In the more formative years Dad lodged
his books in my room; their voluminous rows
could uncork vertigo if you stared too long.
He wished to encourage reading,
to be dazzled and desirous
of the worlds he’d fallen into.
But sometimes what you think
might inspire others
has the opposite effect,
and for all their spined beauty
( their queue of cropped color
and variant font ),
they only served to bully my intelligence.
By high school my insufficiency
I could no longer forbear.
When the morning streets filled with rain
I ’d grab a novel and scrub
their words clean.
On Saturdays Dad would clear a spot
on the couch and ask what I’d read;
he’d pat its cracked leather fissures,
motioning me to sit down as the last
of his coffee and Motown
percolated through his head.
He wanted to know: what did I think
of his fiction? I began to see
good books aren’t judged by their fidelity
to how things are, rather their ability
to find balance with opposition,
to make a home for the unruly;
betrayal to veracity what makes
a good story go.
He was amused with my sloppy attempts
to decipher their weight, to express meaning
in what I’d found. I confessed
the torpid annals of Faulkner
merely encouraged sleep, but that I loved
the protagonist in Hemingway’s Farewell To Arms,
( unspoken was my desire for his angelic
nurse, or the more lustful moments, the quasi-
turgidity that wrinkled my teenage pants
encountering New Englander’s unabashed eroticism
rampant in Updikes’ books ).
My father listened to a mind gone partially
literate, while the other half was reserved
for touches practiced before love,
for my coquettish friend who’d park
curbside in her father’s car,
which was warm and waiting,
which had little to do
with the lives we lead.
isbn 1-59661-077-8
39 pages/$9
“Like Houdini, poets keep the public guessing,” Anthony Tracy writes in Without Notice, his new collection of poems that investigate the nuanced shadows, “the corners we paint ourselves into.” The stuff of the material world marches colorfully through Without Notice—old creeks, lost girlfriends, spring songbirds, trampolines, leafed sycamores, the music of Miles Davis—but Tracy never neglects the imperceptible undercurrents that pull and tow at us, just below the surface of things. Each poem in Without Notice opens “the aperture of its shutter…to etch the harrowing clarity of dark and light.”
—Debra Marquart,
author of From Sweetness and The Horizontal World
These are poems of domestic longing and joy, distant memory and impinging immediacy, poems of work, music, love, time seized and released, all suffused with a distinctive music and a devoted eye for the particular. These are the spun wonders of an attention surprised and sustained, uniquely Tony’s, intricate mosaics of a fine poetic consciousness.
—David Wolf,
author of Open Season, The Moment Forever, and Sablier