No one sounds like W. S. Di Piero. Explosive language, rough sensuousness, unflinching eye—here is a poet who will not look away, and who is always committed to poetry’s first purpose: to bring song. TOMBO is a book of lyrics fueled in equal parts by realism and big-fish storytelling, a book of wanderers, foghorns, summer rain, feral cats, and city jazz. Built on heartbreak particulars, these poems are raw, mysterious dilations of the moments of existence.
TOMBO is the latest book in the McSweeney’s Poetry Series. If you subscribe now, you’ll receive this collection and three more delivered to your door this year. Read an excerpt from the collection below.
STARTING OVER
I can’t not keep coming back
to this place that’s not a place,
its pepper trees, olive trees, lilac,
narcissus, jasmine, here with me
and mock orange and eucalyptus
and cypress flat-topped by sea wind.
Here are interstate concrete,
desert dust, hardpan,
here are cobblestones
and steep bricky streets,
Death Valley’s salt flats,
here red granite domes
that cool at night and groan.
The vagrant imagination
rushes toward the world
in fear of forgetting anything:
witness and invent, it says,
and stay in motion in every
invented place. It tells me,
here you are the nothing
that is this place,
and all places are you,
none of them yours to keep.
SUMMERTIME SUMMERTIME
The foghorns this morning
test tones in the dark.
Or I’m hearing them thus.
A hoarse baritone bellow
laid over reedy swells,
high-toned laments,
a thin, expiring bugle.
And behind them a whisper
of something not quite sound,
a respiration of mist
keeping alive those sounds
I want and need to think
are whales of the deep,
their hymns and carolings
breaking above the waves,
when we sleepers think
in dreams we hear life recede
from the world, beginning
in the distance,
in the unlit deep.
Their song wakes me.
IT’S THAT TIME
The quiet of night hours
isn’t really quiet.
You hear the air hiss
even when it doesn’t move.
It’s a memory of day.
No traffic hushing up
and down tricky hills
among the camphor trees.
No foghorns, no phantoms
shrilling before streetcars
rumble from tunnels.
The absences keep us alert.
No rain or street voices,
nobody calling
Hannah, you walk the dog
tonight yet or what?
But there are certain things:
the sexy shifting of trees,
the refrigerator buzzing
while Cherubino sings
the best of love is enthusiasm’s
intense abandon, a voice
in song that preys on no one
and is unconscious of its joy.