Laurie Byro
Laurie Byro and the late Actress Teri Garr at a Multiple Sclerosis conference in 2002
I owe it all to Butch and Mark
By Laurie Byro
If it weren’t for my brother, Butch Lampe, and my Professor Mark Hillringhouse. I wouldn’t be writing and publishing poetry today at the age of 67.
My brother was eight years older than me and he was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War.
I was 11 when I wrote my first poem, “My brother was a soldier.” All I remember is the last stanza.
My brother was a soldier
a good one too they say
So here’s a cheer
for Butchy dear
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
I didn’t write another poem until I was 35 and took a creative writing class from professor Mark Hillringhouse. I was writing short stories, and took his class thinking it was more of the same, and it was poetry. I hated poetry. I thought poets were crazy people who throw themselves off bridges.
In the first class, he handed each student a sock and said, “Write a poem about it. I wrote “Clint’s Sock” which I never tried to get published because Mark said it wasn’t a poem but a short story. I showed it to Sharon Knutson and she snatched it up for her Celebrity Nostalgia super-sized series coming up.
I cried in his class for 15 weeks. Mark never told me I was writing poetry, they were “poem like” but later said I was the best he’d ever seen and I wrote 3 sestinas in his class by picking out words from a hat. Mark said, “What are you an Idiot Savant?” When I was 37, my brother was dying of cancer and I sent Mark poems I wrote for my brother and he helped me shape them. Butch died when I was 39.
First major publication I got lucky, timing is everything. I was part of a group and just starting to write poetry, we would meet at a restaurant on a Sunday and read our poems. I was reading Anna Akhmatova and one of the kindest professors/editors of the “Literary Review” (it’s like Poetry Magazine hard to get into) came up to me and said he thought they were going to use one of my poems. I love hats and had a hat like a Cossack he asked if I spoke Russian and could help them in translation, I could not, but he gave me a very good start, publishing this poem in 1998.
Summer Garden
after Anna Akhmatova
I want to see the roses
in the park
of my childhood
where I played as young
as the newly formed statues there.
Rain drops
tiptoe in puddles
that grow as we splash.
We wade through pools
of uncertain dreams.
We swim in lonely desire.
I see their chiseled bodies
with unblinking eyes
regard me
a pink, imperfect bud.
I imagine them now
moss laureled halos
mother-of-pearl and shell
and I wonder if they still
tend the roses
whether they are too old now,
whether I am too old.
And what of their loneliness?
And what of mine?
Then I was taking “stories” from the Bible or literature or songs, and I imagined Lazarus after he was raised from the dead. I read in Cyprus there is a sign “A friend of Jesus” next to his tomb, Tetraimerous (he rose 4 days after his death)
Tetraimerous
For Elaine Moustakas
I follow him to Cyprus,
to grow us a garden of poppies—
scarlet, like spilled blood.
At first, he treats me badly,
shoos me away like a chicken.
I ignore his protests, bring him
plates of sweet carp, my nails dirty
and broken from digging black soil.
Finally, after two years of silence,
those side looks when he walks
into town, death a robe he can’t
completely shake—we speak.
I show him the garden fully bloomed,
blood scattered everywhere.
Dragonflies mate, jewel upon jewel,
sapphires and emeralds, tourmaline wings.
They hover above the feast of flowers.
We mourn Mary’s boy, each
in our own way. Aphrodite’s Island
brings out our best. Night after night,
I pour wine and break bread, serve
a man busy becoming a saint.
The table we eat from wobbles with
its crooked leg,
how we want our carpenter back
to steady it, like he steadies us.
His lessons make the stars shiver,
the trees long for transformation
into something better.
And my poem, “ Continued” I got from the Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne” and both poems were published by Literary Bohemian in 2002. We used to stay at a B & B in Montreal and became friends with the owners, who gave Leonard Cohen my poem at one of their parties.
Continued
for Leanard Cohen
The place where he takes me
has ice cascading the windows,
reaching in at us
where we curl into each other
for warmth.
This port is hard on sailors,
hard on beggars who don’t speak
French. When my sleeping bag
begins to crawl, we land at a clinic—
imitating sidewinders, snakes that lie
to women in deserts, cheap
souvenirs from a forgotten life.
I am ashamed and crying.
He is patient, long and slow
as the river murmuring outside.
His eyes are sherry brown, almost liquid.
We are almost liquid as we sit cross-legged,
his eyes warming me through
second hand tights.
He hands me a cup with a broken handle,
filled with tea from an island of spice.
He reads my fortune, peers into the mug.
He thinks I am crazy, he thinks
his love will save me. The tea leaves
don’t listen to his confidences.
He makes me drain a second, this time
with a clean mug. He takes my hands
instead, won’t reveal a better future.
I collect shells and feathers, cast-offs,
treasures. We talk about words
before we know the meaning of the song.
The part about Jesus always confuses—
drowning people, the blind men and sailors,
leaving these ports lonelier still.
I will leave him behind. I will come back
different. With gifts, exotic offerings.
Nesting dolls, a smuggled turtle, bergamot and oils.
He will wait for me, turn me into this.
Snow in his eyelashes when he kisses me goodbye.
We will warm each other through.
We will tell each other stories, make our fortunes with these lies.
I will peer into porcelain and directly in his eyes.
My poem, “Details” won an HM in a poetry contest I was part of for two decades (stopped at 60 awards, Toi Derricote and Mark Doty two notable judges)
Details
Before I make up the forest
I fill it with pheasant, with
a curious moth, apples and pecans,
and a wandering serpent
(who later becomes a troubadour)
I mop the forest floor, I hang curtains in trees,
I string cranberries and popcorn
in the limbs of the hemlocks above.
This is before the blight,
before thunder and lightning.
I pick your pockets, I brush out
your blond pony tail.
You take off everything but your argyles.
I hang your pocket watch off its long fob,
directly over our heads.
I kiss the pulse on your neck.
I want to say a word, a phrase, but we haven’t
studied Socrates. I’m not even sure if we’ve
invented him, truthfully. We are consistent
with soft rain, with peacocks, and conch shells.
We scatter sea glass.
Of course there is a tortoise,
of course there is a hare.
But there are words you are afraid of,
in between sighs and cuckoos,
in between green mountains and hovering dragonflies.
All the lanterns we have strung, the grinning
monkeys, the silver slip of a moon.
You touch my lips with your finger
and tell me “no”
You thrust and sing.
The pocket watch swings
back and forth rhythmically
dropping minutes.
and I was grateful to the Interboard Poetry Community for making me poet of the decade, that same year 2002, I won for Visiting his Aunt which later was published in the Paterson Literary Review.
Visiting his Aunt, Christmas 2002
(Green Holly Man)
The rivers have frozen, yet beneath the ice,
turtles and fish swim in slow motion—
a silent ballet, undistracted by the jubilant world.
At night, we skate beneath stars
that pirouette closer. The motion above
and below suspends us as if we were fish,
struggling to breathe, struggling
to keep from becoming stones.
Last year, trying to escape the cold—
we snuck off to the barn,
to hear the lowing of the animals.
But the dark with its mossy warmth
greeted us with another legend,
and the green holly man startled us
from his perch up in the rafters.
This night, we are cagey, fearless.
A flask of whiskey has made us bold.
You tie up my laces, wrap a long red scarf
round and round.
You kiss my forehead, warm my neck
with wool muffled breath.
We skate through a skeleton of trees,
sentinels to a deeper forest. We stop
at a boulder we know by its graffiti,
pause to take a swig, your eyes merry
as you tell me to look up at the cobwebbed sky.
We’ve dared each other before. I suck
your bottom lip, taste the smoky malt.
Birds mate in the trees, branches fill with eyes.
Your arms are thorned as you pass
the flask. Your eyes glow red.
The trees rustle, your face scratches
as you kiss me, whispering “Happy Christmas.”
I remember the bitter taste of you.
You crush one berry in my mouth.
And finally the New Jersey Journal of Poets published “Because you are the interesting one” in 2003.
Because you are the interesting one
You invent him
out of nighttime
when starlight waltzes
and tiptoes past your bed
and the moon falls smack on its face
the way you did
when he no longer needed you
needing him
Years later
when his belly is soft
and time the difference
that makes the hurt appear in
brown eyes that no longer
hold you captive
or captivated
you tell him
or what remains of him
the last figment
the shadows
that play across the face
of a lover
whose eyes shine
brighter than the stars
when they rest on you
you tell him
“sleep now
sleep, and dream up a girl
a girl out of daffodils and clouds”
just as you dreamed him up out of starshine
But the moon is jealous
this night
and when you wake
you are the silver
in your lover’s hair
held captive
in the mirror
where he falls in
love with blue
every morning
The New Jersey Journal of Poets have since published me many times and I was 1st runner up for the $1,000 prize, but always the bridesmaid never the bride. I started a poetry circle because the poet laureate at the time Robert Hass said to read important poetry and it will help you write better. THAT is a funny story, my name is Laurie yes, so I was being called Lauriette by my friends. I was at an event for Georgia O’Keeffe with all these famous people and Marcia Mason (Goodbye Girl) was announcing who was in the audience, I told her I was Lauriette and she announced me as the poet laureate of the US. When I told Hass this he said “my friends call me the Poet Laundromat, so you can you that title forever because of your name” and THAT also (30 years ago) motivated me to keep writing. So I did.
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