TROMPE L’OEIL

Death be my home light. Turn night on its black

grindstone.

From sleep’s sleepless engine

deliver me: who toys feebly with jaws,

who tricycles fast into false

relief in a trompe l’oeil window.

In this that was love’s room

who cries spectre come,

deck me, cuff me with spent fuses

soon enough dwindles from false dawn

into false death wish or is it.

Sees who cannot. Fumbles for cracked glasses,

from cheating hat-trick

fitful dreams shot out

with no scythe yet

come whistling from the opposite corner,

that these chipped

under the lying stars dragged out

hours of un-life be gone

come nearer, begs, come nearer.

(first published in Volt)

THE BASEBALL FIELD AT NIGHT

for what keeps us company is not

always here the bare space

where the cat was is simply

where if there was a voice

in a corner of the world it’s gone

said something then hung up

so call back ask

nobody wants to cross an absolutely empty

baseball field at midnight probably not even you

if you were here gangs of crows hover

in the shadows never mind the abandoned

wrecked car by the roadside

sapphire spiked with wishes stars blackened

motorcycles to repair and orphanages

cages full of skinless small you’s crying

what keeps us fatherless

and motherless each in our air-tight

body capsules zipped the cities of time are full

of friendly taxi drivers where do they go

when they’re not talking or listening

over the radio grid to the score keeper

the churches won’t do

these days or the stock market’s

stranglehold on the soul’s economy

if there’s no company coming

for supper to share the jug wine

can a single self bless itself

it can but maybe it doesn’t have to

when two breaths meet one sighing out

over the plate sometime at the tip

of the disappearing bat

suddenly there are three

and more than three the night’s diagrams

are more faceted than black

diamonds revolving a single player strikes

more than out the doorbell

sometimes rings and there’s no one only an extremely

peculiar hair-on-the–back-of-the-neck

feeling of something or someone

wanting what, change a few bucks

to save the world spin it

on its three bases glittering towards home wherever

that is such complicated

strings stretch between us doubled then tripled

in a cat’s eye cradled

from point to point flashing what if the cab driver really

does know where we’re going

the vacuums of space hum with so many different

baseball fields mysterious dark

matter vast plateaus of cold

and hot bristling spheres flying

back and forth here

and not here only wait

sometimes over the hard packed

emptiness between empty triangles

there’s an ocean and we’re in it occasionally

a warm dragging mountainous swell comes

out of nowhere if there is actually

such a place how can there

or an end the wave doesn’t know

beneath our dangling feet elegantly lifts us

a little nearer toward where

(originally published in The Denver Quarterly)

HELIOPAUSE IN HIS STUDY NOW HER BEDROOM

little sweats sneak up on her creased

on the mushroom green duvet

where his desk used to be

the old furnace gasps itself into life trembles

every fifteen minutes or so

sudden exfoliations puffs

coverlet full of feathers

no, don’t he wheezed

laughing

into her firewall trunk her button-hole eyed

sewing box her big empty brain

glue, stick but Hold

that we may be held

as worlds tear themselves apart

the cracked chandelier reflects

every atom multiplied

paper books skin crashing through

Ad astra

And higher

only put your hand on my she cries out

remember the thorned oath

we did not swear

stars palaces of flame

crossing into open blackness deep

turbulences in the zone between what and

what

without you all lights go out

and on and on

without any of us all lights go out

and on and on

(originally published in The Gettysburg Review)

THE QUESTION ON THE FLOOR

Some mornings the body wakes to itself

as to an ocean, the soft wash of it

on a shore it wants to love. Lie back, love, it says,

and let me lift you,

the sheets touching you are waves,

are the cool shock of first sun over the mountain lighting

the ceiling, then the floor—Ah yes, the floor

the body says to itself, those skeleton boards

that trip. Splinter. Stumble us

to our knock knees backhanded—

But is this proper, is it mete?

Especially after the calm. The miraculous

svelte peace of the sea, say, after lovemaking

which never lasts, Horatio, which never lasts—

Though waves of liquid salt lap at each other, circulating around the world

this tidal lymph (which is everywhere) is a mess

of needy corpuscles unmoored,

free form, floating—

As the great capricious Body above us moves (regretfully) on,

the question, still on the floor

is a tongue of greasewood burning

to answer itself,

to contain its own dissolving

into little permanent cups:

snapshots

of what we used to look like: what cells

eventually consumed us

and what we cooked for the picnic, what blessings, how many oysters,

or pancakes or kisses (which are words),

and more kisses, and more words, and more—

even as the great sand dunes,

their chewed driftwood, their ground up shells collapsing,

the entire shoreline falls away out from under us.

Patricia Goedicke Robinson, 1931-2006

MISSOULA - Patricia Goedicke Robinson, nationally acclaimed poet and beloved teacher, died July 14, 2006, in Missoula's St. Patrick Hospital of a rapid pneumonia associated with cancer that had been diagnosed several months ago. She was 75.

Her immediate survivors include her sister, Jean-Marie Cook, of Beirut, Lebanon; and her stepson, Rick Robinson of Knoxville, Tenn.

Patricia Goedicke, the name she used in her work, was the author of 12 books of poetry, the most recent of which, “As Earth Begins to End,” was recognized by the American Library Association as one of the top 10 poetry books of the year 2000. She taught in the creative-writing program at the University of Montana for 25 years.

Her previous teaching included positions in the writing programs of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Guanajuato in Mexico.

She was born Patricia Ann McKenna on June 21, 1931, in Boston and grew up in Hanover, N.H., where her father taught neurology and was the first resident psychiatrist at Dartmouth College. She and her sister, Jean-Marie, a longtime literature professor at American University in Beirut, were accomplished downhill skiers in high school, and Patricia competed on racing circuits. She earned a B.A. degree from Middlebury College in 1953, and an M.A. degree in creative writing from Ohio University in 1965.

In 1957, she married Victor Goedicke, a math and astronomy professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Twelve years later, the marriage ended. During her years in Athens, Patricia and her friend Pat Grean published a weekly broadsheet of poems, their own and others'. They remained best friends for the next half century, speaking at least weekly by telephone.

In 1968, during an artist's residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., Patricia met Leonard Wallace Robinson, a New Yorker magazine writer and former fiction editor at Esquire. Twenty years her senior, he became in short order the love and ballast of her life. Her first poetry collection, Between Oceans, was published the same year. “An unusual and startlingly original lyrical talent and much emotional force distinguish these poems,” wrote Publishers Weekly. “A remarkable first volume of poetry.”

Patricia and Leonard moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to live frugally and to write, and stayed for a dozen years. During that time, she produced four more books of poetry, received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and won the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry from New Letters magazine. She and Leonard both suffered serious health problems during that time. In 1981, in part to reduce the stress of medical and business travel to the States, Patricia accepted a visiting teaching position at the University of Montana, and was later hired in a permanent capacity. They plunged into the life of the community, and their house on McLeod Avenue quickly became a gathering place for friends, many of them writers or aspiring writers. In the spring of 1993, they spent two months in Lake Como, Italy, where Patricia had been awarded an artist's residency at the Bellagio Conference and Study Center.

Leonard died in 1999. As Earth Begins to End, published the next year, was both her tribute to him and a searching, anguished meditation on diminution and death and what might outlast them. “Her theme here is old and enduring love, the gnawed-at bond between longtime mates that survives epic quarrels and the creeping assault of age, and embodies a transcendent eroticism,” wrote reviewer Donna Seaman in Booklist.

One of the poems, “The Things I May Not Say,” contains this passage: “I would like to speak to you,/the way we used to,/humming into each other's necks, close/as tango dancers, step, glide/embrace/Before you were dropped behind bars/I can't get through.”

She was a profoundly engaged and insightful teacher of poetry, and has former students in all parts of the country who count her as a pivotal influence on their work and their lives. (A Patricia Goedicke Scholarship Fund has been established in her honor at the UM, in care of Kate Gadbow, director of creative writing, Liberal Arts 211, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812. A memorial service will be held on campus Sept. 17.)

Before her death, Patricia completed her 13th poetry collection, “The Baseball Field at Night” which is under consideration at several presses.

“Everything Patricia Goedicke looks at sharpens for me and becomes hopeful. She is a believer in our connectedness to the things of this world and to each other,” poet Maxine Kumin said of her work.

“Goedicke has been compared to Whitman in her use of the extended line, and because she seeks to bring the entire world into the poem Sˇ the profound feel for rhythm, swing, and modulation of the human voice is astonishing and makes Goedicke's poetry a great physical pleasure to read,” wrote a reviewer for New Letters.

There was very little about the human experience - personal or universal - that did not interest Patricia. She seemed sometimes to ski her own life, as if it were the most tantalizing and difficult slalom course imaginable; one that demanded (and rewarded) alertness and engagement at every turn.

Even as her body became fragile and besieged, she remained utterly invested in being alive. Among the hundreds of notes, quotations, random written thoughts, plans and descriptions in her files was this note to anyone “who might get drowned in the sludge of my psychic and physical pains Sˇ Please be sure to speak of my utter joy - inexpressible - but experienced ... walking barefoot over the grass around the house looking up at the stars and talking to the in-and-out cats in the shadows ... walking on the same barefoot grass in the early mornings ... waking in my sweet bed with the breezes blowing over and no troubles during the night ... Such pleasures ...