Anne Caston

Anne Caston and I were together teaching and poeting, at St. Mary’s College of Maryland for the best years of our lives. She is from ”Deep Dixie” – as she likes to say with all its innuendoes—Anne likes to joke about the reptilian brain that comes to call when she sits to write. That is not true. More like an angel or a white swan is resting in this poet’s head, coming to the surface, then to paper, to raise wings and fly. In the meantime, Anne walks the sands of North Carolina, composing the next great thing. -- Grace Cavalieri

Anne Caston is a professor and former nurse. She was the 1996-97 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the 1999-2000 Jenny McKean Moore Fellow in Poetry at the George Washington University in Washington D.C. Currently, Anne Caston is core faculty in poetry in the Low-Residency M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is author of Flying Out With The Wounded (NYU Press, 1997) Judah's Lion (THP, 2009), and Prodigal (Aldrich Press, 2014). She lives with her husband, Ian Gallimore, in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

Three Questions For The Whirlwind

What was it like for You to speak a world,

word by word, into existence, to say

gazelle and have the horned and hooved

animal leap, startled, into being on the hot savanna?

What then to utter lion

and see unmothered muscle and sinew

take shape, the amber-eyed creature

confused, blinking in the light?

How long did the beasts stand like that,

in stunned closeness to each other,

before hunger came to one

and terror to the other?

The Gospel Of History

In Scotland, another century, a hangman

prays all night before an execution. Always

his prayer is fervent and the same: Give me strength,

O Lord, to make the knot hold fast; I only want to hang him

once. All night, outside the window where he prays,

hammer-blows: gallows being built

by the man who is to be hung.

In France, running short on bullets, a young

soldier lights a gas-soaked rag and hands it to the captured

man standing in front of a barn. If he drops the rag

to spare himself the scald, he will be shot

and the force of the bullet will drive his body

backwards, setting fire to the barn

in which are locked the town's orphans.

Three tides to kill

a man when he's buried in sand.

So says my refugee neighbor today

who knows about such things.

Should that man drown before third tide, his

executioners have been instructed to dig him up,

resuscitate him, then plant him again in the tide.

Each time, for your sake, reader, I am tempted

to turn ordinary pigeons into doves,

I force myself to remember that man

rescued from a mass grave who came up

counting – three-thousand-one, three-thousand-

two – because even under the earth he could hear

the ticking pocket-watch of the dead man under him.

In the spirit of inquiry, let us

consider: how long do three-thousand seconds seem

in a grave? How long three tides? How many

nails and hammer-blows to build your own gallows

by dawn? How long can you clutch a gas-soaked rag, your arm

in flames, before you accept the merciful bullet? How long

for a barn full of orphans to burn?

The Final Gospel According To Prodigal:

Regarding A Theory Of Intelligent Design

That lost ship of In-the-beginning long ago busted to bits

somewhere on time's barrier reef dead-center of the universe

and you, still rowing your ridiculous little lifeboat

of belief through the inky sky and its waste-

land of bright constellations. Why not

stop, drop anchor tonight among the flowers

and the beasts of this world; why not

let the sorrow of letting-go take root

in the body? Walk once more

the surf-furred shore and leave

behind you for a while your wrong-headed

journey toward the why? of suffering

and God's part in it and where else now

you are to place all the blame for it

that still shines and shines from you.

Bright blossoms are tumbling

from the tree of night and one far

blue star scorches the sky in its descent.

Look up. There – right

there: the moon's little white fang. The dark

heavens are not trying to tell you anything.

You have been to funerals.

You have been to weddings.

Afterwards there was dancing.

And after that, only the small, far-off

noises someone made cleaning up,

setting things in order again.

Sometimes A Dark Bell Rings Me To Sleep

All day my little son pulls

his red wagon of nothing around the yard, singing

with birds, waving from the tire-swing.

While he sings, in the wetlands

beyond town, two dogs and a search party

discover a toddler we've searched for nearly two weeks.

When a child is carried home again

and washed and dressed in a pressed white

gown, laid out for the viewing, who do we become?

As darkness comes on

with its shackles and chains

and what I most desire is to lie

back in the black boughs

of night, emptied of psalms, emptied

of prayers, far beyond the infernal

racket of the world. I am sick

of elegies. I am sick of all the small

annihilations that pile up daily now and how

I'm expected to resume again my mostly-ordinary life.

I want to sleep like my son sleeps tonight: exhausted

by birdsong and laughter and sun.

God, I am the daughter

of what you have wrought in this world;

he is the son of what you have not.

Perdition, 1978

All afternoon, in the fan-swept funeral home:

a conspiracy of flowers and uncomfortable chairs,

a few kind words for the dead man.

By sunset, fields brighten

with fireflies and cricket-song, and the refugee

heart lashes itself again to the old half-mast of anguish.

Overhead, Polaris takes its place in twilight's

estuary of light and shadow. The Between.

Where that man vanished, where he lay

for three years in a coma.

Then perished.

Midnight to seven a.m.:

I walked from bed to bed

in white, washed

in hope, like a bride. Each morning,

I stepped out again into the ordinary

world, soured and spoiled.

Mercy had nothing to do with that work.

Nor courage. Nor goodness.

How I tended that man was how I tended

everyone: from the safe distance of my own well-

being and knowing, first-hand, how impossible it is

to save what has already forsaken itself.

The man who smothered his brain-dead son

is returned now to the dust and ash from whence he came.

While he lived, others stood apart from him

as light moves away from the blind.

You, Lord, in your heaven, and that man

in the fire, and me here on earth

which is sometimes so cruel

it makes a trinity like ours

almost bearable.

When he arrived on the ward – failed

suicide – for the first time I saw for myself

the black channel a bullet leaves

in the brain, the man's heart still

jack-hammering in the strange

and ungrateful country of his body.

Pity him, if you can, for what he'd had to do

for his wrecked boy – and how, for years,

we kept bringing him back, pell-mell,

into the world of the living.

Whether a man goes out from his house

one morning to song or misery

depends on why the chair

next to him is empty.

When the last singing thing in your world

stops singing, that is death.