I dream of us on that map.

I take giant steps, a hundred miles long,
a foot in Colorado and one in Utah.
At the California border my wife zigs when I zag.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Map Reading,” North American Review 289 (Spring 2004): 29.

Birmingham

2004-04-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

My brother says Birmingham is the ass end of everything.
He whacks a tree branch against the side of his leg
while we wait outside the church reception hall.

His new bride is inside, dancing with her fat and white-haired father.
She has brown skin that shines against the white of her dress.
Her father is talking loud over the music and letting her lead.

My brother goes to AA ever since he met this girl.
He thinks he can handle it on his own,
but stops by my place for a beer after his meetings.

We’ve lived in Birmingham since Daddy brought us here
in the late 70s. We dragged up and down Mitchell Street
in the Bonneville we bought together in high school.

As I watch his wife inside I think about how I kissed her
more than a dozen times when we were all kids together.
I remember she used to wear cherry lip gloss.

My brother says Birmingham can suck it right out of you.
That Birmingham killed Daddy, and that Birmingham
is going to kill us, too.

He says it like Birmingham is this thing.
He drops the tree branch and he grabs the beer in my hand.
Just a sip, he says. Then I’m going back in there.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Birmingham,” New Orleans Review 30:2 (2004): 79. Pushcart Prize nominee.

Texas

2003-09-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

for Chet Hicks

There are, of course,
all the jokes about its size.
The big brush joke.
The joke that ends,
“...the only place big enough to hold me.”

I sell it to my pals as a sort of nirvana,
where we ride cows to work,
and where women with big brown hair
scratch our backs with red fingernails.
(You were the only one ever to believe me.)

I think of you leaving the state and I think
about some kind of present.
Maybe a shot glass with Kennedy’s head and a target.
That’s how far I am willing to go today.

Your name will always remind me of music.
Of guitars and a dream about the desert.
We never went there, by the way,
although in my head, I always held it
like a little promise or reward.

I suppose that it is just hot and sandy,
no hamburgers for many miles,
not a decent fucking motel anywhere.

When the apartment on Kings Highway
filled with new people, I walked my dog
in the other direction.
In nameless bars, for the benefit of mean drunks,
I’d sometimes send some bad song your way.

I think about what happened to you,
and that Cort bass.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Texas,” South Carolina Review 36:1 (Fall 2003): 29.

Satellites

2003-06-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

We’re racing across Charles on a cloudy day,
wind pressing newspaper to store windows,
people in gray and black raincoats shoot past
in clumps of threes and fours.

Now we’re standing on a patch of beach by an ocean
that we’ve never seen before,
and you’re throwing pieces of broken shells
as far as you can into the water.

We’re on a highway in Wyoming
and you’re rolling the spare tire toward me.
We watch it roll down the embankment,
moving quickly away from us.

In an open field outside Wichita,
we spot shooting stars in darkening sky.
I’m wishing on them.
747s, you say. Russian satellites.

You tell me things change.
You turn it like a lock.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Satellites,” Hayden’s Ferry Review 32 (Summer 2003).

Foreigners

2003-04-01T12:47:00.000-08:00

Will is the one with
the blonde children.
They make sandcastles out of mud
in a squared playpen,
see saw endlessly
with grinning faces.

I read the mail with air mail stickers,
and know that his wife
has found a Polish lover.

Will drinks American beer and dreams
about Disneyland
for his children.
I love foreigners.
I love their little histories.

The wife's letters
are always meaty. That's a word
I wouldn't say to just anyone.
I dream at night of her arriving
at the local airport. (An impossibility
because of the size of the strip.)
And in this dream we drive a Citroen
car like the one I remember from my French class
in high school.

But Will intrudes on the dream with
a hammering on the door.
"My little girl has eaten this mud,"
he says. His face is stoney, shocked. The little girl,
hanging from her father's hip,
her lips smeared with a slick black paste,
smiles big at me.

One more night,
one last dream.
Will's wife arrives from Germany
in a blush of fantastic billowing skirts,
and she speaks my name in perfect English.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Foreigners.” Aura Literary Arts Review 29:1 (Spring 2003): 67-70.

Wyoming

1995-01-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

There are bugs pressed against car windows
from Wyoming to Texas and back.

I want to say, fill it up,
but that’s from a movie.

The key for the men’s room
has been lost for months.

We don’t drive when it’s light.
There are Holiday Inns pressed against highways

from Wyoming to Texas and back.
Beige phones and ice machines.

We’re taking big steps,
covering ground,

chewing up the Earth
in noisy gulps.

In Kansas, a forty-foot high neon cowboy is waving
from the parking lot of a rib place.

My wife parks, takes it as a sign.
We stand under it and salute up.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Wyoming,” Kansas Quarterly 26 (1995): 285.

Meetings

1993-04-03T12:57:00.000-08:00

for Steve Carter

Slow witted,
but getting sane.

The heart of a champion.
We drove a car across Texas
in the middle of the night.
Cigars and speed and open windows.

We were friends first,
and then all this happened.
He is comfortable with my wife,
in the same way I am not with his.

My eyes aren’t what they used to be,
but my hearing is sharp.
My reflexes are tremendous.
I once caught a fly in my mouth
on a very dark night.
It was easy.

It is a phone call at odd hours that marks us.
And there are those weekend trips to the coast,
a bar called Burners, a waitress,
and the Kon Tiki motel.

He will die of liver disease,
and me of a heart attack.
We will be young and pretty still,
like shells on a beach.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Meetings,” The Ohio Review 50 (Spring 1993): 99.

Driving

1993-01-01T03:42:00.000-08:00

The spinning sound that
rejects road and asphalt
grays up at me like horizon,
blinding us on this interstate.

It is not a dream, we are flying.

Shallow grooves make the tires dance,
undriven by human hands.
The music reaches us through tinted windows
of gray asphalt upon gray sky.

We'll.

Yellow houses off the side of some unmarked state highway,
and a flag in an open, deserted field.
Grass begins to move across the feeder road,
a blade at a time.

We'll leave this highway,
when we find.

There are cicadas in the bean fields,
calling across,
calling.

We'll leave this gray ribbon of
heartache and truck songs
when we find.

Rain pointing our windshield, blurring,
clouds filling the view
while wheels spill
spray up and over.

The ramp slumps from this pure gray highway,
and down into a small town,
where people dwell
between the ditch,
a dirt road,
and the exit sign.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Driving.” Bangtale (1993).

Promises

1993-01-01T03:40:00.000-08:00

One

That the wind on this plain
will die in embers
before our next breath
(which is shallow and pained)
can overcome the dust
that rises (irises) from
this desert lake bed.

That my love of truth
will endure one more
long night of
drawn curtains,
and empty bottles of whiskey.

That this song
in the field
is that same one

love of beauty
love of truth

that we sang on a
broken pier into
the green yellow sea
of a full moon
spring night
while water was on water
was on wave.

(Do you hear me calling to the seagulls?)

That this dream
will whither and die
before one more tear drops
from heaven to earth,

love of the jaunty saxophone
love of the misery makers
love of mankind’s misery makers

That we shall sing
the misery song
with the chorus of
children
in a cornfield,
on a warm Iowa dusk
evening
and with

when it comes from above
when it comes from above
when it comes from above
it is meant for us below

brilliant intensity,
we will engineer one more dance
for

love of the mystery makers
love of promises

That the one promise
unmade will
be the one left unbroken
that the sea memory will
merge with
our cornfield song
and make one night
last.

love of the maker
love of truth

That it blackens
behind
points of light,
that it is only
blackness
and more blackness
behind the points

love of the loss of beauty
love of

That the blackness has shape
but no meaning,
that we will sing
the song of children
and we will
dance the dance
of misery
and mastery of the dream
makers.

Two

That the desertion
of the father
will turn to cement thoughts
of cool nights
on this solid wood porch
and its neighborhood overlook.

and of the father
so as the son

That the leaves of this
last uninfected tree
will heave its branches
cleanly
(without blood)
through the plate glass
and in
reaching across the ration
of sadness that clusters
in this room around
yellow photos
of a man on a motorcycle
with a small hat
peering out from 1955.

love of the father
love of the son
love of the sadness makers

the jaunty tunes of tuneless
jackhammer afternoons

That the 14 year old son
put to work in a cold
post depression
prairie town
will make pains to reconnect
those parts that frayed
as springs turned to summers
turned to falls

love of emptiness

songs of the unborn silence
makers of the jaunty silence

and that the new son failed
to measure up
to the dream,
or that the dream failed
to measure him at all.

That the phone call
will not create the desert
place in the mind
that the dream of the loss
will be replaced
by the reality of the loss
that the loss itself
will replace the knowledge
of the loss
that the loss itself will
make itself the reality
without the pain
of the loss
without the loss

love of the mighty sadness
of self.

That my hands
thrown up in terror
will come down at
last
in prayer.

of the tuneless songs
of the last man
to hold a son in his arms
of the love
that is loss.

Three

That my secret devotion
will absolve
the desire to have it.
That the last memory of this night
will leave itself
drawn and dirtied
on the front step,
allowing the clean part
entry to this

love of the wife
love of the jaunty silence

home.

That in turning myself
one last time for home
I will find
the constellation of
Orion
left standing,
bloodied, perhaps,
but standing amongst the ether
pointing, interpreting the galaxy,
singing his song

of loss of life
of hunting for the loss
of life
of the jaunty silence
of loss and desertion
of the pained expression
of the silent
spinning of his sword

of the gold shatters of
mornings above
the prows of our
neighbor’s homes.

That my one good soul
will meet with my one bad
and form a bond out there
on the lawn of the new home
that the heavens will not open
nor even exist
until this one soul finds
the other,
until the one finds the unanswered
question of the one.

loss of life
loss of hearing
loss of the voice

That my knees
will buckle at the appropriate hour
in proper recompense for the
indefensible actions
for the unmistakable
sound the heart makes
in passing like trains
like madness
like sadness hurtles
its way down murky tunnels
of heart’s passageways

the misery maker

loss of the soul
loss of the making

of sanity
and the pathway to redemption.

Four

That this ending
reveals newness
despite its lateness
coming.

That this invocation
shouts out warning
of the impending change
of motions.

That this drawing
madness from sanity
leaves the shell
whole and earthy
but without the center of sadness

love of the jaunty misery makers
love of the father

in me
of thee.

The sound of the world forgiving.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Promises.” Georgetown Review 1:1 (Spring 1993): 25-33.

Winter Afternoon

1992-02-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

Longish curves of light soften her face.

It is nice to sit here quietly,
watching some of the afternoon
slip past us and into something else entirely.

I watch her as she gets up,
and listen as she disappears
down the hallway.

She brings me back a cup of coffee,
the top half of a carrot muffin,
and a photo from college she has found.

When the door opens and closes, a rush
of freezing air comes inside.
I feel it on my feet.

Outside, the sun brilliantly plunges
into the drifts of afternoon snow.
A car door slam. Crunch of tires.

I straighten meaningless things on a table.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Winter Afternoon,” The Advocate 6:1 (February/March 1992): 23.

Emily at the Playground

1987-04-01T12:52:00.000-08:00

for Emily Pestana (1964-2002)

I take them to the playground
at night.

Naomi, the oldest,
gets to play by herself.
She climbs the jungle-gym,
silent, moving through the bars,
her hands slick on the steel.
I watch her for a second,
she’s nothing but blonde ringlets,
streetlights shoot off her.

And Emily and I go to our swings.
She’s the forgotten child,
our relatives say. The quiet one,
the one who we sometimes let disappear.
So I swing her here first, alone,
my hands on either side of her,
pushing, catching.

As she swings,
I stand behind her,
and sometimes I’d like to look inside
her small, dark eyes.
What’s going on in there.

Instead, I whisper things in her ear.

“Emily at the Playground,” Mississippi Review 15:3 (Spring 1987): 59-65.

Hero

1987-04-01T12:49:00.000-08:00

Things weren’t always like this.
There was furniture here once,
and I had a lot of it.

Couch, chair.
Same coloring, same pattern.
A coffee table.

And all the bedroom stuff,
queen size, lamp,
the works.

But you know how that is,
and you know what a room looks like
without things.

I used to be her hero.
I used to drive
a big car.

I used to know something about stars,
and planets and comets,
and we used to go out there at night to look up.

There was something we used to say back then,
and sometimes when I’m here
wondering about my furniture,

sometimes, when I’m in here,
in what used to be a
living room.

I can sometimes remember what it was.

Pfefferle, W.T. “Hero,” Mississippi Review 15:3 (Spring 1987): 59-65.

How to Throw a Baby Chicken

1987-01-01T03:47:00.000-08:00

First pick one out.
Get a fat one, they fly better.

Then put its head in the palm of your hand,
and close your hand into a fist.

You'll hear some cracking,
but it will be over in a second.

Then when it's shaped like a ball, wind up.
You've got to wind up.

Then you throw it,
as far as you can.

We were young.
That's the first thing you have to understand.

Pfefferle, W.T. “How to Throw a Baby Chicken.” Mississippi Review 15:3 (Spring/Summer 1987): 59-65.