Status Quo, the Roman, wakes with a wine
Hangover, cursing in casual, but correct Latin
Ludmilla, drunken aediles, the bar brawl—
Attitude and language cowboy, country western.
A water clock counts the ancient hours.
He chews a strip of willow bark, listens
To dormice dine in a terra cotta glirarium,
Hasn’t the foggiest he’s fantasy or B. C., years
And years pre-Jesus, the obscure crucifixion.

And there you have it: history, intrinsic time.
No need for channeling magic, the paranormal,
Only that we know from grave goods and our own
Well-worn habits the trick of glimpsing
Small lives and silence, the ripening of mice.
Indignans, cupidus, he shuts the door and trips
Down five stories to the one-way Via Aeternum,
Takes the first turn and is lost to the future,
To the auspices of water: drip, drip, drip…

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Like innocence in chemo naïve,
Like hip in titanium hip,
Like discomfort’s make-believe,
And peace in a propofol drip:

Your prepped-for-ectomy cheer,
In johnny and birthday suit,
At the doctor’s determined sir,
The nurse’s consoling cute.

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1/
A midday moon says nothing of love:
Albedo ash, atmosphere none,
Heedless of sign or madness, amour.
Philly-to-Phoenix wide but thumb-
Covered, the pale, distressed denim,
Attic of landers, forgotten tools,
The poked eye predicted by Méliès,
Le Voyage dans La Lune, 1902.

2/
Dusk summons the idea of light:
A western crescent in ichor white,
Bleaching demon detail, place.
Or full and orange, helped by horizon
In the darkened east, an Old Man
Or Selene, the mind’s eye. Hey,
Diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle…
The illusion of huge. Let us pray.

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The poems in John J. Ronan’s new book, The Idea of Light, soar between earth and sky, body and soul, the sacred and the profane with deftness and ease. Roving through myriad subjects and sentiments ranging from the tender to the ferocious, Ronan lifts us into the cosmos while also rooting us firmly to the ground beneath our stumbling feet. Comprised of three parts, I. Halo and Clay, II. A Certain Rich Man, and III. Ether and Belief, the book explores humanity’s wanderings in spaces both minute and vast. From suburban living rooms to ancient Egypt, from a Parisian café to a veterinary clinic, the poet roves through an array of locales with intelligence, curiosity, and wit.

The title/first poem considers the moon in daylight—bland, dispassionate. “A midday moon says nothing of love: / Albedo ash, atmosphere none, / Heedless of sign or madness, amour,” Ronan writes. “Dusk summons the idea of light: / A Western crescent in ichor white,” evoking fecundity, mythos, and creativity even while the final line yanks us back to earth, for the moon appears as “The illusion of huge. Let us pray.” Other poems evoke a similar pulley-like sensation. “The Pedestal” recounts Catholicism’s fetishizing of the Virgin Mary—that “In the seminary, priests-to-be thought of girls / In Marian images mostly, real flesh / Deflected by confessors urging their celibate selves / And mentored boys to believe only in blessed / Virgins, chaste vessels of the Holy Ghost.” Imagine their surprise, then, encountering a “Mix of piety and dry martinis, lust” in a flesh-and-blood woman. “Human love,” the poet writes, is “laminate, halo and clay,” the saintly and the bodily, a combination embodied in his partner that continues to surprise the speaker decades later.

Poems in Part I explore the range of human experience along with elements of the natural world. In “The Servitude of Eavesdrop,” a couple watch their new neighbors through their living room window like silver-screen images from the silent era; “Nothing You Need” rues the gentrification transforming Main Street, USA, into shoppes hawking soaps, candles, and kale, the “bright brew pub / Featuring Pumpkin Harvest ale”; “A Lumberyard in Gloucester, Massachusetts” ponders harvested wood processed into all manner of objects—“Someone’s dream house, a new garage”—and priced accordingly. The wonderful four-part “Windowsill” meditates on objects seen beneath an office window—as quartz alchemized into a magic jewel, as an ancient pharaoh’s glory reduced to the “Knick knack status” of a small figurine.

In a similar vein, “Princess Ennigaldi” reflects on relics and museums, our penchant for preserving and exploiting the past. The speaker and his partner leave the museum wing of mummified remains, packed with schoolchildren, for a quieter section displaying “the pottery of Kish and Ur— / Where the young Ennigaldi, daughter of Nabonidus, / Assembled the world’s first museum / In 530 B.C. / With something like the urgency of a teen memoir,” a brilliant simile I read over and over, along with the surprising and poignant final line, “Whatever was the Princess thinking?”

The conceit flows into the next poem, “Leaving Thebes,” which imagines “The mummy diaspora who journeyed off / By plane or train, a stagecoach, ship, / To Europe, the East, the New World. / Like Princess Kherima . . . A nobody, really . . .” Her voyage to Brazil ends in literal flames, her body reduced to ashes in a tragic museum fire of 2018. The poem’s collapsing of time and space and critique of traditional museums brings to mind my own recent experience at the British Museum. In the Ancient Egypt wing (where else?), I stared at a crate housing the skeletal remains of a teenaged girl, and I wept for her.

The first poem of Part II features Dives, a rich man whose experience of descending into hell is told in the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In Ronan’s poem, Dives justifies his “misdemeanors”: his wealth, his empty gestures towards the poor and the suffering, and his stubborn refusal, still, to listen to Lazarus’s instructions to heed Moses and the Prophets to find salvation. Ronan situates the figure of Dives in other poems in Part II as observer, Everyman, or perhaps a stand-in for the poet himself.

“Confirmation Bias” evokes the section’s opening poem in critiquing our uncanny ability to conduct or find research that sanctions our worst impulses and actions, that fosters the “everyone gets a trophy for showing up” culture. In “Transgender,” an aging man finds it easier to pee sitting down, “The gender expression now appropriate” along with his exasperation with the men in his life “Whose fickle piss dries on tiles . . . / Dives’ toilette is a fixed routine: / Tinkle neatly, and with impatience, clean.” “On Rejection” wryly encapsulates the shit sandwich that is the rejection letter all writers know: praise for the writer’s style, reasons why the piece is unsuited for publication, then “a switch / To poetry’s prosaic, publishing concerns— / The next issue’s theme, a subscription pitch, / A sincere request for preferred pronouns.” Dives imagines the recent co-ed, oh so hip, churning out such letters. “He would not kick them out of bed.”

Closing Part II is the devastating “On Regrets” in which the speaker imagines those who die by suicide having regrets at the last moment, when it’s too late. “Dives believes compressed reflection / Must oftentimes include regret, / Prompted by pain, by embarrassing / Grammar lapses in the whiny note, / By not having seen as bright challenge / Life’s suddenly welcome uncertainty.” I’m haunted and inspired by this whipsaw of thoughts, the sudden and tardy revelation of the last two lines.

The poems in Part III Ether and Belief continue to engage earthly and cosmic realms, blurring the two in fascinating ways. “Quietus” features an American tourist in England going through the motions. “This endless English summer day,” the poem begins, “You cruise the Thames, ride the Eye, / Snap the changing palace guards,” zip through museums, and attend a performance of Hamlet in the evening. The figure’s mind drifts from the action on the stage, though, as he pictures the dust accumulating, the plants drying out in his empty house back home. Leaving the theater, he’s “Swept quickly along by the city and green / Lights, the crosswalks counting down” as he, we imagine, counts down the minutes until he can go home. The back-to-back “4015 Alabama” and “Mom’s Watch” reflect on the past, consciousness, and the vagaries of memory. “The Procedure” and “On Placebos” take us along with aging, ailing bodies into hospitals and recovery rooms.

The book’s final poem, “Flight Time,” resembles “On Language” from Part I in its participant-observer noting the people around him. “The rough runway lumbering ends,” the poem begins, “In uplift of this lucky machine / Into ether and belief,”—into power, precarity, and volatility all at once. Such is the condition of riding in a plane and our human condition as well. We see “Rosaried old, second honeymooners / . . . / A burka. A suit. Sweat clothes.” We see the rituals of a transatlantic flight in “A second meal and movie, scotch” / . . . Seatbelt warnings Off and On.” Overheard disconnected bits of conversation. And then, we prepare for landing, “The plane motionless in surrounding cloud. / Position lights blink on the wings.” “Flight Time” beautifully concludes The Idea of Light, its plane soaring high into the air while those inside live out the mundane realities of the everyday. Is life a miracle? Is it absurd? Is there a true light to inspire and guide us? Or is the light just an idea, a suggestion we cling to in order to survive? I appreciate the images and questions raised by Ronan’s provocative, beautiful book.

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News of a new collection of poems by John Ronan is always a thrill. I have known and admired his work since the time I read his first chapbook. A true Renaissance man, I think of Ronan as sitting in a rarefied and well-deserved catbird seat. Ronan casts a wide, wide net . . . quintessential lyric poem on one page, a daunting poem of space travel, AI’s creep, on the next. One of the poems in this new collection closes with this: “And it’s like that all around us. Almost everything.” Reader, get ready to peer into the “everything” of John Ronan’s oeuvre. Enjoy.

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When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?

I remember wanting to write – always, anything. One of my earliest memories is of reading the Chicago Tribune comics with my father: Pogo, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy…. I started a Dick Tracy novel when I was six. In the words of Dylan Thomas, “I tumbled for words at once.” The turn to poetry was a gradual process, through exposure to nursery rhymes and through high school, college, reading Thomas and Frost and Auden… The joy of writing poetry matched and then passed that of prose and, well, I was better at it. Gave up prose, mostly, though I’ve done a good deal of journalism over the years.

Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?

I do. I write every morning for about three hours and sometimes it is wonderful and deep, sometimes tedious, unproductive. But as Tim O’Brien once told me, “You have to put in the butt time.” And I believe that. A writer has to sit down to the job and be ready when (if) the lightning strikes. The schedule extends to the afternoon, too, for a couple of hours, but that is usually secretarial work: mail and email, submissions, correspondence, lining up readings….

Where do your poems most often come from – an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

I like your list. My answer is: “Yes.” I can think of poems coming from all of those sources. It doesn’t really seem there’s a majority from any type of source. The subconscious toils away and when something is about to pop up into awareness, anything can trigger that process. Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art once prompted a poem, the Boston Marathon another, riding the One train in NYC, a meal, drinks, funerals…they are always fertile, of course.

Which writers (living or dead) do you feel have influenced you the most?

Names pop up: Yeats and Heaney. Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan. Kooser and Collins. Derek Mahon, William Meredith. On the other side of the fence: Welty, Marquez, Camus, Elmore Leonard. More and more I re-read books, even individual poems, go back again and again, say, to Bishop’s “The Moose” or Derek Mahon’s “A Garage in County Cork.” I really believe the most important tool a poet has is recognizing what doesn’t work, throwing it out, and going back at the problem again. Reading (poetry or prose, plays) creates that sense.

Tell us a little bit about your new collection: what’s the significance of the title? are there over-arching themes? what was the process of assembling it? was is a project book?

The key to the book, naturally, is the title poem: “Taking the Train of Singularity South from Midtown.” I have often had, on subways, trains, and planes a sensation of not having to go anywhere anymore; I am already there, everywhere, among my fellow brothers and sisters, rich and diverse humanity. Most powerfully, that has been a sensation in New York City, riding – in reality and symbolically – the One train. The bulk of the book is about that sensation in other places, other moods.

To give a little background, I’ll risk repeating myself a bit. Love and language create community, an idea more crucial in America today than it has been in many decades. It is the theme of the book. There is little confessional self-reference – or only when I couldn’t help it. During a term as poet laureate in Gloucester, MA, a commitment to civic poetry – a poetry of place and witness – grew strong. By civic poetry, I mean poems written for the public on community topics. I mean poetry accessible to an attentive, general audience. And since it is often meant to be read in public, I mean poetry that relies heavily on sound and familiar forms: rhyming tricks, assonance, consonance, regular rhythms, refrains, the workhorse sonnet… And of course, civic poetry, like all poetry, is insightful and fresh, never talks down.

Some fine civic poems have been written for inaugurations. Sadly, there have been only six, counting James Dickey’s work, read at an event the evening of Carter’s inauguration. I keep in mind two lines from Miller Williams’s “Of History and Hope,” read January 20, 1997:
“We mean to be the people we meant to be,
To keep on going where we meant to go.”

The book’s development was straightforward process: sorting out the best I’d done the last few years, pulling what didn’t – recognizing what didn’t work. Then, going back and forth with editors and friends on the poems’ strengths, weaknesses, their placement.

© Mass Poetry 2018

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The following essay appeared in The Gloucester Daily Times, The Salem Evening News, and other publications.

Dog School

I taught Cowboy to sit, to lie down, and not to walk on the dining room table. I also coaxed him into looking at sunrise for a few seconds, now and then. Apart from that, the education was one-sided. I learned to stop and smell roses. I learned the one-second grudge. I learned headlong hope. I learned to roll in leaves. Cowboy also rolled in dead fish, a yelping celebration of life I didn’t quite understand, though it was consistent with the examples I did follow. He was pretty much happy about everything, all the time.

Cowboy had been a stray near Ucross, Wyoming, a ranch I was visiting in the spring of 1994. The vet in nearby Buffalo said the black lab was mixed with collie, about six months old, and had probably been abandoned after the worst of the snow and cold, a concession to survival chances. I adopted him, named him after the state’s logo, and then headed home to Gloucester, Massachusetts, on a three day drive. Cowboy sat in the passenger seat during the day and I’d sneak him into motels at night. With that start, we spent most of his thirteen years together, the last few every day, all day, home and office.

My first lessons were about his past. For months he’d turn at the rumble of any pick-up truck. And he had bunked in a barn or trailer because the first night home he climbed the stairs with slow amazement. The bunk itself was high because that same night, and every one after and during thunderstorms, he clambered under our bed with quick familiarity. One day he even hinted at a previous name. My wife and I were talking about an actor we’d just seen and suddenly the newly christened puppy perked and jumped. But the odds that he had really been named Paul Scofield seemed so remote we stayed with Cowboy.

Of course, Cowboy couldn’t teach me how to solve problems, not in a detailed way, but he did listen with patience, providing an acceptable form of adult self talk, without the billing. There were also clear priorities. Dogs never diss, but it’s instructive what they ignore: TV, fashion, politics, the NFL, cars, cash. Super Bowl or Survivor or whoppers on Fox, it makes no difference. Offer a dog a hundred dollar bill and he walks away as if it were broccoli.

Let’s be frank. Dogs don’t think. Or if they do, it rises only to the level of inkling. Neither do dogs reason or have a sense of morality, our great invisible fence. I have never read these things into dogs. But neither exactly is there any lack of reason or lack of morals. It’s more that reason and morality have been considered, taken for what they’re worth, then trimmed down before they could interfere with the indicative mood, the hopeful, precise present where dogs so innocently live. It’s always Eden with a dog.

And so, Cowboy. He was happy with March. Or September. 3:00 a.m. was wonderful. Or noon. He greeted rain or sun with the same gladness. Snow and ocean were wonderful. Cheese, wonderful. Monday, wonderful. He’d shift from sleep to alert joy instantly, brown eyes again surprised and pleased by existence. He would cock his big black head at nothing and give it a bark.

Dogs do have vocabulary. Cowboy recognized ‘beach,’ ‘walk,’ ‘ball,’ ‘Sandy,’ and ‘John,’ all action words because it’s about doing with a dog, nothing is lyrical. At these sounds he jumped, cried and barked at once, by which he meant: ‘just so, oh yes yes!’ Other words included: ‘office,’ ‘bedtime,’ ‘up,’ ‘down,’ and ‘car’. He especially liked the verb ‘cheese.’ And, of course, he recognized ‘Cowboy,’ though if we referred generically to ‘the dog’ in conversation, he would turn, knowing that reference too, and be enormously uninsulted.

Cowboy’s favorite word was ‘out,’ to which he responded: ‘just so, oh yes yes yes!’ Most days we’d drive to the beach. If dog fog built up or if it was warm, I rolled down his window and he’d hang his head in the breeze, a lesson for living we all recognize. After the beach, he’d get back into the car with a single collected rock, much sand, and park his wet self with a happy sigh. At the bakery, we split a donut. Then we’d drive around for a while listening to Rameau or the Stones.

When Cowboy died, friends said, “Get another dog.” As if I were not missing Cowboy and our story, from that bright Wyoming spring to the vet vigils. A particular being who acknowledged me, whom I knew particularly, each of us for thirteen years a part of the other’s identifying world. No dog for now, not in ricochet, not in grief over a death that remains impossible. Cowboy is in the yard, on the sofa, under the bed, this desk. I still look for him in split seconds of hope before reason interferes. Denial? Just so.

In this empty house, Cowboy will slowly become his picture, passing into that fond anonymity that pet portraits have. Someone’s beloved dog. I’ve already given his food to the birds. I don’t flush the toilet twice or answer a staccato bark that means he’s again stitched himself to the pear tree. I am learning how not to have a dog. It’s a difficult lesson and one I don’t quite understand, but I will master it, like the others. I am living in the present. I am eating cheese.

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