Dave Malone writes of the people and events shaping our lives.
I’m reading a poetry collection, and an image forms in my mind, a memory I hadn’t recalled in years. I’m 11, and my mother arranged for me to spend a week with my widowed aunt who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. She was the family historian, and I was the family reader, so I suppose my mother thought we’d be a match. We were.
She was a force to be reckoned with. In her lifetime, she crossed swords with reluctant neighbors, homeowner associations, historical commissions, the New Orleans City Council, and just about anyone whom she saw standing in the way of historical preservation and urban beautification. She also buried every deceased pet in her deep back yard, well behind her pre-Civil War house.
That week she had to do research at the Louisiana State Library, then located across from Jackson Square in the French Quarter. It anchored a corner of the Pontalba Apartments Building. The staff knew her well. She was a regular patron and a donor. We sat in the library that day, her reading through census records and me reading inhaling the smell of old books and documents.
That memory came back full force when I read this poem by Dave Malone in his collection Bypass.
Great Aunt
Autumn morning too cold
for its own good. The day
she buries her last sister.
Behind the country church,
with her back to the timber,
she sits straight in a crooked
funeral chair, its feet dug in
like leaning fence posts.
Unpinned, her white hair floats
in the wind, never falling back
in place, and her blue eyes
leave the entourage, hide deep
in the brown ridge past the steeple.
Half-shelled acorns crunch
like old cow bones beneath my boots
as I approach to give condolences
to this blazing lamp so unlike
the ghost in the ground.
I want to tell her everything,
tell her, she has to live forever.
Never leave the farm.
Never leave
me.
Malone does something interesting in these poems. He writes with a wry humor and a deep affection, but it’s an affection that doesn’t prevent him from seeing clearly. He writes with a deep love for his aunt, his mother, his grandfather, a debate teacher, friends, and a history professor. He also sees their flaws, their humanness. And he knows these people have shaped his own life.
Dave Malone
And it’s not just people, but events and experiences as well. Some seem like small things – a visit to an amusement park, a college road trip, a family reunion, children’s ball games, disappointing a friend, a float trip. Like his poems about people, Malone writes with a simplicity, almost a starkness; the stories he tells don’t need adornment or massive elaboration.
Malone is the author of seven other poetry collections: Under the Sycamore (2011); Poems to Love and the Body (2011); Seasons in Love (2013); View from the North 10: Poems After Mark Rothko’s No. 15 (2013); O: Love Poems from the Ozarks (2015); You Know the Ones (2017), and Tornado Drill (2022). He’s also published a two-act play, The Hearts of Blue Whales (2013) and a poetry chapbook, 23 Sonnets (2011). His poems have been published in Midwest Review, Fourteen Hills, Bellevue Literary Revue, and Red Rock Review, among many others. He lives in the Missouri Ozarks.
Like its predecessors, Bypass is grounded in landscapes and the people who inhabit them. And Malone is saying these are the people and the everyday experiences of life that shape us.
Related:
Dave Malone and Tornado Drill.
Dave Malone and You Know the Ones.
Dave Malone and O: Love Poems from the Ozarks.
Dave Malone and View from the North Ten.
Dave Malone’s Under the Sycamore.
Photo by brando, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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