Going Back
By Jim Neely
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About this ebook
In his sixth collection of poetry, Going Back, poet Jim Neely takes us on the long road from youth to old age with a wide array of human insights. He presents richly sensitive poetry overflowing with love and laughter for all things human and a voice that rings true with inevitable insights.
The poems in this collection are intentionally scattered throughout the seven stages of man. In Pitchfork, a boy lies on his back gazing up in darkness with his father, learning how to calculate the distance of storms from a strike of lightening. A member of The Greatest Generation, Neely shows what made men so proud to go to war for their country. There is the joyful love of a first marriage in Honeymoon and the sadness of divorce in Dream House.
He struggles alone to unearth Hemingways grave in the midst of an Idaho snowstorm in A Farewell to Arms and recalls his incomparable fathers love of children in The Cardboard Slide and Swinging with Heather.
Direct and straightforward, yet realistic and imaginative in style, Neelys collection of verse explores a lifetime of experiences and emotions with pathos, humor, and startling resolutions.
Jim Neely
Dr.Neely was born and raised in Harrisburg , PA . He graduated from Princeton University and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons . He received his surgery training in Cincinnati and was awarded a research fellowship at UCSF where he became a Professor of Surgery and had a private practice in San Francisco for 40 years. He loves sports and has been a skier , sailer, and tournament tennis player . He has five children and six grandchildren , and lives with his wile Patti in Palm Desert , California .
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Going Back - Jim Neely
Copyright © 2013 Jim Neely.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1194-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4917-1196-5 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4917-1195-8 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013919557
iUniverse rev. date: 11/09/2013
Contents
The Tightrope Worker
Swinging with Heather
Poppy Is Dead
A Farewell to Arms
Ingénue
Dancing Class
Honeymoon
The Liberation
Pitchfork
Sushi
The Mint Doctor
Rust
La Belle Dame Sans
Swan Lake
Vickie’s Stylish Umbilicus
Broke
Her Biopsy Report
First Overnight at Gramps
The Greatest Generation
A Sight to See
Déjà Vu
Going Back
The Kiss
Roses
The Philanthropist
Forbearance
The Cure
Hot Air Balloon
Doctor Nearly
The Sweet Spot
Leda
The Nutcracker Again
A Soft Shoe for Maybelle
For Patti Hospitalized
First Responder
Low Impact
The Leaves
Send-Off
For George
Sunday
At the Tollbooth
The Rose Bowl Parade
The Church’s One Foundation
The Leak
Once
Taste
Ham
The Clocks Bar
Molly
The Cardboard Slide
Their New Chem Teacher
The Burden Lesson
My Feminine Side
Up in the Old Hotel
To Vivian Gone
Opening Ceremony
The Barges
Entropy
Day Of Infamy
Yellow Rumped Warblers
Awakening
Mileage
Mercy
Fall Gathering
How Life Begins
Cobweb
January
On Yeats’s Tower
Ellendean
Encore Paree
Basic Need
Beatitude
Jaundiced
Trinh
Being Two Places at Once
Grand Central
Blackie
Pops at Large
The Living End
Diva
Sometimes
Settlers
Without Children
Minnie Gates
Purgatory
Game Face
Party Pooper
The Trill
Haunted
Envoi
Denouement
Harrison Street
The Assistant
The Clot
The Solution
March 1941
The Travelers
Joe
Spunky
The Interview
Au Milieu de La Nuit
PSA
Wake
My Autopsy
Trapper John
How Are You
Impaired
Betwixt
Oneiric
Leisure
The Last Time
Animula
How to Listen
Groundhog Day 1896
Waiting for Triple A
Age Three Remi Has to Go
Christmas 2011
The Bouquet
Pigeons
Nurse Maria Theresa
Goosed
July 4
Waiting For W. S. Merwin
My Son The Surgeon
The Bite
Young Lovers
Breakfast Nook
Reservatus
Blocked
Stymie
Reunions
Class Notes
Fetal
Doing the Math 2012
My Jeremy
Eulogy
Sleeping Alone
Dream House
Aliquot
Stoplight
My Ocular Migraine
Afterword
Also By Jim Neely
POEMS
Quarrel In Straw 1972
Pillars 1972
A Partial Victory 1974
Reconsiderations 1976
Blessings 1977
PROSE
Gender, The Myth Of Equality 1981
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
MY Life Before And After San Francisco 2006
ESSAYS
How Your Surgeon Feels 2009
to Patti
The Tightrope Worker
Angel in the velvet moon
I cannot catch your eye
you prance such steeples full of fun
your golden scissors two are one
above a deadly sky
unlike below where goad is gain
yours no fear of slip
fatality but finality
cast off with charmer’s quip
your high dance begs fear of fail
pure to the joy pursue
O hurry down
teach your weave to us
wink on us anew
end is only end itself
whatever you chance to do
Swinging with Heather
The laughter that fun-curdles your tummy
turns your sky forever into my love lap
will always own the stretch of clear blue
you’ve learned to seek
with your head thrown back
against the wind
yours is this everlasting gem
to tell the world you better be a better place
than he has lived this past century
as with your smile
a sway pendant of truth today
my tear-dusted face
suddenly knows
we have already done as much
for you as we can
and what you must find yourself now is unlearned
the opening to those whom else madness
I must trust will swing you
half so well as us
Poppy Is Dead
For Christopher
We explained to him
something might enter to a sleeping bird
catch one wing in a corner
pin him unsuspecting in a cage corner
where his towel had not been responsibly drawn
rip out a socket there cleanly
shearing feathers about
before there was even time to cry out
in the night
shit happens
thin bird blood could seep out
noiseless before we knew it
something escapes
something inside him sated
into the darkness of his life
unaware while the bright plumage left
folded slowly in upon itself breathless
like he found it still this morning
so coldly
he packed all the feathers he could find
in the one best candy box
and beneath his high rope
hung from the useless old split oak by the studio
beneath her spread root he dug him deep
a cover with the finest granular glass around
and from the swing circling above
smiling overall he cried
rest down there all of you
your crazy peace
A Farewell to Arms
In the dreary Idaho winter
a man at the one grocery store
there in Ketchum
gave me a lead pipe scraper and told me
you’re still young enough
you can maybe probe him
in this blizzard we’re having
the great man lay somewhere near
the back cemetery
across from Baldy Mountain
so he can watch the skiers
cosseted by two small cedars
I went the worst day the worst winter in years
six-foot ice drifts covered the stones
you brought one up
flat slabs impossible to read
names all frosted
I chipped and picked layer after layer
double-blind sweat and sleet
double-blind fighting the challenge
be strong
I said
like he wanted me to be
true cool in adversity
for hours slab after slab till finally
one came up ILLER followed by INGWAY
through