Ned Balbo

 Thanks (not for the first time) to the one and only Patrick Kurp, I have discovered another really good American poet, one whose existence I was quite unaware of. Ned Balbo, whose name reads like an anagram, is an active, even prolific, poet, translator and essayist. His books are hard to get over here (except at ruinous prices), but happily he is well represented online.
Here is a well managed and rather beautiful villanelle (not the most fashionable of verse forms nowadays) –


Stella's Children Look Out from a Photo Faded Gold
for my adoptive mother Betty and her siblings

No matter where you vanished, you’re vanished still.
Astonished, pointing out your childhood face,
whatever I felt, I know I always will

remember your words: That’s me. The car was full—
Prop Model T: three boys, two girls, your mother’s trace
of a cold smile vanishing…Vanishing still,

that bygone era, pale and possible
in the grim-faced slow-exposure photo’s glaze-
to-gold. What I feel now I always will:

displaced. Gently, you spoke, the silent reel
that carried your memory forward brought no grace—
No matter. When you vanished, you vanished. Still,

I see them through your eyes: Eddie’s motorcycle
blasted in war, Henry’s shell-shocked gaze
(who knows what his captors did?), Al’s loss of will

in a bottle’s presence, living in basement rubble;
even Vera, whose loss refused all solace
… No matter when, they vanished. They’re vanished still.
Whatever you felt, I felt, and always will.

(You can see the photograph of the family group in the prop car here.)

I find the poem very moving, and it put me in mind of Donald Justice's 'Thinking About the Past', especially the closing lines –

Certain moments will never change, nor stop being—
My mother's face all smiles, all wrinkles soon;
The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen;
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune—
All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.
That red-haired girl with wide mouth—Eleanor—
Forgotten thirty years—her freckled shoulders, hands.
The breast of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit,
Damp, sandy, warm; or Margery's, a small, caught bird—
Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward.
O marvellous early cigarettes! O bitter smoke, Benton...
And Kenny in wartime whites, crisp, cocky,
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
Dusks, dawns; waves; the ends of songs...

And here is another by Ned Balbo, an unrhymed sonnet called 'The Sugar Thief' –

If it was free, you taught, I ought to grab it
as you did: McDonald’s napkins, pens,
and from the school where you were once employed
as one of two night shift custodians,
the metal imitation wood wastebasket
still under my desk. But it was sugar
that you took most often as, annoyed
on leaving Dunkin’ Donuts, pancake house,
and countless diners, I felt implicated
in your pleasure, crime, and poverty.
I have them still, your Ziploc bags of plunder,
yet I find today, among the loose
change in my pockets, packets crushed or faded—
more proof of your lasting legacy.

If your interest is piqued, you can find more poems by Ned Balbo here.