Visiting the Formers, Feast of the Transfiguration

To know a place is yours

is to feel it moving away

from you—every tree

over the old lane

gone or grown, the arcade

dreamy in partial turnover.

The marvel of summer returns;

the body carries hot days

farther down the reservoir,

drying but damp.

August is its own mood:

sweaty, clingy on the back,

weak but full with the last

flower’s push, feeling a strain,

a pregnancy, setting forth but lapsed—

the ashes, bored,

the early elders to berry, a unity

of leavings and latencies stirred to presence.

this might be the saving dodge,

the shoulder roll of history,

slipping perennial from the latest 

feast backward:

no storm, no wreckage,

just the slow and silent wind

repelling the casual angels.

Inside this crater in the calendar’s

heart, the poppies tabor and glow—

small blows

and a cryptic ignition, burning

out the slight, spectral nativities.

If nostalgia has a task

beyond arming the ghastly

new guard, might it be redrafting

old auguries

for the elaborating passways—cede the ash,

tent the elders, nimble and radiant.

The Green Lawns of the Vacant Houses by the Public School in Recess

Connecticut

Dense of origin, loose of economy,

August rears in heavy light

a gnarl of life—tillering and root lodge,

prone and prodigal, 

zinnia to aster, this hushed

and inefficient country blossoms late.

As a child I was returned midmonth

to the schoolroom, back in the sun-

dense midwest; where the fall swung 

on deer season and harvest, 

we got the jump on the inside lessons well 

before blaze orange, the wicking base.

The children of compacted New England know 

what I, despite decades of passes, 

will never learn: August as total 

summer: sagging, 

full in tenure—the unrefreshing finish, 

temps sore from roving, thankless tasks;

white families of the gold coast 

set the sprinklers, set for beaches,

clear to month’s end—faith in the hire,

to overseed the surfaces, 

brown unto dormancy, the seared 

and polished minds laying by their trouble.

Such is this world in August, in freefall— 

tumbling and dampened sequence,

the works, the recreation flung 

bluntly schoolward;

the better referees will hesitate 

before ruling the play upcycled,

the labor of the strangers, gamed. 

An August sigh, like a curling leaf,

marks the stress of a season—its resistance

or reprieve—the gust

of exhausted hours rushed off to the next trough

in the smothering air, echoless, washed out.

The yarrow and the nesters each live dragged 

into a registry of effective scraps,

uncoached yet jiving with the drafters’ pounce

and play—a scaled commission,

they stretch and tutor—eccentric athletes  

sweltering in cool-down, in the heat’s last swim.

Even so, here is the old change ringing 

in the old hall tower, the oldest neighbors 

left rehearsing the call and bob

of closing time.

They sound far—even so—the canons, 

dulled and duly exercised in recess.

Such is late summer: swelled and unimproved.

Arriving raw to my share of this state, 

I yet may learn its passing pageantries. 

I would live out August

lodged down in the grassbow, spent 

and leafing late among the tapering blades,

hammocked huffy in the ligule,

full with the laze of my own works and days,

emptied in the barrenness of fertile things 

taking just a beat—

for my courses coming to term,

the registries postponed, this world’s relief.

Please tell us something more about the poems:

These two poems are a part of a larger collection on which I am working, which revolves around transition zones. In horticulture, such zones are liminal spaces between more distinguishable growing regions. They are neither hot nor cold—or, they are both hot and cold. They are dry and/or wet. Therefore, various plants built for different climates might thrive in a transition zone. Due to the zone’s variability, they often thrive precariously. 

These two pieces reflect upon in-between spaces—the points of contact and overlap between phenomena: public and private, old and new, tradition and progress, ownership and tenancy, labor and leisure, stewardship and domination. Their occasion is August—a month heavy with rot and becoming, a month during which I, an educator, am always a little unmoored, but one that has become for me a rich time of writing. Perhaps it is the urgency I feel, as the cadences of summer prepare to give way to the accelerations of the fall term. 

On my process: I am a jazz drummer, and rhythm often emerges early in my drafting. I frequently have a sense of the pulse of a poem’s lines and stanzas before I do the words—though the words often loop back and inform my revisions and refinements of the rhythm. While these two poems differ from each other in several ways, in both cases I wanted the lines to dance in and out of regular meter—some conventional iambic stretches interrupting and interrupted by more uneven, rolling moments—varied phraseologies meeting, calling and responding to each other. I also wanted the stanzas to be cinched near their midsections—like an aural and visual catch in the diaphragm. The metric variation has a parallel in the poems’ mixed diction. Maybe to say it more simply: many things converge in transition zones.

Ryan Harper is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Fairfield University-Bellarmine in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Coachella Review, Heartwood Literary Journal, Appalachian Review, Citron Review, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal.

 Read more at Ryan's website.