Earthly - Hardcover

Funkhouser, Erica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618933425 ISBN 13: 9780618933426

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

Erica Funkhouser's fifth collection considers what it means to be earthly. These are poems in which a one-eyed hawk observes us from ?the wide realm of his rapt patience” and a group of long-buried foundation stones works its way back to the earth's surface like ?ceremonial animals, their throats unslit.” The central poem in the collection, ?Pome,” cuts into the mythos of Johnny Appleseed, the biology of apples, and the poet's own experience of growing up on a farm. The final section of the book contains sonnets written as an homage to the Holy Sonnets of John Donne -- witty, graceful poems that limn the coming into consciousness of a young poet. A departure from Funkhouser's previous historical narratives and her compressed lyrics, the expansive poems in Earthly are sure to deliver this poet her greatest recognition yet.

About this title

About the Author

Erica Funkhouser is the author of four previous books of poems, including Pursuit and The Actual World. She is a lecturer in the department of writing and humanistic studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in Essex, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Journey

In need of a journey, I traveled all the way from the rose to the potato and kept going.
The mud was unbearable, the wind a knife.
Not one bite to eat, not even a cup of tea-stained water, but at last I was on my way, alive and alone.

In flat country, I dozed off.
When I awoke, a city was rising from the grain with its own onion-yellow moon.

It was then I remembered feeding apples to horses in autumn, how the horses tossed their heads back to tumble the fruit against their tilted teeth as they ground the apples down.
Sprays of pink foam flew from their mouths and landed on me like garlands.

The sweet joy of slobber is one I had forgotten, and the joy of being nuzzled by huge animals begging for more, all their impatience in their lips.
Rubbing My Mother’s Back

She remembers me as restless and impulsive, legs wrapped around a gallop or swimming until no one could spot me,

so she is surprised when my fingers with their large knuckles stroll the miserable ridge of her backbone and turn up comfort.
Not a snap but a bend.

She was never one to imagine her children’s secret destinations.
She let us stay away for hours without worry.
In exchange for our privacy, we brought her violets or the skull of a fox.

Now her dry spine takes her where it will, reckless with age, and she imagines the worst.

This, too, a mother: cooing and sighing, little gasps of horror and relief as my hands let her know where I am, where I am going.
Mood Swings

When criticized, she craves butter.
When praised, salt.
Sadness calls for inadequate outerwear.
Exhilaration, for ultraviolet.
All feelings are unhealthy.
For solitude, driving too fast.
For lack of solitude, Scotch.
Money, success, and attention cure everything.
Money, success, and attention make no difference at all.
Open the window on trouble.
Close the window on luck.
Baseball statistics to ease boredom.
The botanical names of plants to prevent vanity.
When doubtful, dive into freezing water.
When empty, collect clouds.
There’s nothing she hasn’t tried.
Lacking speech, she pierced her tongue.
Lacking sleep, she invited stones into her body.
A precipice when enamored.
A coil when confident.
Some days one mood chases away another: stubbornness beats back fury beats gratified beats silly.
She has used pitiful to subdue commanding, and austere to embarrass sweet.
Two moods of equal experience will stare each other down until one blinks.
A new one is always arriving, like a bat, like a bandit, like a break in the current.
Emergency Room

I’m in the tent of oxygen again unlucky cawl each breath a sphere I quarry from antagonistic air. Alien parents fish-mouth promises: Don’t worry,

you’re fine. You’ll be home soon. How white and round they look out there, sea clams in a sea of dials and appliances. No sound is louder than the air escaping me.

I’ve seen dead ducks, dead dogs, dead cows, dead deer.
I can’t imagine all the emptiness that death requires, the anecdotal eye gone cold as hoof or antler. A stubbornness is born: I’ll breathe these chiseled chunks of fire and thrive on them as others thrive on air.

High School

We read John Donne while smoking Panama Red, our metaphysics sizzling in a bowl: two girls in high school moving on from Howl.
Our friends at Quantico would soon be dead.

Donne ordered God to enter him with zeal.
We sucked on smoke to cultivate a soul.
To knock. To shine. We lined our eyes with kohl.
Resistance was the only way to heal.

We gathered signatures, a real-world trip less real than photographs of Haiphong burning.
Completely stoned on sonnets, we kept returning to the little worlds that held us in their grip

not for and not against, no self, no war.
Only break, blow, burn, arise, repair.

The Pianist Upstairs

The world’s at war and he breaks into Brahms tonight an intermezzo one might hum to lull a child or coax to life numb nerves after a round of deafening bombs.

The stairwell’s dark and cold, and still I sit and listen as the music circulates.
I don’t know what to do; the day’s debates don’t change a thing. We hit. They hit. We hit.

My country’s ruin’d choir resounds with lies, and still my song will only come from words.
Upstairs, a man devotes a tender hour to teasing out sweet hidden harmonies that populate the hallway with white birds.
How wasted here, their pure expressive power.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0618933425
• ISBN 13: 9780618933426
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 67