A Handpicked Poem article by Michael Todd Steffen

A Handpicked Poem


article by Michael Todd Steffen



From Plume, November 2024, issue 159 (note the author’s finish date for the poem, September 2024)




F O R T H E D E A D U N I O N


by Christopher Bakken

a savage servility slides by on grease



After summer rain, the old-growth forest


behind Greendale Cemetery fills


with eerie promise—boletes, milk-caps,


and terraces of pink-white oysters,





while the veterans of remembered wars


doze on beneath deep mattresses of moss


and gaudy rhododendrons wide as mansions.


Even this far west, five hundred miles





from Bunker Hill, Daughters of the Revolution


have graves to tend, as do the offspring


of those who fell at Shiloh and Khe Sahn.


Fresher mud roofs the new pandemic dead.





Paying no heed to local history,


remote or absurdly new, quick streams gush


the layered shale embankments, cut ravines


so steep old gravestones sometimes slide





from their tidy, metered plots to murmur


obituary greetings from below.


I’ve sometimes brushed their faces clear of dirt


while out foraging, sounding out the names.








If the rains are right, by mid-July


the first chanterelles tunnel up through leaves,


timid as small flames for a day, before


rising bold as Corinthian columns





into the mist—fluted, comically orange,


and not reeking of funeral soil


but scented improbably apricot


—hints of death’s most subtle literacy.








~








Atop the city’s other distinguished hill


the college buildings shrug, clutch their ivy.


The old observatory, named for Captain Newton,


who fought with the Union of Corinth,





is really just another church—its design


cruciform, compassed north, domed with green copper,


its Doric narthex cheerful as a crypt.


The students only stroll downhill for booze,





wary of the red-capped, red-faced whites


who fly the Dixie flag from their new trucks


and shop at Giant Eagle packing heat,


the same men who join militias in the woods





across French Creek, where young George Washington


once paddled his canoe. On Braveheart Radio


the new patriots whine and stockpile ammo,


their sniggers ringing in the city’s ears.





Some years back, I read a student essay


that not once, but twice referred to Lowell’s


“For the Dead Union” by mistake, a bit


too apt, only months after Charlottesville.











My children practice active-shooter drills


at school, though I fear almost as much in-


active shooters, my well-armed small-town


neighbors, who see mostly through the dark glass





of their rage. Tonight, carting groceries to my car,


I had to dodge a pickup flying an upside


down American flag. On bumper rust:


BELIEVE IN GOD NOT GOV SCIENCE.








~








Our city boomed in the cross-hairs


of an infant nation—a half-way stop


on the New York to Chicago rail,


and a stop, too, for those running north





underground: at his busy safe-house


near the corner of Liberty and Arch,


the freedman Richard Henderson


sheltered hundreds, working the secret line





a local firebrand had established


out of his tannery in New Richmond


—young John Brown, who buried his first wife


and two children on a hill behind his barn.





Downtown, at Diamond Park, the cast-iron fish


of the faux-Bernini fountain gasp,


since their water was turned off years ago.


The new, most savage servility here





bends low to the con, believing nothing


but what’s been fetched from the extremes


of explanation: the virus a hoax,


and micro-chips, and deep state cabals,














with a million orange ballots hid somewhere


in a blue car with Arizona plates.


The local Klan are now just Oath Keepers,


dismissing any mention of a coup.





In my Night Owl hockey league, machinists,


plumbers, and professors hit the ice, work


off their beer. On the trophy, last season’s


champs christened their team The White Nationalists.








~








A thousand small-town Midwestern greens


are now deserted as dead factories,


guarded by bronze, musket-clutching soldiers


who can’t recall which fields, of which republic,





are engraved on the plaques at their feet,


nor how many Lenape or Shawnee


were scythed to speed the frantic engines


of America pastoral. In the woods





we return to reason and faith…


until faith bends reason towards disbelief


in the great frontier towns, whose fates are geared


to the greater green lights of commerce.





Like Talon, now gone for thirty years,


where generations had fed their fortunes


making zippers—patented here in 1914.


The city nearly died when the plant moved east.





I have tried to remain one of the roughs


all my life, but maybe we’ve had enough


of roughness now. As I marched across campus


at dusk, I scared an owl from its hollow














in a split oak by the observatory.


I thought of the telescope inside,


good for looking far away from here,


and the quiet power of such refraction,





those quick bends in the direction of light.


At the base of the owl’s rotting tree,


a clump of Jack-o’ lantern mushrooms


were casting spores, just beginning to glow.





September 19, 2024














The stateliness of Bakken’s poem is unmistakable. From the outset, foraging for mushrooms in a graveyard, the poet chimes in with a deep vein going back through the American Civil War and our father poet Walt Whitman to a long English tradition of the elegy. The home pulsing reference to Thomas Gray’s canonical “Elegy” surfaces with the poet’s allusion in the last stanza to “the owl’s rotting tree” and its natural woodsy echo of Bakken’s earlier huckster-like proffer of the classic symbol for Death and Athena with the Night Owl hockey league. There are in fact many 20th-century and early 21st-century poets who’ve struck Mediterranean epic poses at major poems in English (or American English, Irish English, or Trinidadian English for that matter), but none of them comes with more observance (and convincingness) about the language’s sensibility for brevity, commonness, local particulars and quiet oblique lineage than does this “Ode” with its deceptive yet alluring nod to Robert Lowell. Bakken strikes a masterly voice for our ear and its preference for soft smiles in the darkest hour, and the softly spoken—





death’s most subtle literacy (first section)








As a centerpiece poem to its culture, in the widest sense, in its day of brassy fanfare for outspoken political divisiveness, the poem keenly identifies the “extreme” elements (of either political division, of both parties) at the throats of American life since the controversial 2000 election denouement, and simmering long long before that. Deftly, Bakken has chosen modesty over profusion, keeping his poem to 112 lines, in Lowellesque un-rhyming stanzas, seven to a section, in unnumbered sections. (Around 100 lines were in Eliot’s thinking for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” from Poe’s ideal for a one-sitting read.) The gaudy rhododendrons mentioned in the seventh line of the poem may just be the poet’s poke at his ambitious wayward confreres.





There Bakken leaves shop talk, enhancing both just the playfulness of his comment, in passing, and also the poignancy of a brush—brevity the soul of wit—about the on-and-on grinding of grand gestures, not by any means confined to poetry, but to the paramount muses in all public arenas these days generally.





In the days before personal computers and word processors with autocorrect, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida discovered one of his seminal concepts, Différance (with an a), while correcting student papers and noticing what he liked to call a recurrent neographism. Similarly, Bakken cites a student paper’s error with the title of Lowell’s memorable poem as the meditation is situated significantly in Meadville, Pennsylvania, home of Allegheny University where the poet teaches; home also of the once widely providing Talon zipper factory (“now gone for thirty years”).





Bakken’s epigram is a direct quote of the two lines concluding the Lowell poem “For the Union Dead,” bearing the exact same title only with the inversion of “Union” and “Dead.” And, yes, for me, that’s a significant enough inversion to constitute an original title—even timely in itself for the mocking or echoing strain in today’s culture with its allowance for reproductive creativity and a nearly imperceptible fine line between assimilating and plagiarism, with promised award for merely systematic reproduction, as with AI or pop medley dance tunes.





Admiring the courage of Shaw and his men, the speaker in Lowell’s poem is driven to reflect that their spirit of heroic self-sacrifice is in short supply in a modern United States riven by segregation, commercialism, and insincerity. Old timey North and South in our times has re-shifted to the opposition of political parties, or, more exactly, to the extreme elements of each party, the radicals. In the poem the polarity is arranged in opposition most prominently in the second section of the poem. The liberals are scantily and passingly represented in the students of Allegheny College who “only stroll downhill (from the campus) for booze.” They appear in the poem to give the poet his title, but also show up here in the poem mostly as a way into to the caricature as looming victims of the radical right,





the red-capped, red-faced whites


who fly the Dixie flag from their new trucks


and shop at Giant Eagle packing heat,


the same men who join militias in the woods





across French Creek… On Braveheart Radio


the new patriots whine and stockpile ammo…











Vis-à-vis Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: the concept of lacrimae rerum, or lament of the human condition.





Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r


The moping owl does to the moon complain


Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r,


Molest her ancient solitary reign.





Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,


Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,


Each in his narrow cell forever laid,


The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.








Compare to Bakken:





while the veterans of remembered wars


doze on beneath deep mattresses of moss


and gaudy rhododendrons wide as mansions.


Even this far west, five hundred miles





from Bunker Hill, Daughters of the Revolution


have graves to tend, as do the offspring


of those who fell at Shiloh and Khe Sahn.


Fresher mud roofs the new pandemic dead.





Paying no heed to local history,


remote or absurdly new, quick streams gush


the layered shale embankments, cut ravines


so steep old gravestones sometimes slide





from their tidy, metered plots to murmur


obituary greetings from below.


I’ve sometimes brushed their faces clear of dirt


while out foraging, sounding out the names.