Ryan Murphy, The Redcoats

Privateer

A stain what hearts last

Saddles a river through snow

In falling sunlight.

Eating an orange

Reminds us tomorrow is another day.

The general fog of the metropolitan

Night sky is warm orange—

And thus not alone.

Ain’t no lighthouse

In that eye’s dilated star.

A savagery sw-

Hollows me up.

The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming. Everyone who knows history, and even those that might not, across North America knows what these words mean, spoken by Paul Revere. “I have cannibalized other moments to invent this one,” poet Ryan Murphy writes. Moving through American history, specifically the American Revolution, is Murphy’s new poetry collection, The Redcoats (San Francisco CA: Krupskaya, 2010). In poems that call out to themselves, Murphy explores the myths and stories of American history, stripping away the topsoil of how founding stories get told, just what happened, and what it all means. Murphy engages the question, even if those questions aren’t entirely certain, twisted, and turning in on what we think we might know. Just what is he asking, moving through the complexities of history? The poems want to know, clearly, as much as we do, and struggle their clear way across chasms, as in this piece from the sequence “Poems for the American Revolution”:

Ethan Allen & the Green Mountain Boys

Is it not enough to be loved

and repulsed?

Fenway—in your ashes

build a republic.

Sebastian, not a name

one should chose for oneself. Nameless

above Ticonderoga.

Lake Champlain

into the vowel of your open mouth

the water rushes in

This is American history redux, one that doesn’t take anything at face value, even questioning the values inherent in the stories retold so many times they’ve turned myth. This is American history post-lyric, exploring the facts and the language of story, and all their inherent, and even contradictory, meanings. Poor Benedict Arnold, for example, treated so poorly he turned, and blasphemed for his grief, or Thomas Paine, as Murphy writes in “One More for Thomas Paine”: “When we lost your head / I’m sorry.” Murphy writes America the colonizer, fighting back against their British forebears for injuries, real and imagined, while the same colonizers blissfully unaware (and as often, painfully deliberate) of how they were perpetrating their own savageries, despite the resulting myths. In subjects not found, they are merely lost, as in this fifth section of the poem “All Saints,” that reads:

Vigorous and charming

the baseball hats and commemorative

coins of the bicentennial.

The rotting hulls of the last tall ships.

Daisystar, pulled by the plague

of storms and foglights,

sinking fast, amongst calls for

more rope.

I am some sad potatoes.

Which is also awful.

It is Monday, the same Monday

or another Monday come around,

and the petulant lights of the churchtop

warn off small planes

like a children’s book lighthouse.

The tensions in Murphy’s poems exist through the lightest touch, in a collection of lyrics that create poems as a rock creates skips over a lake, working to create as many touches as possible and creating more than what water means and thus makes, before slipping (inevitably) under. Murphy manages quite a pack in some of these, and the strength comes from the lightness of touch, and the simple, subtle flick of a line, and a line-break. Just as easily, some pieces exist purely as small, lovely lyrics, touching and inferring what the most of it means.

A Valentine

We emblems

flicker

in this, the gray

lilac of February.

Hearts is ash.

Warm drone

from the amber

of medicine bottles.