Alms for Oblivion

Paperback, 172 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-63980-595-2

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William Heath was born in Youngstown, Ohio, on 27 June 1942. A graduate of Hiram College, with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Case Western Reserve, he has taught American literature and creative writing at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, and the University of Seville as the Fulbright professor of American literature. Since 1981 he taught at Mount Saint Mary’s University, where he edited The Monocacy Valley Review, which won national awards for excellence, and retired in 2007as a Professor Emeritus. The William Heath Award is given annually to honor a student writer. In 2008–9 he was the Sophia M. Libman Professor of Humanities at Hood College. In 2022 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Hiram.

Alms for Oblivion collects the best of William Heath’s recent poems, ranging from autobiographical reminiscences to social commentary, travels abroad, observations of the natural world, meditations on the art of poetry, and a final section on aging and the fate of our nation. 

The poems in Alms for Oblivion have a lapidary precision in their intelligence and power of observation. William Heath’s lines lift me out of my own self-absorption and into a larger world. He has an empathetic awareness of what it means to be human. Reading this marvelous collection reminds me of why I came to poetry in the first place.
 
— George Bilgere, author of Cheap Motels of My Youth

Mr. Beeghly has his doubts
whether I am a suitable playmate
for his son and my friend Joel.
He calls me a Johnny Come Lately
and a Fly By Nighter, although I
only break into their house once
to retrieve a basketball.

It isn’t
hard: I ascend the television pole
on the side of the house near
an open second-story window,
then it’s down the stairs,
through living room and kitchen
to the garage where the pebbly
surfaced sphere of my desire
is waiting for me.

You see
they have the best backboard
and rim in the neighborhood
fastened to their two-car garage.
I am guilty, I know, but feel
completely innocent. Isn’t
basketball my avocation, don’t I
answer its call every day?

And yes I am known to rob
their orchard of apples, plums,
and pears when I’m hungry,
to pick grapes from their arbor,
and ride Joel’s pony, but only
with his permission.

And yes
I teach Joel to swing out on
tree vines before splashing
into Lee Run Creek in spite of
repeated warnings the water
is shallow, we could break
a leg or our necks on the rocks.
After Mr. Beeghly chops off
the offending vines, we simply
seek others further downstream.

The guy with the Walt Whitman beard
lives down the valley in a clapboard
colonial house so close to the road
you can judge its age. One evening
he shows up at my front door, wants
to talk. I have only a few neighbors
yet I don’t ask him in.

As we stand on my fieldstone porch
I note his bicycle tipped on its side,
wire handlebar basket brimming over
with quart bottles of cheap beer.
I often see him pedaling into town
two miles away to replenish his stash.
His ruby face betrays he’s far gone
before he spills his slurred words.

NASA has rejected three-hundred-
and-sixty-seven of his inventions because
it has been taken over by Venusians
from outer space. I nod and ask how
he knows who they are. They have
a strange look about them, their heads
aren’t on straight.

Weeks later, wandering in woods
that frame this valley located between
Esopus and New Paltz, close to
the Hudson River, I come upon him
crouched by a small waterfall
rearranging stones, he looks up
and says, “I think Nature should look
as neat as possible, don’t you?”

Each weekend his gentleness is belied
when his mother brings food and clothes,
hauls off the laundry. Their fierce arguments
last hours, horrific screams echo
in the valley. I fear he’ll strangle her,
yet the following day he’s out puttering in
his yard, the next Sunday his mother
drives up with fresh supplies.

1
There is something compelling
about a man named Moses
walking into a town named Liberty
in Mississippi’s Amite county
(friendship, in French) where
no Black person is free.

That’s what Bob Moses does in 1961,
working to register Black voters.
In late August he leads local farmers,
Curtis Dawson and Alfred Knox,
down to the courthouse to fill out
a daunting registration form.

Suddenly two white men attack,
one hits Moses repeatedly in the temple
with the blunt end of a switch-blade,
knocking him to the sidewalk where
he curls up to protect his head.
Knox, a part-time preacher, tries

to pull Bob’s assailant away while
Dawson pleads with the man to stop.
Moses has an out-of-body experience,
as if he were floating off the ground
and looking down at himself before
coming to, T-shirt drenched in blood.

Knox urges him to leave the scene,
but Moses insists on pressing charges,
entering the courthouse only to learn
that Billy Jack Caston, his attacker,
is the sheriff’s cousin. Against
all odds, Moses files charges.

Back in McComb, Dr. James Anderson
needs nine stiches to sew Bob’s scalp,
wraps bandages around the wound.
Moses returns to Liberty the next day
for the hearing, a courtroom filled
with white men brandishing shotguns.

Caston claims Moses, crouching
like a kung fu master, attacked him.
The sheriff says it’s too dangerous for Bob
to tell his side of the story. He, Knox,
and Dawson are hurried out a back door,
the judge finds Billy Jack innocent.

2
Thirty years later I drive into Liberty
to research what happened there
during the Civil Rights movement.
Herbert Lee had been killed at a local
cotton gin, Louis Allen, a witness,
was gunned down in his driveway.

Moses and his fellow SNCC workers
leave the area in 1961; Preacher Knox,
a local farmer, stands his ground,
still lives outside Liberty.
I give him a call, ask if I can come
to his home to tape an interview.

I follow his directions through
a maze of backcountry dirt roads,
no street signs, no names on mailboxes,
eventually I pull up at his house,
a weatherboard cabin with tin roof,
stone chimney, small front porch.

Knox is one of a few Blacks in Liberty
who, thanks to a New Deal program,
buys forty acres of land in 1939,
thus fulfilling a Reconstruction promise
some seventy years too late. We sit on
a bench supported by two large trees.

I remember how the hens cluck
and peck at the front yard dirt.
I place a recorder between us
and as we talk chickens strut
beneath the bench, still clucking.
A rooster voices his opinion.

A large-framed man wearing blue
denim overalls, a chambray shirt,
Knox explains how hard it is
to be a small farmer: “Ain’t nothin’
folks can do ’cept scratch it out in
the summer, strap it in the winter.”

When I ask about Moses and Liberty,
Knox calls to his grandson, elbow deep
in a tractor engine: “Come here, Henry,
I don’t think you’ve heard this story.”
A sullen well-built teenager strolls
over to us, reluctantly.

As Knox relates in detail
what happened the day he goes
to the Liberty courthouse to “redish,”
the boy’s face changes to respect.
He didn’t know his grandfather
is a hero, stood up to the man.

As we are conversing I notice
pickups cruising by more
frequently than you’d expect on
a back country road. Are they
other farmers or has word spread
about a white man asking questions?

The statute of limitations does not
expire in murder cases. Before I go
I ask him who shot Louis Allen.
He shares my suspicion of the sheriff.
Driving away, I see a grandfather
talking with his grandson.

Sarah Winchester marries the son
of the man who invents the Winchester
repeater, the Gun that Won the West,
a medium tells her that unless she builds
more rooms to her house to host and
appease the spirits of thousands killed
by the notorious rifle, she will die—
so for thirty-eight years she adds room
after room, door after door, endless corridors,
stained glass spider-web windows, twisted
stairways, parquet floors of mahogany,
teak, ash, oak, and other choice woods,
silver-plated chandeliers, secret
passages to elude pursuing ghosts.

Each night she visits the Séance Room
to learn what next needs to be done.
This calls for continual renovation
as the house expands to five-hundred
rooms, shrinks to one-hundred-and-sixty.
The resulting maze has an upside down
column that doesn’t touch the ceiling,
chimneys that never reach the roof.
Windows in the Grand Ballroom feature
obscure Shakespeare quotes: “Wide
unclasp the tables of their thoughts,”
“These same thoughts people this
little world.” Gnomic messages inciting
her obsessions? No one knows.

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906
severely damages the house, Sarah
is rescued from her wrecked bedroom,
she sees the quake as a sign to change
her ways, thirty front rooms are sealed.
An eight-story tower falls, other turrets,
towers, cupolas, and balconies remain.
The number thirteen figures prominently
in her extravagant designs. Thirteen
the number of window panes, ceiling panels,
stairway steps. Among flowers, fountains,
statues, and exotic trees highlighting
her resplendent gardens, thirteen palm trees
lining the driveway die of old age.

Serbian soldiers waving guns
come to her school, tell all
the students they have thirty
minutes to collect whatever
fits in a backpack and board
the waiting buses. A few try
to smuggle a beloved kitten
or puppy but soldiers seize
and shoot them on the road
in front of the bus—blood
spreads everywhere. She will
not see her home again until
turning fourteen, the house
in ruins, no roof or windows,
wet floors, the walls covered
with green mold.

She is angry
at her mother for leaving her,
not understanding how wars take
away free choice, she couldn’t stay.
Like all Croatian men, her father
is off fighting, does not return—
shell-shocked, limbs intact—
until the war ends. He restores
the house and outbuildings,
now runs a prosperous farm.

Her husband works all day
disabling land mines, fears he
will be sent to Ukraine to do
the same dangerous work. She
tells her story as we sit at a long
table sampling local liquors
and pastries because she wants
the world to know how hard
it was for a very young girl
when Serbia invaded Croatia.

Stinkbugs don’t smell as bad
as breadfruit rotting in the sand.
But if one should happen to fly
into your mouth, its taste is sharp,
and you are obliged, regardless
of the company, to spit it out.

Centipedes, a foot long, venomous,
seek warmth in slippers or under pillows.
Giant stag beetles, longest flying insects
in the world, thrive in rotten logs, blunder
about after nightfall. If they hit your skin
they cling with their piercing four-inch
mandibles. Entangled in your hair, they stay

for some time, once attached it takes
a flaming match’s encouragement
to make them let go and leave. Worst
of all the nono flies, most dangerous
island creatures, walk your face,
camp out on your eyelids, ride food
all the way to your mouth.

So small you can barely see them,
but their fierce stings cause serious
swelling, a swarm can kill. One
wannabe starlet on Survival wore
only her bikini to show off her bod,
ended up with permanent scars.
Hollywood did not call.

If a squid loses the tip
of an arm to a rival squid
it knows it’s been hurt,
its whole body reacts,
becomes hypersensitive,
but it doesn’t know
which part suffered
the painful loss.

If a squid loses an arm
to a rival or a crab’s pinchers,
it jets away squirting black ink.
The squid never touches
the severed spot, rather acts
as if its whole body
was one big sore.

Unlike a squid,
an octopus knows if
one of its arms
has lost a tip, or been
otherwise injured.
The wounded limb
is cradled to protect it
from further harm.

A plastique, e. e. cummings says,
is easier than poetry, a great poem
keeps detonating as long as readers
have ears to hear. To begin: take
a deep breath then release words
by the lungful as the heart beats
against the stress; say it straight
and get out, leaving clear images
and a clarity of thought.

Poetry
is simply and only those times
when language yields imperishable
eloquence, the unfading flavor
of choice words tasting perfect
in the mouth, the loving syllables
rubbing together in sonorous bliss,
the frenzied world finding a brief,
bright, particular focus.

True poets
ask all those wallflower words
to rise up and dance; perhaps,
as Flaubert lamented, a tune
banged out on a cracked pot
to set a bear to bopping, when
we strive to make the stars
weep for our melodies.

As long as
there’s life in it, as long as poets
love their words well, take
pains to present their best
acts of attention, then poetry
can still give us the pleasure
to experience the incongruous
truths of the world.

I’m talking
about genuine wordslingers taking
command of our common tongue.

Twelve-hour shifts in the ICU
watching Covid-19 patients take
their last dwindling breaths,
unmasked people standing vigil
outside the hospital insist
their relatives on ventilators
only have the flu. If the hospital
claims otherwise, it’s to grab
more federal dollars.

Local preachers
praise a God stronger than
any virus since true believers
who pray to Him will never die.
Those she inoculates say
the syringe is empty, she must be
getting kickbacks from Pfizer
for peddling their fake vaccine.

She is a hero in a war many in
her town think isn’t happening,
a hoax. At the grocery store
checkout counter they joke about
the fools who wear masks.
Don’t take it serious, they say,
it’s a Democrat plot, once
Biden’s in office after the rigged
election it will all go away.

If someone comes off
the ventilator and survives,
people credit God, not doctors,
nurses, or treatments. It’s a miracle,
not modern medicine, that saves them.

When one of her patients dies,
she weeps until her ribs ache.

1
In my forties I said
“I’m playing the back nine.”
Now, clubhouse in sight,
my best hope is to double
bogey the eighteenth hole.

At a Barcelona restaurant
I hear two men switch
the metaphor to soccer.
“We’re in discount time,”
one says, the other is
more dire: “We’re in
final penalty kicks.”

2
In the middle of the night
my metaphysical moment:
old guy, prostate, that story.
Shuffling my Frankenstein amble
down the hall I sit and piss
in dribs and drabs several times
each night as years slide away.
I’m not the first, nor the last.

This is the way the world goes
for all us old guys. Eyes dim,
knees shot, bum plumbing,
clogged pipes, my ticker
sometimes skips a tock.
A few hours of sleep,
then a few more, until one day
that last alarm rings.

We pay a price for
those distant ancestors
once having the audacity
to stand on their own two feet,
the law of gravity has it in
for our poor spinal cord,
disks slip, vertebrae feel
the wear and tear, arches
fall, hip and knee joints
grind to a halt.

It hasn’t happened,
yet it will come.
Bum knees, shaky legs,
an unsteady balance,
one day I will topple
to the floor—with luck
a thick carpet, not wood,
hard tiles, or linoleum.

Will I
break something is
the question: an arm,
a leg, worst of all
a hip or hit my head,
and if no one is
there to help me,
the plot takes a dark
turn. Even if nothing

happens and I am able
to rise up by myself,
the good news will
only last so long before
I take another tumble
and fall again. That
is the fate in store
for all us old folk,
sooner or later
we all fall down.

The Pope today is too ill
to say Merry Christmas in
so many languages, Jimmy
Stewart raises a weary arm
to cameramen on his return
to the hospital, I call Dad
to wish him happy birthday,
his wife says he still won’t
wear a hat in the cold.

On his deathbed he tells me
to take good care of my wife,
in the end it’s the only thing
a man has, but what son
can understand his father’s
last words, who were close
too short, apart too long?

The final time I see my father,
half-naked, dressing gown askew,
half-conscious from medications
easing him out of life, I say,
“Goodbye, Dad” and touch
his bare big toe as I leave.

I’ve always been curious
about the centuries before
I was born, now I worry

about the years I will miss.
I must admit my mind
tells me that the world

at present is taking a turn
for the worse, as if things
weren’t terrible enough

as they are. Temperatures
will climb, water will rise,
bad weather of all sorts

will wreak havoc across
our vulnerable globe.
China, smiling benignly

as if nothing were wrong,
will spread tendrils, taking
whatever its empire needs.

As for us, will we be up
to the task of defending
our identity or integrity?

Will the dumb keep
dumbing down, the smart
still outsmart themselves,

and whatever the case is,
however unacceptable,
will it be accepted?