Storyteller of the Week

 Ethan Goffman

 

 

 Ethan Goffman is the bemused, confused, conflicted person described in his completely fictional autobiography, Dreamscapes, a collection of flash fiction. The very same person (or almost the same) is responsible for two volumes of poetry, I Garden Weeds and Words for Things Left Unsaid. His volume of short stories, Realities and Alternatives, further illuminates Ethan’s young life—at least in the unlikely event that the reader can differentiate those parts that are autobiographical with those that are utterly fictional.

Although the name is unique on planet Earth, a different version of Ethan Goffman writes about transit issues in the DC region, while an earlier version wrote environmental journalism and a still earlier incarnation composed literary criticism.

Yet another Ethan Goffman, somehow coexisting in the same body, lives with his wife, Marianne Szlyk, and cat, Tyler (formerly two cats, Callie and Thelma, but they have transmigrated into one being) in a cozy and eco-friendly house in Rockville, Maryland, existing without a car and eating almost no meat, a lifestyle that will allow a sustainable future on Planet Earth.

Ethan (or some version of Ethan) is co-founder of It Takes a Community, a Montgomery College initiative bringing poetry to students and local residents and is founder and producer of the Poetry & Planet podcast on EarthTalk.org.

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Ethan Goffman’s works and quirks can be described as weird, wacky and wonderful. Whether I am reading his poems or his emails, he always makes me laugh or think. He is part philosopher, part comedian and part historian. But what draws me to Ethan is his sensitivity and honesty. Plus he is a cat lover like me.

 I met Ethan through his wife, Marianne Szlyk, my mentor and go to girl, and when I ask her something she doesn’t know, she says: “I’ll ask Ethan” and soon I am emailing her witty wise other half.

Ethan is exactly the storyteller I am looking for because he dares to be different and marches to a different drummer. I am proud to publish his delightful, charming poems.

When My Wife Gave Birth

When my wife gave birth,
she gave birth to cats,
a feisty calico
and a tabby
who purred so loud
it about shook the world.

I said, Isn’t something the matter?
Don’t most women
give birth to human babies
and not cats?

She threw me a look
half glance, half glare
as if to say
What more did you expect,
you who could never give birth to anything?

In all likelihood
my wife and I will survive our children
leaving us lonely and alone
to live out our days.


Eight Million Years

Yowling and whining,
Callie and Thelma demand
breakfast each morning
walking over us 
with imperious impunity.

Cats are
an astonishingly patient species.
They waited 8 million years,
hunting, breeding, dying, hunting,
for their humans to appear on Earth.

They waited 8 million years
to evolve in the blink of an eye
from hunters to lovers
purring, rubbing, frolicking
ending the suffering of
all the lonely people,
becoming stars of stage and screen
of a billion videos.

They waited 8 million years
to become an invasive species
slaughtering birds and voles
and rare protected critters
in nooks and crannies of the globe
where no cat had ever been.

Our cats haunt us daily
ghosts of devastation future
ethereal angels of love.
We cannot live without them
as we hurl toward our common fate.


Oh No, Not Another Nature Poem!

What more is there to say.
The hills are hilly
the grass is grassy
and still inexplicable
as in Whitman’s day.

Leaves lie like litter, individual as snowflakes
each a jagged, textual miracle,
woven, a brown blanket
future fertilizer
for new leaves of grass.

Occasional birds twitter
a snatch of song
a suite
of call-and-response.

The grass is brown now,
the vegetation sparser, the songs quieter than decades past
when legions whipped up a chaotic orchestra
chirps, blades, thrums, green shoots.

In the distance, cars hum
as they have, it seems, for time immemorial.

A tiny spider descends
from some invisible string
lands on my notebook
skitters across these words as I write,
disappears off the edge,
reappears crawling up my jacket.

I would flick it away, but it’s so tiny
and fewer spiders crawl each day.
Once upon a time,
bugly hordes seethed, common as words scrolling a computer screen.
Now each minute life is precious.

In the distance, a lone hawk
prowls the sky.
How must if feel to fly?
not in some contraption, but
borne aloft on one’s own flesh?

Columns of trees loom every whichway
naked in the late fall
unashamed.

Hills roll into the horizon.

This was a golf course once.
Soon
it’ll be townhouses.

Nature’s encroachments
are
puny and sporadic.
So you see, I’m no Wordsworth or Whitman
not just through lack of talent.
These days,
poems celebrating nature’s grandeur
are an affront.

This poem is a hymn in its feeble way
to glorious remnants
fading, fading, fading.

 
Native Americans Return to the Suburbs

Native Americans tread, creep, sprint, and leap
through America’s suburbs.

Rabbit nibbles incessantly on vast salad bowls,
breeds copiously on a million lawns,
watches nervously for enemies, Cat and Car,
feels a rush of adrenaline, strange joy as
she dashes into a thicket.

Rabbit suckles her babies,
loves them deeply, forgets them quickly,
remembers the centuries, lives in the now.

Deer no longer dwells in shadows,
hiding from her
ancient friend, ancient nemesis:
humans,
for whom she has, time and again and again,
kindly provided nourishment.

Nowadays, Deer eyes two-legged beasts,
common as the stars,
as curiosities
if not quite
friends.

Clever Fox hunts from the hidden places,
preserves the gardens of her tidy human neighbors
from Rabbit’s ravages.

Fox remembers her long-lost cousin, Wolf,
slaughtered and confined to
reservations.

Fox mourns Wolf, but cannot
Howl!

Crow struts boldly down gray streets,
steps nimbly between killer machines,
dines greedily on road kill,
digests corpses of Squirrel, Chipmunk, Rabbit, Deer.

Flying into nearby yards, meadows, Crow
returns her cousins to the soil from which they sprang.

Crow remembers Raven, clever thief
who stole the sun,
to alleviate humanity’s
suffering.

Native Americans live among us,
if one knows where to look,
ghosts, spirits, remnants
of 50 million dead,
Mohawk, Cherokee, Sioux, Ojibwe, Pawnee, Diné,
countless more, names forgotten.