Out of Town by
Lex Runciman
Praise for Out of Town:
In Out of Town, "memory and repetition drive Lex Runciman's moral
investigations of a world--our world--which he suspects may be an inappropriate
place to investigate morally. But what other world is there? Memory and
repetition create the measured grace in his stately lines, but a measureless
grace, one that approaches the sacramental, permeates these poems."
Andrew Hudgins
"Like music from an open window, Lex Runciman's poems draw me into
his life. So how is it that his childhood memories-the light at night,
the wishing for water-can be so like my own? How can he love his daughters
just as I love mine? And the sea, exactly as it is? This poet's truth,
so perfect, so ringing clear, sings of the universal longing."
Kathleen Dean Moore
"Because Lex Runciman gives himself to it with such unreserved and,
more distinctively, unembarrassed attention, the domestic world--the world
of the household, backyard, the neighborhood street--is flooded with a
pathos, a quality of light, a delicious and familiar beauty that one sees
in the paintings of Vermeer."
Sherod Santos
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Born and raised in Portland, Lex Runciman has lived most of his
life in Oregon's Willamette Valley. Along the way, he has worked
as a warehouseman, shipping-receiving clerk, and a stacker in a
box mill. He is the author of two earlier books of poems: Luck (1981)
and The Admirations (1989), which won the Oregon Book Award. He
holds graduate degrees from the writing programs at the University
of Montana and the University of Utah. A co-editor of two anthologies,
Northwest Variety: Personal Essays by 14 Regional Authors and Where
We Are: The Montana Poets Anthology, his own work has appeared in
several anthologies including, From Here We Speak, Portland Lights
and O Poetry, O Poesia. He was adopted at birth. He and Deborah
Jane Berry Runciman have been married thirty-two years and are the
parents of two grown daughters. He taught for eleven years at Oregon
State University and is now Professor of English at Linfield College,
where he received the Edith Green Award in teaching in 1997. |
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Letter to Ourselves from Placid
Cracked, useless as an old Timex,
the Nikon rests at home in its parts
in the drawer with nuts, lock washers,
unmatchable bolts. Travel assumes
the unreality of history, and the sun
fills us with languorous desire. Therefore,
we imagine paper, a letter to ourselves
returned amid extraordinary laundry.
Here, out there, mergansers:
their neon crowns are sexual displays.
Placid Lake fills a bowl a blue mile
half full, sides bristly with larch a green
entirely their own. To imagine the cabin
say cabin, screendoor. A propane icebox
hums its cargo of beer. Here is here,
and we are not opening envelopes.
No news arrives. We have no pictures.
Earlier, we swam. Later we threw rocks
for the splashes. Cattle blur on the far shore.
We have used all our fingers to count deer.
Two of them cool their withers in lake water.
Bats roost under the back porch roof.
Today we are going nowhere. We can tell
each other almost anything.
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Glass
Out the office window, sidewalk cherries begin to be ornamental, afternoon winding down, and the phone rings-Charles Neville, a stranger who remembers my father a nine-year-old boy, if I can imagine that.
They played, he says, played in a peach orchard with an old house smack in the middle of it, long lines of trunks with heavy canopies, then a saggy porch fronting grimed, wavy windows-two casements flanking the nailed door, one more on the west wall, two on the east. Late afternoon, he says, one day they broke every window, stoned them all for the pure thrill of breaking something fragile. For the sound it made again and again, the sound of glass. "We loved it," he says, all pleasure in memory, "that wild craziness souring only at the end. Then we went home."
My father says Charlie always tells that story. And lately I've been picturing blossoms drifted on a porch like snow, pear blossoms since I know those trees. I've been picturing that house, dark settled in the cupped steps, a thin, widening line of twilight rising between the chimney and the wall. We've been here before. We've piled up river rocks and just carrying one around I've warmed it. Sky going dark, I stand sideways and look over my shoulder at Charlie who's standing sideways. We see each other. I wind up, figuring we're pretending like always, and I'm not thinking about anything but how weight shifts and shoulders turn.
I can feel the heft and surface and curve of that washed stone, then it's out of my hand. It's out of my hand, rising a little, side-slipping flat away, and it's beautiful even though I know where it's going and what will happen-the guilt and the whipping. It sails on the air, spinning.
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