Ways to Reshape the Heart
poems by
P.V. LeForgeISBN 13: 978-1-59948-158-6
~90 pages, $14
* * * This book was selected for publication after finishing as a finalist
in the 2008 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award * * *Projected release date: December 22, 2008
***Advance discount purchase price of $9 will be available until December 15, 2008.***
About the Author / Comments / Sample
P.V. LeForge lives on a 50-acre horse farm in north Florida with his wife Sara Warner, a historian and competitor in dressage. LeForge's previous books of poetry and fiction can be obtained through bookfinder.com or from his own website www.BlackBayFarm.com. In addition to writing and doing farm chores, he enjoys target archery.
I must confess to a long friendship with P.V. LeForge and say that I've been reading his work for about twenty years now. Pete's work sneaks up on you. I call it Domestic Surrealism--not quite the Magical Realism of the Latin American poets, but a kind of homespun oddness that's as American as, not apple pie, but maybe rhubarb--if rhubarb pie came in those one slice packages, that are not really slices, but sort of rhubarb tarts that look like calzones. These poems, in their domestic mode, tell us about houses in the 50s, ponds, drunks, kids with nicknames, and then they veer off slightly into a Twilight Zone, suddenly the domestic becomes odd--people are eating dirt for their aperitif, someone's calling his capellini my beloved. LeForge is, essentially, a storyteller and his stories twist and turn like the Arabian Nights. He's paying for his calling, and our attention, one line at a time and we return night after night for more.
--Rick Campbell (Dixmont)
P. V. LeForge is a poet of the lyrical real, and these reconfigurations of the heart are his life, from childhood to the point where, now, he confronts his own mortality. What I particularly like about this book is that although it deals with and ends in sorrow, the poet has kindly left us, as in a fallen notebook, a way through. There are things we have no words for, he says. A war of love/ hands made of snow/ books without words/ the doom of donkeys lowered forever into coal mines./ It is in pondering these things/ that we may find the meaning to each of us. Exactly.--Lola Haskins (Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems)
The End of Things
I was the last kid on my block to get long pants,
a bicycle, a key to the house.
We never locked our doors in those days anyway.
My father said that was because he was a policeman,
but I knew that we had nothing to steal.
I remember sitting down on our porch after school
and telling a buddy that I had forgotten my key
so he couldn't see that we ate off
chipped plates and drank from jelly jars,
or that our television was too old and bulky
for even a thief to want.Dinner was usually slices of bread and margarine,
bowls of corn flakes, peas from the can.
I remember liking those meals
and searching in the cupboards for more.
In front of the big TV, we laughed merrily
to the only station that came in clearly.
I remember my father poking in the pack
for the last cigarette, searching with his tongue
for that final drop of beer in the bottle.But our memories sometimes push us in strange directions
and I've come to dislike the ass end of things.
This morning, I threw out the last inch of Cheerios in the box
along with a heel of bread and a stub of butter.
I replaced the old green sliver with a fresh bar of soap.
Other things have begun to disturb me too:
the last cup of iced tea in the jug,
the final song on the album, December.
I give my house key to everyone I meet.
The Mission
Ten years ago I first came to this Mission.
I saw it as a refuge, lying
halfway between the highway and my home.
I was a young man then, at an age
to be at constant odds with my father;
when he called something pretty, I called it plain.I took to visiting the monks. They let me wear a plain
gray robe that matched the walls of the Mission.
They told me that an unseeable deity was my father.
I dreamed of writing scrolls and of lying
on an earthen floor in the dark ages.
I imagined a cloister as my new home.Now, twenty years later, no one calls it home.
The gates are rusted shut. A toy plane
sticks its tail above the weeds. The place shows age
and utter darkness. It no longer has a mission.
More death, more changes; I've been lying
to myself, and to the ghost of my father."Dear Nephew: Bad news about your father.
He's had a stroke and you need to come home.
It's terrible for us all to see him lying
there, hardly moving, under that plain
gray blanket we always meant to give to the Mission.
Your pa looks older than his age."But when I saw him, he was beyond age.
Could this shrunken body be my father?
Why hadn't they told me at the Mission
about this grief, this loneliness? I stayed home,
got a job, married, tried to speak as plain
as I could. I gave up dreaming and lying.I hope my son never has to see me lying
in a casket. I'm hoping we'll approach an age
where dying doesn't matter; where death is on one plane
and life is on another; where a father
and a son don't quarrel and break up homes
like time has broken up this dusty Mission.This is my mission: to somehow discover, lying
in the rubble of this old priests' home, a new age.
To father a new set of images; to make everything plain.
This Is America
We've all passed them:
tourist traps called Paradise,
signs telling us that
"You've found Lost Lakes."
We haven't, of course.
When we stop, we find that they
are just ditches widened with steamshovels
and surrounded by a golf course
and brown-slatted condominiums.
These are the lakes we are fleeing from.
A trailer park full of old Airstreams and brambles
teeters on the edge of Lake Okeechobee.
The name on the sign says "Journey's End,"
but it isn't. Another sign says "No Vacancy,"
and we drive on, looking for home.
The black clouds ahead are buzzards
feasting on roadkill and no one is hungry
in this America.Where are the forests so thick with silence
that days went by without the crack of a twig
or the fall of a berry? Where are the warriors
in their brooding antiquity? Where are
the rivers choked with nuggets?
We want to see hogs as big as Volkswagens,
schools of fish like fields of wheat,
wild horses and rattlesnakes and prairie dogs.
We pick out likely places on the map,
but when we get there, the leafy forest we long for
is on the other side of a chicken-wire fence
or posted with signs so old that we read our own fear
into the blurred words: "Trespassers will be threatened,
chased by dogs, reported to secret branches of the government."
The shadows of old cabins lurk behind thickets of trees,
filled with people who own rifles and two-way radios
and who tell us that intruding is a crime
and that this part of America is not ours to see.
Farmers blow off their crops and rent their fields
to billboard makers and sign painters
so that no one can get lost in this America.We find concrete boat ramps to small s-shaped rivers
that look like they might be filled with fish
and serenity if only we could fly or bend our necks
like anhingas to see around the far bend.
The only part of the river we can see flashes with the glintings
of aluminum beverage cans that bob in the wake of jetskis
or wink up from the bottom through tiny rainbows of oilslick.
On the shore, empty plastic bait containers
and the spent carapaces of double-ought buckshot
tell us with a bang that sports and leisure
are alive and flourishing in this here America.We decide that the America we want to find
is lost in the pages of travel books written in 1915,
but the copies we find in the library are ragged
and most of the pictures have been cut out with dull knives.
But we have seen these pictures before, as children-
nailed to the walls of saloons and malt shops,
but when we search out these pieces of Americana
we find only their glitzy replacements--
chic restaurants and coffee houses
where people fight over parking spaces
and sip strange-colored beverages.
Someone takes the table we had spotted for ourselves,
then smiles at our disappointment,
letting us know without a doubt that
everyone's happy in this America.