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Exalting
"Small Disturbances"
by Doug Talley
 Human
nature has a tendency to avoid what is awkward, to turn away from
uncomfortable realities, to erase what is ugly or grating or unpleasant.
And yet much of the truth we must face in mortality, and absorb
for our own growth, requires we take a hard (and hopefully compassionate)
look at what we might otherwise wish to shirk, the messy, sin-laden
complexities of our own lives and the lives of others.
How fortunate
we are then, when an intelligent, talented poet determines to showcase
uncomfortable moments and sear them into our consciousness with
just enough gentleness and sympathy that we profit by the experience.
Such a poet is Lance Larsen, professor of creative writing at Brigham
Young University, as evidenced in his first published book of poems,
Erasable Walls.
Larsen suggests
in one poem that “small disturbances sometimes chart the sublime.”
His book is a litany of such disturbances and the all too human
reactions in response – an illegitimate pregnancy, a young
girl’s first menstrual period, a child wetting his pants,
a mortician dressing the bodies of alcoholics, pot heads, convicts
and a prostitute. These are daily occurrences, a part of life, and
yet how quick we are to disown them, and thereby miss those ironies,
which otherwise would instruct us in a deeper understanding of,
and sympathy for, the human condition. Time and again, Larsen’s
gift for irony presents the reader with opportunities to more fully
understand redemption, as when he notes in the poem “Errand”
that “even worms prepare us”.
Therefore, contrary
to what one reviewer of Erasable Walls suggested, it would
be inaccurate to view Larsen as merely “whining”. His
argument against reality is no simple rant made in ignorance, but
a subtler, more studied expression hinting at hidden and sublime
reasons for the way things are. He notes, again in the poem “Errand”,
that there is a “delicacy” to manna. It “nourishes”,
but also “sometimes rots”. This statement is not merely
a complaint, typical of the children of Israel during their forty-year
trek in the wilderness, that blessings from God are insufficient.
It is also an invitation to investigate what conditions cause the
manna – an angel’s food from heaven – to sour
in the first place.
Larsen, as the
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Richard Howard wrote in his Foreword
to Erasable Walls, is a man “who holds his cards
very close to the chest, inward, downward, anything but toward the
opposite player (i.e., the reader).” So, the reader
must work. In Larsen’s poems one must dig for affirmations.
But they are certainly to be found, as in the poem “Funeral
Home” where Larsen contends that “goodness” may
be as simple as turning down a cigarette. When these affirmations
are discovered, and fully appreciated for their ironies, they offer
rich reward, indeed.
The word “irony”
derives from a Greek word 
meaning “simulated ignorance”. The Greek philosopher
Socrates, especially, resorted to irony, to a pretence of ignorance,
as a step towards confuting an adversary. The temptation to read
Larsen’s poems hurriedly and one time only should be resisted,
or else one may see only the whine, the complaint, which is a pretence
only, and otherwise miss the richer, more subtle meanings that make
for a rewarding poetic experience – that is, how “small
disturbances sometimes chart the sublime.”
We hope you
enjoy this sampling from Erasable Walls. In future columns
Meridian Magazine will interview Lance Larsen and explore his book
more intimately.
From
Erasable Walls by Lance Larsen:
ERRAND
Not God dissolving
in a coin of gluten,
but how bread
tastes – that miracle.
Your errand,
tongue, to know
the exact savor
of the world’s flesh.
Then to translate
beyond it.
Yours to gather
this fragmented body.
Tireless epicurean,
winebibber,
connoisseur
of bile and perfumed skin:
teach us the
delicacy of manna.
What nourishes.
What sometimes
rots. How even
worms prepare us.
AND ALSO MUCH
CATTLE
What did they
look like – those cows God
took notice
of in sparing Nineveh?
Bland-faced
no doubt, eyes big as chestnuts.
Jonah must have
loathed them. Jonah under
the gourd, Jonah
in his cobbled-together
martyr’s
booth, sulking and praying
for plagues.
Anything to teach Nineveh
a lesson. If
not a cracked sky drumming
fire, then leprosy,
or wells curdled
with blood.
As for the cows, if Jonah
followed their
grazing too long, he must
have pictured
them fasting again – tricked
out in sackcloth,
ashes brindling their sides.
Such cheap theatrics.
Didn’t real penitence
mean casting
yourself into God’s mouth,
and waking in
the nave of His bowels?
Just you and
an acidy soup of sin and rotting
fish. Those
three days, they should have
clinched it
for him – God’s golden boy.
Now Jonah wondered.
He tried shutting
his eyes, tried,
but the drove wouldn’t slow.
All those hooves
and splattered flanks.
Cows whose only
offering was a little snot
on the muzzle,
maybe a cracked tongue.
Cows milling
until their moos echoed
across the fatness
of the afternoon
like untuned
pleas deep inside a fish.
FUNERAL HOME
Lungs –
you could smell them.
He held them
like bloated fish,
a big, slithery
one leaking brown juice,
the other one
puffy and clean and pink.
The good
one is Mrs. Daley,
he said, eighty-four
years old.
This other
guy – over two packs
a day, and
not even forty.
To his left,
scalpels fanned out
like silverware.
Behind him,
a power drill
with industrial bits.
Even then I
knew this was not
about careers.
But who cared?
He was explaining
the slow dissolve
of the body,
how it unlocks
itself to the
blade. At the room’s
center, a dented
steel table
and tubes angling
to a drain –
also our questions.
How many
bodies a week?
Do they sit up?
What if a shotgun,
what if a bomb?
Did he have
his wife undress
the ladies?
Next came the putty
and fake blood
and your own choice
of face wounds,
gapped open so you
could river
a finger through it.
Finally, the
refrigerator room
and a draped
body on a gurney.
Draining
them, he said, you feel
this energy,
either good or bad.
I’ve
buried them all – alcoholics,
pot heads,
convicts. And once,
a prostitute.
Spirits of men
leaked right
out of her, he said.
It’s
a matter of accumulation,
what you
take in.
His voice
lifted me straight
onto the table.
Razored me open.
He was reaching in.
My stomach.
My liver, my kidneys.
Lifting one
organ at a time.
I wasn’t
afraid. I wanted it this easy –
The heart something
you could
weigh in the
palm, goodness
as simple as
turning down a smoke.
Lance Larsen
received his Phd. in creative writing from the University of Houston.
His poems have appeared in Paris Review, Shenandoah, Hudson
Review, Kenyon Review and elsewhere, and he has received awards
from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and the Utah Arts Council.
He teaches at Brigham Young University and is poetry editor of Literature
and Belief. He is married to Jacqui Biggs Larsen, a mixed media
artist, and together they are the parents of three children.
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