Joseph Featherstone
Joseph Featherstone is a poet, writer, and educator. He was an editor of
the New Republic, and has served as the principal of the Commonwealth
School in Boston, and for many years as the faculty leader of an acclaimed
teacher education program at Michigan State University. He is the author of a
number of books, including Dear Josie, Witnessing the Hopes and
Failures of Democratic Education (Teachers College Press, 2002). His
work has appeared in magazines such as Ploughshares and the Harvard
Review. He has published a poetry collection, Brace's Cove (New
Issues), and has a new ms in preparation. Mr. Featherstone and his family
have been living in East Gloucester – summers, part-time, or full-time –
since the 1960’s.
Upon Reading
that a Committee
of the Catholic Church
Has Abolished Limbo
Instead, we follow a loose thread from the hem
of a cotton dress to a border --
the vast rim of vanished children in the arms of unknown
nurses, their cries rising unanswered --
the zone of slippage between life and life
repository and keep and dump of treasured and wasted
things, unfulfilled vows, the cat gone missing --
and all those on this earth who die baptized only
by the waters of kindness --
Oh, Reiko, tell me the story again -- your grandfather,
home on his last furlough from the Pacific war,
the black lacquer chopsticks flashing as he taught
his small daughter how to hold one grain of rice.
Voice
For Ornette Coleman
Notes are crap
Sound is real
Parker looked at his watch
Put the horn in the case
And walked out the door
He knew what he could play
He knew this audience
Was not ready for the unknown
You can't learn
life Only way you die
Is if something kills you
Sound is Armstrong
Improvising so beyond
Never a straight chord
His high note
Not only for the high
For humanity
I listened to the cantor Joseph Rosenblatt
I cried like a baby
Sobbing, praying, singing, all in one breath
I said wait
You can't find those notes
They are not notes
They don't exist
He's resolving
The sound
Of a human being
The sad of it
When you name you go too far
No codify no idol
My mother was born Christmas Day
After I got my saxophone
I would go to her
When I learned to play something by ear
Listen to this, listen to this, I would say
You know what she said
Junior, you don't have to tell me
I know who you are.
Words can't tell
Sound does. Only voices do
This proves God has no master
The human race has wasted its history
Emerson
Seeking what he fears --
fourteen months after, searching for new scripture,
he walks with the shovel to open his wife's coffin.
There is no object so foul
that intense light will not make it beautiful
Calling from old brightness,
she pins a washed sheet on the tossing wind --
clean, white, not the dank cerements
of his daily mind. She contained
the sea's trembling --
their faith lodged in magnetism,
Not
the errant compass needle.
His boots leaking ground water,
he refuses second sight. The
soldered eye
misses the world’s bright wedding.
The Age of Ice
No snow or wind to mar the shining facts
of daylight or recollection's salt of night stars --
snap-frozen yesterday, smooth as doctrine but for the long glacial
seams that groan and shove like mastodons.
Clear shallow bottom flies by -- a lily in amber ice,
tuft of frozen thistle down, full of seeds.
Sun, ice, buried flower alchemize:
a beehive in mind's cello, knock of apple, the dump
of summer frogs. Breath catches
at muscled brightness underfoot -- a pickerel
flashing the serene soft-lit parlors of fishes.
The ancient principle of ice is maintained by green leaves
and fossils and ten thousand seasons of hope’s polish.
Measured depths and daily risks instruct
a catechism of cold and melt. The haloes of the icons
in the sun’s glaring mercies
are proof of my cataracts, young and growing;
at the sight some old sweet edge divides and tells me I will die.
My motion dissents, calling out
blue and blueness
to sky and Brace's Cove, wildness.
I scrape quick on borrowed skates, as wick as any fern
or muskrat or ear of corn.
When the great cold came all living things did not die.
Humans walked the frozen mirror
cut images with bones, took bits of burning birch
and outlined spring from memory.
I try a shaky figure eight
and meet, face housed in fur, the ancestor
who on the cave's wall drew the pregnant mare.
For an Old Friend, Sober After Many Years
You and I stood, astonished,
to see them at play -- dropping a feather,
recovering it in mid-air. Years later I learned
the long shadow of their necessity:
one week of freezing summer fog
with no bugs yielded ranks of small corpses
shriveled in the nests from hunger.
All praise then for the discipline of tree swallows
burning through Niles Pond's sun
stoked mists --
they shoot like stars over a fresh moon that rises
over our old planet of luck and
decay.
By wanting one thing or a very few things
they turn the morning from what
it is not to what it is.