EXCLUSIVE: 5 Poems and a Process Note by Andy Eaton

In this exclusive post, American poet Andy Eaton shares five of his poems as well as a process note, exploring how and why he writes.

Andy Eaton (Photo credit: Rosemary Kate Jesionowski)

---

Andy Eaton's poems appear in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Sprung Nocturne (Lifeboat Press, 2016) and divides his time between Northern Ireland and Charlottesville, Virginia where he manages the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.

---

The Parable

(Matthew 17)

The moon is a coin fingered out from

the stomach of a caught, cut fish.

Where was my father when I wanted him

most? He was driving me home

wherever that year that was. I wish

I could answer where I’m from

whenever someone asks. How come

that fish gets torn apart, punished,

peeled at, what was there in him

he carried not knowing, all the way home?

Then ignored. Discarded fish

tossed into the moon. Something from

this story drove the point home

riding small in back. I still hear the splishsplash

of his old windshield. With him

mostly I was always heading home

without arriving. Wherever I am, my parish

is the moon, a coin I might reach down, from

where my father was when I needed him.

---

Autumn Blooming Cherry

Still staff-like and slender, risen

from its plastic pot, the new

branches appear each week

and bear the tooth-edged

greens in late spring, out here

watching if watch is what to say

I do, so slow a tree’s emergence

on our deck. Sapling,

two shades of leaves break out

across what will come to be

the higher, pink-white bloom

and crown. Late, I sit back

and let what star might rise

from out my mouth dissolve.

Someday we will live somewhere

we can put this in the ground.

---



Like a Shadow of Sun in a World of Shadow

Sky is hand-shorn paper shearing, then

the thunder sounds as thunder sounds.

We are held in the center of the rim,

asphalt and grass-slope, landlord’s rubbish

strewn. Somedays we hold our spines

curved upright as a curl of water, somedays

we are strays in our own wind, dropping our tails

on the road, wagging desirous tongues. Lordy.

What a dome the clouds have crowned and crowded

us with tonight. What robes electrified the sky dons

and undons, all around us reeling retinal

and knowing we’re just here to watch. Circular

the purple updraft, crash inside the heavens; as if

no tarry lasts in our divisions, as if to love were not a test

you held my hand and held onto it.

---



Night Duty

She slides her tunic down the board to iron

steaming smooth old pleats. As another episode

repeats its blue-glow, a laugh-track of distraction.

Downtown in her mind she smells the ward

mopped slick to citrus, maybe pine. It aches into

her ankles. When the last coal on her fire grays,

and her iron simmers quiet, one or two

cars flash her window blinds shushing rain,

she flicks her living room back to dark

and the timer on the thermostat ticks off.

On the step, she ties black shoes loose enough

for a little room. A box of leftovers marked

tomorrow’s name slaps her in her tote, clipped tight.

Sachet of instant porridge. The bus at night.

---

The Other Boy

I divide my toys

below the big window

set my lion closest to me

on the concrete patio

above my head my father’s

books rise like dark towers

through the redwood tree

reflection I kneel

offer the other boy

my zebra instead my giraffe

somewhere in the world

is a place where it’s night

when it’s day here

I tell him

let’s pretend

that’s where this is

---

Process Note

These poems come from a manuscript in progress that begins with childhood anomie in a transient religious family and moves into adulthood, marital intimacy and infertility, the longing for a child. Throughout the book, the speaker wrestles with ideology, Christian nationalism, and threat in the living world and the home. The poems were written over several years, out of confrontation with trauma and loss, but also in the lived experience of acceptance and the durability of love. What I hope is that the poems together point not to easy conclusions but to possibility, that even after the most painful and trying formations of our lives there can be an after, that reckoning can hold within it the possibility to reconcile.

I keep coming back to the word “possibility.” This is an alternative to certainty, which so often proves illusory. Certainty was the condition of belief when I was growing up, a firm duality in the universe, politics, taste, obedience in the home. And the cost of stepping out of line was ultimate, in every instance. No wiggle room.

Frost calls a poem “a necessary stay against confusion.” And we always have Keats’ “negative capability”, points on the compass. So poems have become a process by which the old language, the one I was born into, gets to be reoriented or renewed. But that can sound like I set out with an agenda for the poems. It’s the opposite. Letting the poems lead, that’s where the work lies. It’s a lot like children playing, the play is the thing, in this sense—attention and affection for the materials at hand, following the nudge, “feeling into words” as Heaney wrote—and the shape emerges.

Craft and form are all part of this. And the more I write, the more I find that the work of writing poems, tending to form, tuning in to the words, is an act of deep listening. To the silence, and the poem speaking from it. My hope for the poem, each poem, is that what comes into being is a voice, one that even while full of mystery, at times, is one that’s clear and able to be heard, that on the other side of the poem is someone listening.

Looking back at this, it all sounds a bit grand for my taste. I don’t feel that way when I’m writing, or when I read my poems. I think I’m always writing from a place of not knowing. And I hope the poems, in their way, help make the reality of uncertainty more possible to live within.

---

Acknowledgements

These poems are republished by kind permission of the author. They were previously published in the following journals:

“The Parable”: Mockingbird (https://mbird.com/magazine/)

“Autumn Blooming Cherry”: Leaning Toward Light (anthology; https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tess-taylor/leaning-toward-light/9781635865806/)

“Like a Shadow of Sun in a World of Shadow”: The Iowa Review (https://iowareview.org/)

“Night Duty”: Prairie Schooner (https://prairieschooner.unl.edu)

“The Other Boy”: The Iowa Review (https://iowareview.org/)