Where has all my Snyder gone?
I have been unfaithful to Riprap,
have forgotten The Back Country
for years at a stretch, but now
that Turtle Island has boiled up
from the primeval sea, I panic
at the Snyder two days of rooting
in attic & cellar have failed to unearth.
Here sits the photograph of grinning
Keith & twinkling Gary, one snowy
Presbyterian beard & one sparse
as the winter grass on Cold Mountain.
I want my missing Snyder to matter
as much to you as it does to me,
to be the matter it is for both of us,
tool as worn & unthinkingly wielded
as the knife whose deer-antler haft
sheds a few 1915, Edward Karl Repp
molecules each time I use it. Did Snyder
tumble out of the Rent-a-Wreck van
on I-79 during that get-out-of-Dodge
drive north? I thought I lost only
my clothes, but Kora in Hell & a little
of my Hollo have hidden their faces, too.
I am newly aware how many millions
hate books that lack embossed dust jackets,
co-authors, movie tie-ins & Twitter feeds,
but I assure you I am a man who not only
could not be more common, but who also
hungers to speak to you, not at, as long
as we maintain a discreet & preferably
mediated distance. Could I have lacked
Snyder since 1983, ignored him so long,
forgotten what he taught & its pleasure?
Did the Cleveland thieves tire of piling
my books in a head-high hill that August 25th
& so cast from the hijacked U-Haul Snyder
& Olson & my one Rukeyser onto the berm
outside Richfield? Did I crumple at last
under the agony of January, 1984 & leave
more than I recall behind as I humped
my white duffle & red backpack down
Homewood Avenue on the bedraggled retreat
from Point Breeze? I have breathed juniper
for months at a time & chewed cactus hearts
& contemplated a snake that may have been
a rattler whip through the dust on Taos Mesa.
I have sensed the incomprehensible age
of the rock under my feet & cut my palm
on lichen & glimpsed the glory of human
insignificance, so I suppose Snyder has done
his work & can rest, but I have money
you may not, so I could buy new editions
or even firsts, but what of the smudge
on page 21 of The Real Work (apple pie
my sister left on the kitchen counter
of the trailer kept frigid in molten
South Jersey summer), the little tears
near the bottom-right corners of the final
pages of Earth House Hold, the marginalia
with which my twenty-six-year-old hand
crammed the pages, the yarrow blown
horizontal on Coal Hill, the sun refusing
to set in Shepherd, the drunks bellowing
in the alley behind Art & Bob’s, the Hasidim
strolling down Phillips, binding glue cracked,
pages browning, fire lookout & zendo
& the whole of the Sierra Nevada down
to a last speck of pollen right here beneath
my peering eyes, maybe a fugitive speck
(something tickles & burns) lodged in one
nostril as the wood stove puffs blue clouds
out all its seams in Val’s cottage outside
Millbrook, just one squat among many
where I did my deepest reading.
About the Poet
John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. His most recent collections are Civil Service (digital chapbook, Neo-Mimeo Editions) and the full-length Never Far from the Egg Harbor Ice House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions).
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