Michael Lavers is the author of After Earth, published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Best New Poets 2015, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, and the Michigan Quarterly Review Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets. He has degrees from Brigham Young University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Utah. Together with his wife, the writer and artist Claire Åkebrand, and their two children, he lives in Provo, Utah, and teaches poetry at BYU.
Works
The Burden of Humans
The Burden of Humans
The grass just has to wave, the birds just have
to sing. The grapes don’t wonder what light is;
the light just lights them, and the grapes grape back.
The golden oaks just shed their summer dresses
on the lawn—but you? You have to read
Spinoza in the garden while the light
is good. You have to keep your focus as
the motorcycles scream out of the purple hills.
You have to sweat, and laugh, and weatherproof
the bedroom windows, and remember
names and dates, the town your parents met—
Milk River or Swan Hills?—and when they died,
you have to sweep the kitchen floor and then
define the good, the true, the beautiful,
or try, because azaleas can’t see themselves,
the squirrels are busy, and the ferns have closed.
The frost tattoos its sermon on the rose,
but in a language only you can read;
you have to know that all things pass and perish,
and that what you’ve said is finite, but continue—
as if grand exceptions might be made—
raking the leaves, stacking the wood, hoping
the child falls asleep against your chest,
hoping the blizzard swerves, knowing the wreckage
of the present will be gathered but
not soon, and not by you, because you’re in it,
there somewhere, under the sheet of snow.
Coda
Coda
From the garden rose the sound of bees
that lurched and wobbled through the peonies.
We ate eggs and toast with milk that warmed
in minutes in the sun while fat drones swarmed
and looped like bullets misfired from the fields.
It was the sound the mind makes when it yields
to glutted blood. I didn’t understand,
until one smelled the syrup on your hand,
and in a gold-encrusted, drunken strut,
smeared pollen from its mandibles and gut
along your wrist. That morning you had tied
your hair, and as you rose and ran inside,
it gently bounced, and loosed, and then unfurled.
If the next is better, I’ll still miss this world.
Your Father at Fourteen
Your Father at Fourteen
Already tall, all femur and no thigh,
and tripping on my shadow like a new giraffe.
Not your father, but his epigraph,
and not the rider, but the rider’s horse, just feeding
my way through the universe. My eyes
a dirty gas-stove blue, my hair as thick and dirty
as those van Gogh brushstrokes flecked with soil,
shipwrecked bugs, whatever wafted
through that blue Dutch air. I’d walk
to where the wind huddled for warmth
inside the harbour, carrying some comic in my coat,
and smash glass bottles on the pier till I got caught,
perfecting my ambition and regret,
miming rebellion with a fescue cigarette.
I knew the names of birds, but not their calls,
not girls, only their garish names,
which I could coax, if I repeated them,
to drop their living referents like a dress,
revealing stranger nakedness,
and rhythms as translucent as a fire ant’s wing.
I couldn't see the ocean from my window,
but could smell its salt, and sometimes hear
the surf revving its engine, stalling eddies
and loquacious jets, the Narrows where
I once hauled up an oxblood octopus,
slashed badly by the hook, and saw
my own reflection settle like a bruise
into its coiling polaroid of skin.
This was the one past I was in.
I spat, and sluffed, and copiously slept,
I slept as if a mustache could be spun from sleep,
or sleep might sugar and ferment even the air
to muscle. I multiplied my best joy
by my hardest grief, and chose to like it here:
the long, dark, winter afternoons, the way
the mayflies hatched in vetch; I wasn’t mortal yet:
I hadn’t watched you first chew honeydew
or warmed this cup of milk to coax you back to bed.
But one day late in March, I thought, almost, of you:
the adults placed their bets on when the ice
over the lake would break and take the junk cars
left to sink. I dared myself to walk out there,
and got halfway before a long, low groan
revealed a universe of cracks and coming aftershocks.
The ice hummed like a song that I could feel
would end, and soon, bringing the future
with it, shapeless as the teal-grey water,
shadowy, and bright, and almost real.
The Angel In Charge of Creating Earth Addresses His Cohort
The Angel In Charge of Creating Earth Addresses His Cohort
Who cares if more important worlds have been
assigned to those more skillful, who make crusts
that never crack, or plates too fixed to creep
or jostle or explode? Ours are the splendors
of the makeshift, of the good enough,
of cold May wind, wailing and barbed and riven,
coastlines ragged as a vulture’s wing,
of maggots and voles, a vast legion of catalysts
and scavengers the top worlds are deprived of,
worlds where the joins are tight, with skies
unyieldingly cloudless, only blue.
Believe your errors, what they lead you to.
Those patches we forgot to water?
Call them deserts, hide there all our
misbegotten dregs, the scorpions
and saltbush beds, blind rats, weird toads.
What’s perfect is by definition free
of difference—but uncountable and great
are the variations of failure. Take this ostrich,
my self-portrait: botched and brainless,
but still capturing my flouncy abandon,
my leathery grace. Take humans, no two cracked
the same, some warped or knotted, bent of back,
some dragging weak-seamed hearts toward stagnation.
Even the lava spreads its glaze in ways
that no trained hand could replicate,
a slow terrible fluency that bleeds and burps
and teaches those who live nearby to love
what ends, to build what walls they must,
to graft their growing hopes to gravity,
and move more upright through the tilted world.
Don’t envy them, those better makers; let them
envy you, not doomed to mastery,
still stunned by your mistakes, the broken
pomp of cow, the fraying homespun jellyfish,
the accidents of beauty, which, once realized,
can never be forgotten or undone.
Bibliography
- After Earth, University of Tampa Press, 2019