THE END OF DREAMS
by
Floyd Skloot
Paper, 56 pages, $16.95
ISBN 0-8071-3116-4
The poetry of Floyd Skloot is polished smooth words joined together the way a carpenter might hone and fit pieces of wood so that the grain of each is a near match. In The End of Dreams, he writes of family, other writers, musicians, artists, his own devastating illness, the revelations it brings, and the grace it takes to live a life right.
He begins in A Hand of Casino, 1954, with his Jewish grandfather from the old country, whose mumbling words are like someone choking on stones, whose glass eye is sometimes secreted away in a velvet box, and who says he is a man from the world:
That must be where he learned
that losing is winning as a frown
is a smile and a curse is a kiss.
In A Quiet Light, Skloot meditates on how, while feverish, a hot summer night is transformed into winter, how he is drowning in air, and how, in our mortality, there is a wonder in the long afterlife of stars by which we see their light long after the star is gone.
Metastasis. Now a fire soothes but I
cannot abide its flickers on my
eyes.
I am alone and waiting at land s
end,
where either the tides have ceased
or I have
lost the last of my hearing. I
tremble
and tingle within my brain s wild
sparkings. )
These sparkings include a vision of Bach at dusk in the woods and, appropriately enough, T.S. Eliot by the poet s well, diminished by a long drought, and the acknowledgment of the need to find the deep aquifer.
Who better to remind us
that the time has come to drill
deep, to trace
the remote history of water down so
that time future
does not contain time present.
I meant so that cycles
cease to matter because we find
ourselves down
where water always flows, the realm
of ancient
floodwater freeing us from the
desiccated surface
and its arid shallow layers.
There is no desiccated, shallow surface in Skloot s work, and there is much of what matters in the deep aquifer. But cycles do not cease to exist something he seems to acknowledge in the title piece, The End of Dreams, in which the protagonist is dying yet still believes he might sing like Robert Goulet, might dance like Fred Astaire, and, with others gathered round his death bed, he knows the time has come for him to sound / the first note, take the first step, and let go.
If only we all, in our last breath, might find such grace. It is a worthy poetic feat for Skloot to have captured it so singularly.
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