The Complete Poems

Originally from Park River, North Dakota, Roland Flint was the author of eight collections of poems, including the 1990 National Poetry Series selection, Stubborn. He received a 1982 National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Discovery Grant from the same auspices in 1970. His work appeared in Triquarterly, Salmagundi, Poetry Northwest, Ohio Review, and The Atlantic, among other publications. He was professor of English at Georgetown University for 29 years and was on the teaching staff at Warren Wilson College and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. As Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1995 to 2000, he traveled to every county in the state, taking poetry into schools, prisons and hospitals. He died in 2001.

Tulip Tree

I’m sitting at a glass-topped table under a tulip tree, whose blooming my new friend Nellie and I have made our predictions on. It is February, this is Georgia, and yesterday for the first time we had 80 degrees. I am out here in the bright warm day, liking it, and without warning I miss my son, not only in the usual ways but with a kind of wonder that it persists so hard and long and that it is so physical, that I want to hold and feel him in my hands and arms, and that my grief at its worst still is something in my chest like the dreams that go on hurting but you want them as all you have left.

And part of a sheath, the covering of a tulip bud, falls onto the table by my right hand. It is a color between ripe pear and chamois, very delicate, covered with the fur of a small creature, more than on a peach. Inside it is smooth and feels like the inside of a kitten’s ear, exactly.

There is no special providence in this, I think, but I am grateful anyway that the sheath is simple and useful and beautiful, that I know it, and that I like very much its falling here on my table and that it means the tulip tree will bloom when Nellie said it would, which is fine with me because it is even sooner than I guessed.

* * *

For Gabriel’s Hands

Fisted, both of them: 
thirty seconds after the caesarean
says the note with the picture—
his closed eyes squint
fiercely keeping the dark,
blood on his head, the cilial hair,
and on the left shoulder a chakra of white.
Blood on the small wide fists
squared up to the camera
making them even bigger
than the big baby hands
they unmistakably are— 
cub’s predicting the full growth,
which pleases his father.
Someone’s holding him up
toward the camera,
the umbilical not yet cut and
dandling still into his mother, uncoiled,
like a phone cord but four times thicker—
in its dull slick dark blue
it’s handsome, a surprise to me
if not to his father (a doctor)
who took the picture.
It’s a sad first reflex, Gabriel,
but a true one, to make both fists
to the new cold world. After
that bad if timely cutting
of your emergence why should you
open a hand to shake with it?
When mostly you will find apt
your blood-clabbered entering.
There are some exceptions
as I hope my hand closing
to its old light fist around a pen,
this will begin to be.

* * *

No Sooner Is Pigeon

Coming back some from his loved friend’s death,
Greeting the day again, scratching around, &
News comes another old friend is dead,
Bringing the year’s total to four from cancer alone.
And so the pigeon flies northwest to be there,
His heart aburst with emptiness to witness
His poor old friend all dead & coffined
To comfort as well as he can the widow & child
To carry his friend to the terrible hole
To eat & drink too much (with grief to blame it on)
To visit his aging parents
To take them out to dinner
To cut his broken-wristed father’s steak
To stay two days & nights & mow his mother’s lawn
To speak carefully with them of the bereaved
To toss all night in the creaking bed
In which he was conceived.