Tag: Sydney Lea

Pilgrimage by Sydney Lea

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Pilgrimage

The clematis vine was wrapped so symmetrically around an ancient stump it seemed some human hand had done it. I’ve sat on the stump countless times since I saw it decades ago. The vine’s still there too. I sat on the stump this morning. I tried to stop brooding on the costs of old age. Things are what they are. The sky poked through the canopy in shards. You’d call the place more dark than bright, but you wouldn’t be there. I’ve seen no other human track than mine in all this time. The last visitor probably felled the tree.

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Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Toward an All-Purpose Elegy by Sydney Lea

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Toward an All-Purpose Elegy

        –at Bear Ridge Speedway, Vermont

What if I wrote a reusable elegy?
I’d have chances enough to apply it. For some reason the thought
occurs to me here. I sit with two small grandsons,
a gale of dust blowing up from the dirt-track oval.
It coats our greasy French fries just as it did
back forty years when I came to this place with their father,
and much before, when I watched snarling cars

slide around an identical eighth-mile circuit.
Far south of here, that was, but the scene hasn’t changed,
unlike everything else, it appears, in the rest of my world.
Two bats flit over moth-clotted infield lights.
There used to be scores. I liken those vanished clouds
to my corps of friends, which seems to shrink by the hour.
Just this morning, another stab of bad news–

an old friend dying, one incredibly brave
through years of struggle with and after cancer.
He was the smallest but toughest boy on our football team
yet always tender toward others even back then.
Thinking of him, I can blame this dust for my tears.
With an elegy on hand for every occasion,
I wouldn’t need to fetch fresh metaphors

for any future bereavement or for solace.
My griefs, after all, are increasingly the same.
I’d try to devise some elegiac conclusion,
to offer the sense of completion these boys have known–
like their father before them and their father’s father as well–
those times when they bet on the battered car that would pass
the checkered flag into transitory triumph.

The grandsons, of course, lost more than they won tonight.
So just as for any imagined reader I’d honor
the elegiac custom of consolation,
for these little children I’ll offer some little comfort.
We’ll stop by the vendor’s stand where I can buy them
Bear Ridge caps and undented model cars.
Then, our races ended, we’ll head for the exit.

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Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Insomnia by Sydney Lea

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Insomnia

When I can’t sleep, I forge rough rhymes,
matching blindness, say, with timeless,
or almost matching popular
with poplar. Yes, it’s idleness,

and I concede I stretch the rules
as when I pair up misery
and pity– all a trick to find
a way to lie there worry-free.

No, don’t call it trick but mission
even passion, this urge to prise
away each fear, however small,
that blights me. But hard as I try,

my words do as they please. They scorn
resistance: I’ve just sought to link
bliss to something beside distress
but despite me the effort brings

not half-rhymed release but bereft.

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Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Halo by Sydney Lea

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Halo

     I have heard the Master say that on no occasion
     does a man realize himself to the full,
     though the mourning for a parent
     may be an exception.
                   –Tseng Tzu

Fields the color of stale tobacco,
water barely breaching the dam.
Like anyone, I look forward and back,
though chiefly back these days.
I’m seeing myself at ten.

It’s years, however short they’ll have seemed,
before my father’s coronary.
It’s Sunday. The regular grownups–
parents, grandmother, bachelor uncle–
convene in the dooryard yew’s slim shade.

I’ve never returned to my father’s grave.
His shrine’s within my soul.
He exhales his Camel smoke,
which blends with the general August miasma.
No grasshoppers rattle. They hide from the heat.

No matter. I wouldn’t be tempted
to catch them to bait the pond’s small sunfish.
I need to stay, though I’m an outsider.
The murmur of voices blends
with the hum of the fan just inside on its sill.

Do I exist? I feel disembodied.
Stymied, I search for something to say,
to that notably big-hearted father mostly.
That’s not a halo he wears.
Of course not. It’s only that I dream one today,

and it’ll be part of that scene forever–
which, granted, was nothing unique,
and yet I tasted tears of confusion.
I taste them now. No doubt what I saw
was some commingling of smoke

and haze and the clouds that feathered the ridge.
Is that all I’m made of, just timeworn mourning?
I’ve outlived my father by decades,
always hoping, always vainly,
to say what’s always needed saying.

                                             – in mem. Sydney L.W. Lea (1909-66)

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Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.