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My friend William Nagel grew up not only knowing the poet Frank Polite, but having him as a second father. From the time he was a toddler, he and Frank’s son, Khepri, were best friends, and like brothers going back and forth, stayed at each other’s homes. All of the parents were bohemians, and the parenting was always there, but fluid and shared, with an emphasis on having experiences, learning was everywhere with an awareness of the arts and universities, Buddhism and music, sometimes living in Michigan and sometimes Ohio along Lake Erie.

Frank Polite wrote some very beautiful poems with strong metamorphic images, real little bursts of epiphanies, words with a punch, not violent, more like a Buddhist slap perhaps. A few lines from the poem “Last House in Luna Pier” illustrate that:

The pen will now sail off
By itself, where love has gone.
My fingers return to my hand
where they were born.

This is the last poem I know it.

When Frank was working on his book, Letters of Transit. he read his first drafts to Will, who was three at the time, but remembers them well. “Willy not only reads my poems, he understands them,” Frank Polite would tell people. When I asked Will if he would mind reading a few of Frank’s poems for the blog, he happily agreed, and reads them perfectly, someone who was there from the start.

In the Vimeo below, Will reads the poem “Boar, then “The Last House in Luna Pier,” and finishes with a charming father and son poem, “Bedtime Talks Between Two Six-Year-Olds.” Enjoy.

 

 

Boar

By Moonlight, they come, rat, grey or dusky blue,
one candlepower purer than shadow. Impossible
how they move all that bulk

without twig-snap or crunch of leaves, and the
old cartoon about pigs as ballerinas
is no joke now

as they sweep the orchard for fruit. They step
silently or stand, stuck-still, until
you see stars through them

or a further field littered with boulders, or
the boles of trees, pear, or cherry or
apple, or you see

nothing at all. The gift they leave you with is
night writhingly alive in apparitions,
and the thrill of imminent peril

—that, had you stood in their way, or stumbled
upon one of their young by mistake,
tusks would have instantly

encompassed all that the world
will ever hold for you, and that god awful weight.

 

 

Frank Polite 1936-2005

A blog by artist Lauren Raine about art and mythology, sacred masks and sacred art, Goddess spirituality, creativity,and synchronicity.

Two poems by Frank Polite

 

The Manservant

Blood, profoundly red,
color of passion, certain
sunsets, serious threats,
moves deeply in thought
through wide and narrow rooms,
sorting out, mopping up
Death, and the threads of death
far from the sounding
depth charges of the heart.

Lover of life
in a long and winding gloom,
Blood soon will come
to a bright conclusion.
Perhaps a room where no light
nor air should be glare the window,
a wound where this Manservant,
salty and stout,
will broad for a moment,
and leap out.

Image at Thirty

30 circles
in the heart of one tree.
Suddenly, I see me there, grown tiny,
rooted in the wood of the stadium,
fanning the air.

…

I first heard about Frank Polite from Michael Lally. Frank was a mentor for Michael at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. He writes about it in the blog post that follows. Check it out:

FRANK POLITE

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