$12.00
by Ronald Wardall
Here is poetry made of the drama in lives we might have considered ordinary without Ronald Wardall s careful illuminations of them. He looks not so much at, but rather into people and their circumstances, writing sympathetically yet without sentimentality. Memories return as vivid recreations, and the imagery streams along the poems lines as they unfold. The impression I have of Wardall, knowing him only from his writing, is of a person with untiring curiosity about others and the incidents that made them what they were. A sense of adventure powers his human journey and the poems testify to his compassionate attention. Lightning s Dance Floor is a work of generosity by a poet whose technique is as thorough as he is observant.
—David Chorlton
Over the years, Ronald Wardall has been constructing a striking and authentic poetic landscape that is both startling and profound. His poems come at you with a strong and relentless energy, full of clarity, intelligence, lyrical illuminations and passion. What he does so well is to restore the past of his childhood and of a time and place in America but what often is so singular about these poems is the edgy marriage of very private moments with nature, music, and sex. He brings his powers of reflective and historical intelligence and imaginative daring to a beautiful fruition again and again.
—Jason Shinder
Ronald Wardall (1937-2006) lived not only as a poet, he was a farmer, desk clerk, carpenter, bridge builder, salesman, lighting technician, actor, agent for the Army Security Agency, travel agent, publicity agent, educator, fund raiser, administrator, union leader, lobbyist and editor. His publications include Poetry, Field, Swink, Mudfish, and Skidrow Penthouse, among others. His work was included in Random House’s POEMS OF NEW YORK. He was the recipient of the Slipstream Prize, the Dana Prize and a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship. His EYES OF A VERTICAL CUT was published in 2001 by Slipstream Press. He left behind a library of four thousand books and four poetry collections in manuscript.
by Ronald Wardall
New York, New York
From the beginning, having first been drawn,
then quartered, his mouth stuffed
with intimate bits of himself, and still disoriented
by the taste of his own geography,
he took her personally.
She, herself, full of brain-porridge and blood snot,
crammed as a mad man’s wallet,
quick as a dead tree fire, even with
boulders in her lungs and shod in manhole covers
swayed light as a child’s loose tooth.
She bred hope like a teenager’s tented sleep. To scratch
her naked back with the jagged line
of his name. She, rich beyond Midas in empty rooms,
bruised with goodbyes,
the sky-carved fist in Heaven’s face.
The Saracen blade of dreams, granddaughter
to a tailor’s scissors, rain-bright
the long night lines piled like black
panties round her ankles. She, deeply read in psychotic
shut-ins. Remorseless as the coffin beetle.
Catalogue of alone, cockroach-diamond, an unpolitic
honk of geese in dark suits, the Hudson’s vampire moon-
gowned, weighted like the gallows
for sandbag endings, devourer of visionaries,
slipknot town.
She who, even bleeding, could dance the world
up and down the stairs, night’s red eye,
the silver wolf sweating with her tongue, the wind
blowing through him, labyrinth
of dragon teeth, star climbers’ womb.
Regular Visits
There is something in him still
that will sometimes not wait for morning,
but go out under that
softening of the sky before first light,
not with any illusion of purpose,
but for the joy
of walking down the rain-blackened, knife-streaked streets turning
pale silver and final as a lover’s dead face,
going up the dim steps, steeper now in memory, the corridor tipping
like a ship, the angles sharp as a paper cut,
to a room which, even with flowered plants on the sill,
remained scarred as an old tin plate, a room painful
and sudden as a fork in the eye,
to remind himself
he never took it entirely seriously while he was there,
a weigh station,
he would get through by traveling
even lighter than he knew.
They touched,
but as two who were pausing on a journey
they sensed would not end in that tiny room
and, though with little idea of who they were,
they had a kind of will for happiness
he would not know again.
There are places
that are good like the sea,
good to know
for their moments of grace,
good to get through and take away too
as part of a growing root system, a humility
out of failure, a reminder of his need to be near
light on water
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