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    Broken Symmetry
    Broken Symmetry
    Broken Symmetry
    Ebook129 pages53 minutes

    Broken Symmetry

    By Jack Ridl

    5/5

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    About this ebook

    Michigan poet Jack Ridl leads readers into reflective connection with the everyday world in this unique and enjoyable volume.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayne State University Press
    Release dateMar 21, 2006
    ISBN9780814335208
    Broken Symmetry
    Author

    Jack Ridl

    Jack Ridl is professor of English at Hope College, Holland, Michigan. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and poetry journals. Broken Symmetry is his third volume of poetry. Ridl has also published three chapbooks, two college literary textbooks, two literary anthologies, and is recipient of several awards for his teaching of young poets.

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    • 5/5
      Jack is my "father" poet. I took classes from him in poetry at Hope and I must say that his poetry gets better and better. Broken Symmetry is so beautiful and so exquisite that I feel I have to take a moment to savor each poem after I'm done reading it.

    Book preview

    Broken Symmetry - Jack Ridl

    Way

    broken

        symmetry

    Jack Ridl

    © 2006 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

    Manufactured in the United States of America.

    10 09 08        5 4 3 2

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8143-3322-8    ISBN-10: 0-8143-3322-2

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Ridl, Jack.

    Broken symmetry : poems / Jack Ridl.

    p. cm. -- (Made in Michigan writers series)

    ISBN 0-8143-3322-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    I. Title. II. Series.

    PS3568.I3593B76 2006

    811’.54—dc22

    2005035885

    This book is supported by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

    Designed and typeset by Maya Rhodes

    Composed in Horley Old Style MT and News Gothic

    E-book ISBN: 978-0-8143-3520-8

    For Meridith and for Julie, love in every line.

    Contents

    Broken Symmetry

    I. Fractals

    The History of the Pencil

    This Is Another Reason to Write a Poem

    Against Elegies

    Rainbow

    Framing the Morning

    After Reading Dom John Chapman, Benedictine Abbot

    Learning from Old Houses

    Last Chores of Fall

    Fractals

    Fragments from the Early Morning

    The Last Thing

    This Was My Real Life

    Waiting with William Stafford in an Oregon Airport

    Toys in the Attic

    St. Francis in Disney World

    The Crank Collector

    That’s Enough

    The Mail Carrier

    Tinnitus

    Out in the Fields with the Dogs a Week before Christmas

    The Materialism of Angels

    II. Quantum Theory

    I Am Wearing Your Shirt

    Worn Morning

    When I Was Conceived

    What Then

    Forgetting How to Sleep

    The Remote

    The Ace of Spades

    Sorting through the Records

    February Is No Month to Move

    During the Last Two Weeks of His Life, He Wrote Only the Last Lines of Poems

    Waking Up in a Cold Sweat

    Hands

    Tabula Rasa

    The Salt and Pepper Collector

    The Sculptor of TV

    The Time between Mornings

    Traveling Back

    Selling the House

    Evensong

    Still Here

    III. Differential Equations

    Aubade for This Morning

    On Our Dog’s Birthday

    Flying in over Key West

    Divine Women: The Woodblocks of Utamaro

    The Rain on the Burren

    Walking the Creek with Dogs

    Setting out the Puzzle Pieces

    The Gardeners

    My Father Gardening in Heaven

    Raking Leaves with the Gods in July

    A Few Days before Another Memorial Day Weekend

    Knowing Now You’ll Never Be a Clown

    Repairing the House

    Sisley’s Snow at Louveciennes

    Instead of Vacationing in Maine

    The Comforting

    The Drywallers Listen to Sinatra while They Work

    What We Do

    Waiting on the Beatitudes

    The Man Who Wanted to Change the World

    Burying the Poems

    Keeping On

    Living in the Twenty-First Century

    Acknowledgments

    Credits

    Broken Symmetry

    Angels never have to worry

    about their wings: lose a feather here

    or there, a new perfection floats down

    across the landscape, catching itself

    on its cousin the tree branch, landing

    on its second cousin the leaf, or even

    along its third cousin twice removed,

    the blacktop highway. There is so much

    symmetry that in the mirror your left

    side resembles your left side even though

    it’s never quite the same as your

    right. Go deeper. All the cells split

    into identical ice dancers, all

    the electrons spin the same bacchanal.

    Only the broken reveals, gives

    the universe its chance at being

    interesting, says a door is not

    an elephant, the moon is not a

    salad fork. So break the bread

    in two, drink half the glass of wine,

    slice the baby down the middle, cut

    the corner, divide the time. Tonight

    the moon will once again reflect the sun’s

    monotonous dazzle, and the old light

    making its dumb way to us will break

    our symmetry of coming home,

    of passing on the street.

    I

    Fractals

    The History of the Pencil

    Even as you sit staring at the light

    on the new computer that came with speakers

    and disks that hold golf games, soundtracks

    from the movies of the forties and a way to rhyme

    every word except those stubborn loners silver,

    purple, and orange, you have to wonder

    how this most elemental of juxtapositions,

    this marriage that few families would allow,

    this wedding of wood and lead, wandered

    into some pause in the daydreams

    of whom. Even Thoreau, that son

    of the pencil-making family who recorded

    every move of a leaf, who listed each essential

    object for a twelve-day trek into the woods

    of Maine—"Matches; soap, two pieces; old

    newspapers, three; and blanket, seven feet long"—

    neglected to note his pencil. Imagine, held

    by the hand of the keeper of Walden

    as he, in all his assured solitude, attended

    to everything

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