Atsuro Riley, Heard-Hoard

 

                                                [ bunkhouse ]

 

Most nights the boy they called Tynan
suppered us with scrapple from a can. Or some black-eyes
he’d’ve road-begged; a quarter-peck of crowders
scrounged off vines.

            *

The broad back-skin on the tallest boy
  —a (ripening) welt-weave, a lattice.

            *

Last good gloam-minute after work
we’d strip off there in the side-yard, yawping; taking turns
de-tarring    un-burning
arc-aiming cool hose-spray each on each.

            *

Eleven of us / chigger-scritches, scablets.
Eleven of us / none of us clean.

            *

Where the boss of us bore down
on us    our rank of bedrolls on the floorboards    one
and one and one eleven of us    ranked sack-beds
on floorboards    boots of    black breath of    the boss

            *

Of us bearing down on us—
ain’t none of us (not a one of us) clean.

I was curious about what I was hearing about the second collection by San Francisco poet Atsuro Riley, his Heard-Hoard (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021), a collection that follows his full-length debut, Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press, 2010). It took a couple of passes to really catch the nuance of Riley’s lyric, but once heard, it sunk in and stuck. And now I can’t not see: there is such a lovely music to these meditations, a slowness, almost akin to a drawl, and perhaps the pure, meditative slowness was what was holding my appreciations back. “A last rock-skip hurlstorm (crazing river-glass),” he writes, to open the poem “SUNDER,” “the closest they ever were.” There’s a silence he manages to articulate, one that runs like a current underneath each line.

There is a lyric calm presented through these poems, even as Riley writes on the storm; a lyric that verges on the hypnotic, or sacred, writing out the unspoken, against all the silence. As he writes, mid-way through, as part of the poem “[ cottage-work ]”: “Word says—renting that stripped-wood A-frame yonder is a / new woman nobody knows. How she’ll scald and scour out / quick all your bringings in her bathtub—your miles of pig-guts / (for the chitlin strut, the piney supper) bundled spruce as / laundry.” His passages are descriptive and evocative, painting portraits of space, moments, scenes and narratives that rile fresh perspectives on what might otherwise be familiar. There is something about the way Riley takes a line or a thought and pulls it, stretches it out across the space of the extended lyric that is quite intriguing, akin to what Ottawa poet Monty Reid is known for as well, but with a language and candence and sense of the shadow and, dare I say, heart, that veers into a territory explored by the late CD Wright. As the same poem offers, a bit further on: “Mr. W. being known / for fine-carving these stern pine-paddles // (fresh-hewn for use by fathers). / Known to sear to scar.” There are some long, languid threads here, and the threads are breathtaking.