Down the Line

Honorable Mention, 2013 HSA Renku Awards
Nijuin

Tom Clausen, Ithaca, New York
Yu Chang, Schenectady, New York
John Stevenson, Nassau, New York
Hilary Tann, Schuylerville, New York

Judges: Norman Darlington and Linda Papanicolaou

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Down the Line

freight train
sumac red
all down the line

frosted windows
on our little house

tilt of heads
viewing the moon
from a canyon

a full set of
mother’s best china

surprise offering
to a snake charmer
in Mumbai

her stockings
over the chair

scrolling down
to savor
the x’s and o’s

dust motes shudder
in a shaft of light

I wonder
who has John Wills’
cold box of nails

election day coup
for the 99%

all eyes
on the whistle blower
in the boardroom

a weakness for
baked potatoes

the click
of her tongue ring
against my teeth

no holding back
on the empty beach

at the dude ranch
coyotes howl
even on moonless nights

just a ghost of Lincoln
on this old penny . . .

veterans
admitted for free
at the arcade

some heirloom seeds
fall by the wayside

a Woodstock
of cherry blossoms
in the formal garden

my kite
aloft

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Judges’ Commentary:

“Down the Line” is the product of four writers whose blend of voices also indicates an easy familiarity. It opens vividly with a freight train of red box cars against the autumn foliage of sumac trees along the railroad tracks, and nearby a small house—“our house”—with its windows frosted from the warmth inside, and closes with a lamentation on wars and corrosion of values, against which the Woodstock era seems like a lost paradise. Despite that a kite, still hopefully aloft. Especially in comparison to the first-and second-place renku, its minimalism can seem a shock to the system—witness the three-word ageku. As judges we differ in our responses to this: for one it inclined towards a series of separate stills; for the other, the minimalism and separation of verses gave the poem a laconic quality of voice that was consistent with the setting of the hokku and waki. Both judges, however, agreed that the result of this choice brought problems, in that the linking is often vague or mechanical. There are some wonderful pairings—shuddering dust motes to cold box of nails; the humour of passionately kissing a young woman with tongue-piercing, then zooming out to that vintage clinch between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. But overall the linking in the ha seems more thought than felt, with a consequent lack of a sense of momentum. On another note, it took effort to avoid reading a certain degree of kannonbiraki (reversion) in the alternation of indoor and outdoor imagery that runs from the middle of side 1 through the first verses of side 2.

At a subliminal level, there are what seem to be threads of theme running through the poem. The most prominent of these is the hokku’s railroad imagery, which returns in various elusive whiffs in the cold nails, the “whistle-blower,” the baked potato (a dining car specialty of the Northern Pacific), and “clink,” so that at times the poem seems to be circling back and reexamining itself from different angles. But this is done in such a subtle manner as to provide a great part of the poem’s power, and is in no danger of crossing into the realm of “thematic renku.” Overall a skillfully executed poem grounded in a strong sense of place.

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