“Gnostic theological debates through the pageantry and panoply of the ring”

Fragments by Stephen Dobyns



Now there is a slit in the blue fabric of air.

His house spins faster. He holds down books,

chairs; his life and its objects fly upward:

vanishing black specks in the indifferent sky.



The sky is a torn piece of blue paper.

He tries to repair it, but the memory

of death is like paste on his fingers

and certain days stick like dead flies.



Say the sky goes back to being the sky

and the sun continues as always. Now,

knowing what you know, how can you not see

thin cracks in the fragile blue vaults of air.



My friend, what can I give you or darkness

lift from you but fragments of language,

fragments of blue sky. You had three

beautiful daughters and one has died.



Stephen J. Dobyns (born February 19, 1941) is an American poet and novelist born in Orange, New Jersey, and residing in Boston.



Life

Born on February 19, 1941 in Orange, New Jersey to Lester L., a minister, and Barbara Johnston Dobyns. Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967. He worked as a reporter for the Detroit News.



He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.



As a professor of English at Syracuse University, he was involved in a sexual discrimination scandal. Francine Prose defended him with faint damning of his accuser and the neo-Victorian victim-feminism policies of the school in an article that cast all parties in an unflattering light.




Works

Dobyns has written many detective stories about a private detective named Charlie Bradshaw who works out of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Bradshaw is unusual as a private eye protagonist, an ordinary man who was once a police officer. All the books have the word “Saratoga” in the title.



In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He does not shy from the low, nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason. This voice is strongly informed by his journalistic training.



For example, in the poem “Missed Chances” in Cemetery Nights, the nameless speaker wanders through a metaphorical city in which those who missed their big opportunities futilely rehearse for when that moment will next arrive. In the comic novel The Wrestler’s Cruel Study, the protagonist roams through a modern cityscape populated by fairy-tale rituals, searching for his missing fiancée, alternately aided or hindered by a Nietzsche-quoting manager and his Hegelian nemesis, to find that his wrestling matches are choreographed by a shadowy organization that enacts their various Gnostic theological debates through the pageantry and panoply of the ring, all the while learning to resolve his own dualistic nature and determine who he is behind the role he plays.



Dobyns’ poems are deeply personal, precise renderings of a speaker informed by but not limited to his [Dobyns'] experience. Though the personae in the individual poems differ, they blend together in the collections to act as a voice in wonder of the beauty and cruelty of the world we live in. One might gather that, to Dobyns, the world is a woman he falls in love with who breaks his heart but who is so beautiful that he must fall in love with her again and again.



His poetic works count among them the 1971 Lamont Poetry Selection (Concurring Beasts), a National Poetry Series award winner, and a Melville Cane Award winner (Cemetery Nights).


Cold Dog Soup has been made into two films, the American Cold Dog Soup and the French Doggy Bag. Two Deaths of Señora Puccini has been made into the film Two Deaths. The movie Wild Turkey is based on one of his short stories.



Boy in the Water is a novel about what goes on in a secluded private school in the United States.





Bibliography




Poetry

The Reason Why (1973)

▪ Concurring Beasts (1972)

▪ Griffon: Poems (1976)

▪ Heat Death (1980)

▪ The Balthus Poems (1982)

▪ Cemetery Nights (1987) ISBN 0-14-058584-2

▪ Body Traffic (1990)

▪ Black Dog, Red Dog (1990) ISBN 0-03-071077-4

▪ Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992 (1994) ISBN 0-14-058651-2

▪ Common Carnage (1996)

▪ Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides (1999) ISBN 0-14-058916-3

▪ The Porcupine’s Kisses (2002)

▪ Mystery, So Long (2005)





Fiction

▪ A Man of Little Evils (1973) ISBN 0-689-10567-3

▪ Dancer With One Leg (1983)

▪ Cold Dog Soup (1985)

▪ A Boat Off the Coast (1987)

▪ The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (1988) ISBN 0-14-023579-5

▪ The House on Alexandrine (1990) ISBN 0-8143-2183-6

▪ After Shocks/Near Escapes (1991)

▪ The Wrestler’s Cruel Study (1993) ISBN 0-393-03511-5

▪ The Church of Dead Girls (1997) ISBN 0-8050-5103-1

▪ Boy in the Water (1999) ISBN 0-312-97522-8

▪ Eating Naked [SS] (2000) ISBN 0-312-27829-2





Charlie Bradshaw series

▪ Saratoga Longshot (1976) ISBN 0-14-025196-0

▪ Saratoga Swimmer (1981)

▪ Saratoga Headhunter (1985) ISBN 0-14-015606-2

▪ Saratoga Snapper (1986) ISBN 0-670-81059-2

▪ Saratoga Bestiary (1988) ISBN 0-670-82024-5

▪ Saratoga Hexameter (1990)

▪ Saratoga Haunting (1993)

▪ Saratoga Backtalk (1994) ISBN 0-393-03659-6

▪ Saratoga Fleshpot (1995) ISBN 0-393-03805-X

▪ Saratoga Strongbox (1998) ISBN 0-670-87692-5





Nonfiction

▪ Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry (1996)

“Ishah” – Jessica Care Moore

attached to strangers

who smell like family on Sunday morning

you’ll never really be loved that way again

this shit is temporary

keep reminding yourself baby girl

while looking for unconditional daddy love

that he will only have his eyes

but never his heart

will have his walk

but never his feet

we are born in battle creek searching for

ourselves inside the weak

so we can appear strong

entertaining confusion on canvas

unfinished colors reminds me of my brother

woman who wonders when they get to turn into

a seductive action figure

invisible planes flying

little girls learn to summon rain

when tears dirty their face and their dreams start lying

sleep bandits stole your sight

you never gonna know how to love right

cause your heart is on the left

your spirit’s mistress wants back in

but your body is locked inside its first life

you’ve been labeled ho, mother, wife

where’s my gold dipped knife my sacrificial womb

oppressed bone buried in stretch limo tombs

opening the door the way gentlemen do

we’ll have a table for two

but only one of us is gonna eat

you think I look beautiful when I sleep

my skin melted to the floor

while I was counting sheep

so I keep one black eye open

hide my power inside my throat

swallow when necessary

talk too damn much and practice whispering

tell you my secrets then ask you to protect me

from the truth

you are my best friend

my nigga my motha fucka my boy

hurting me like my man would

I never knew love like this

I never knew pain like this

my daddy was a fish

but scorpions don’t like to swim

unless they’re drowning

it’s more passionate that way

we love because we have to

not because it’s practical

or matches the curtains / goes with my new dress / looks good in

pictures / sounds good off the page / works for the soundtrack / makes other

people feel tingly inside / or just because we happened to both be

standing there

when the perfect music came on

and we know how to dance without practice

remember baby girl

he will have his eyes

but never his heart

he will have his walk

but never his feet

still

you will stand on his shoes

close your eyes and pray this time

that if it’s not him again

at least you will know

you came close

lower commons

We watched Malibu burn together in 1993
sitting in the far corner fifty feet away from the television
you complained when that girl Laura kept coming out to the water fountain too often
you were in pajamas during Ben’s drunken deflection in the parking lot
we took his keys and he was really pissed about it
that was funny though
he’d just tried to start the pinball machine with his car key
yeah
completely dangerous
i wouldn’t have done that if you weren’t there
but it was superheroes for a few seconds and it was fun

helicopters dropped gigantic boxes of chemicals onto the mansions of your home town
veering in sharp and then pouring sand out of giant funnels and leaving
very dangerous they said
i remember the lights of the giant fire making the helicopters orange
it wasn’t the real firefighters either
it was a special group of rich people stuntpilots
the wind was too dangerous for normal flying but the rich people could afford the hazard pay
and their mansions needed saving and television played it for us
and the problem turned out to be a guy who started a brush fire by an overpass
they were really mad at the broke ass loser when they found him
and you said you’d been so busy you didn’t even realize your town was on fire
i never understood why you were so nice to me.

you thought I was some gangster or something
or maybe you thought I was a vegetable, I don’t know
you wanted something
i was too young to understand i think

You remember what you finally did with me
but Ben eventually drove into the Oregonian delivery van
wrecked two cars and had to go to court and couldn’t drive for a long time
that was about a year later

I decided the reason I haven’t heard from him since 1995
was either he was dead or ashamed of something
probably the second one there
but Malibu is on fire again right now
it’s the right season for it

and San Diego too
i’d heard so many stories about La Holla
the surfer kid you always saw me with
you and me looked back at that night like it was a huge mistake
i mean
that thing with the winter formal and Mark Churchland who would hate me for all time
those other nights
you and me both separately would look back at that as something that shouldn’t have happened
but that was your big chance wasn’t it.
you saw it happen and you know how rare that is
it was your big chance, i mean it was
you know that now right?

if you weren’t such a big valley girl drama victim stereotype
and if i weren’t a useless child with brain trauma
we would rule this world by now.

Instead
I have this imaginary thing
too fragile even to describe out loud
and you don’t remember anything except my shitty handwriting.

I’m going to remember you now if that’s alright.

-October 21, 2007

October 29, 2007

Rat Control in Alberta is Telling Me To Shut Up



Under normal circumstances

this would probably constitute depression

but we know there’s no such thing with me

this is just the way it is

do I miss sex or what?

do I sex miss or what?

I hate how Sasquatch would leave his fucking porn everywhere

fucking weirdo

I hate how dudes get old and stop being able to control themselves



I can’t tell you what I saw in Albany

it was about the most disturbing thing I’ve ever encountered

I’m sitting here getting sick remembering it

this is disgusting



The good news is that my remaining family is smart enough to work around my dad

they know there’s something profoundly wrong with him

and do what they can to keep a distance

Mom is just insane at this point

lost

so weird that Uncle George has such a clear mind

he reveled in stories of hurling my dad off the sled when they were kids

uncle Tom’s friend confessed to putting tobasco in the pudding

they knew my gluttonous dad would be unable to stay away from the pudding
and they zapped him

cousin Alex had a million and one fat jokes

the fatness is just a symptom though

a way of making the problem easy to understand

even my dad will make fun of his own fatness

he’s used to it

the problem is Dad’s a psychopath

republican white collar criminal with no teeth and no eyes and no hope

the only people who speak with him are people he pays to listen

Am I the product of everyone who ever tried to fix what was damaged?

You know?



Am I comprised of the good will of my nice neighbors down the road?

Baxter and my English teachers and Joe Meda running an antique business?

the time I ran away from home on Easter and watched movies with Eva?

Brendan and his Mom?



People count on your having a family the way people count on your having a cell phone

why can’t you just ask your parents?

what does your family think about this?

“where is the mother during all this?”



I wish I could say what I saw in Albany this time

this world is fucking disgusting

I’m so sick of being teased with it’s beauty

outside there’s a farmer’s market and the colors are all vivid and wonderful

smiling yuppie women walk by about as enlightened as anything else I’ve seen

but it’s not for me

the paradox of hardship

I never would have discovered nirvana without it

but I can’t maintain nirvana alongside it

and all I want was for someone to have listened years ago when it mattered

whoever taught you the word “martyr” has a lot to answer for

whoever taught you it was normal to kill people has spent the last eight years in hell

Robert De Niro’s house in Miami

Stevie Wonder failing completely

Al Gore waving at the crowd like a little kid

“please please old people, I’m a good kid!”





well

I know who to think about to make it sunny outside

Go to sleep thinking about her and then it’s beautiful the next day

I keep on forgetting about it though

due to the utmost respect

it would be so beautiful to see her that I know it can’t be for me

it works though

every time



white cat always sneaks back then

always can sense the new feline and sneaks back in

white cat says remember the good times?

yeah I do



I wish you made it sunny

I wish you weren’t strychnine

I forget that too easily

I could see the shift in you at 3 in the morning when your body ran out of vitamins

I always wanted to call it a night at that point but it was the only time to see you

chain smoking in your car outside the house

you would get worse and worse and wouldn’t let me leave happy



I never did anything to you



Other days a dream cop chases you in a Volkswagen

I’m always relieved when it happens

someone who knows what you’ve done

go dream cop go!

send white cat to dream jail!



I don’t know if I’m going to make it to fourteen

I wanted to say good bye to you just in case

but that’s like saying good bye to a tire fire



Thank you to everyone who ever meant well.

William Blake

To Nobodaddy



Why art thou silent & invisible

Father of jealousy

Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds

From every searching Eye



Why darkness & obscurity

In all thy words & laws

That none dare eat the fruit but from

The wily serpents jaws

Or is it because Secresy

gains females loud applause

Herman Melville

Misgivings



When ocean-clouds over inland hills

Sweep storming in late autumn brown,

And horror the sodden valley fills,

And the spire falls crashing in the town,

I muse upon my country’s ills–

The tempest burning from the waste of Time

On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.



Nature’s dark side is heeded now–

(Ah! optimist-cheer dishartened flown)–

A child may read the moody brow

Of yon black mountain lone.

With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,

And storms are formed behind the storms we feel:

The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.