David Watts: Having and Keeping

In Having and Keeping (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017),  David Watts writes lyrical narrative poems about people and events that, undoubtedly, matter to him most, piercing not only memory's smoke, but also reality's skin with keen-edged words that probe a "father...made / of dust and intelligence," a "mother...made from music and culture," a soldier brother, "...so deep in camouflage / even his blue eyes // are like cinders." Less hazy with time are his poignant poems that give us one son's epithets like, "I remember things behind things," and his other son's answers to father's calls. A lover is "beautiful / in the manner in which there is so much beauty / it almost cancels itself." But above all, or inside or both--who knows?--is the observer, the universe become conscious, the poet, the "Man at the Window:"

He stands at the window baffled
by pleasure and how brief it is.
Pleasure followed by the memory
of pleasure. Light
then dark with a splinter
left in. Something like that.
The woman in the chair is reading,
drinking tea in the ground glass
haze of evening.
The sudden swell he feels
watching her
illuminates the past she spent
getting to this place:
a lover who left, perhaps. Time
setting her kitchen in order, or maybe
gathering artichokes from the field.
The moment opens in a diorama
of impermanence, seeping away
at the edges even as it is breathed
into vision the first time. He holds out
his arms. He wants this moment
in the body, to feel there
the pleasure it holds, and then
whatever it is that pleasure
leaves behind,
which is all he can keep.
The strange quality of light
dissolving like smoke in air,
slipping away
in the sun's diminishing gaze.

Life's simple pleasures--the music of "the forest hum[ming]. / Even the Johnson grass sque[eking] / as it grows," the work of "driving nails / with the same muscles / that lost baseballs over West Texas outfields," and a hundred more--are contrasted with memory's "imperfect forgetting." Here are two passages that are true sample of the poet's musings on memory and its role in life and art. The first are closing lines from "Broken Jar."

...I'd like to think
what memory wants us
to think, sitting securely
on its fence post
lifting particles of light
from the broken jar.
But the world is beyond us
even as we live inside it--
The sun comes and goes.
The moon breathes and circles us
with reflected light,
while the soul holds the body
carefully in its arms
as we walk through the perforated dark.

I Tie Knots in the Strings of Memory

and tighten them against forgetting.
They cannot imitate her hungry look,
eyes glazed, lips parted, but they prevent
imperfect forgetting. With my fingers
I choose what I own of the past,
arranging flashes of light
the way a movie wants to be told,
part accuracy, part fiction,
part what the body wants to keep
of its bumblings in this world,
late at night when it pans the past
for gold, the lines tangling and un-
tangling in the swift undertow
of the strong passing current.

Many poems in this collection can be seen as ars poetica. Indeed, Watts is masterful "with [his] fingers, choos[ing what] to keep / of its bumblings in this world, / late at night when it pans the past / for gold, the lines tangling and un- / tangling in the swift undertow / of the strong passing current." Panning the past for gold, would be a spot-on subtitle for this collection.

Many poems in this collection can be seen as Staffordesque. Deceptively simple lines belie deep truths. The final poem informs us "How to Survive the Cold." "Shovel a path," the poet says, "to the storm cellar." And while you're there, absorb "the lava red glow / of raspberries." "Gather wood from the shed," we are told, because "Winter is only waiting for you / to build a fire." After you "Prop your feet to [it],"

Then settle for the long evening.
Read a poem. Sing a hymn.
How many years has spring listened
for your distant song?

Pick any poem from this masterful collection, and you may inhabit this poem. We have waited forever for David Watts's songs. And we are so happy they have arrived, heralding a spring beyond any winter our world is capable of delivering.

David Watts grew up in Texas, thus the scattered references throughout [Having and Keeping] to the characteristics of the terrain and subtle tonalities that capture the personalities of the people there. The "can do" attitude that characterized his family helped him to move forward into many fields, medicine, classical music, scientific invention, radio, and television hosting and production, and finally, after mid-life, to become a poet and a writer.

His literary credits include seven books of poetry, two collections of short stories, a mystery novel, a best-selling western and several essays. He has received awards in academics, medical excellence, television production and for the quality of his writing. He is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and Professor of Poetry at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco. He lives in California with his wife and two sons.

Reproduced from the "About the Author" page in Having and Keeping.