Danniel Schoonebeek’s “Poem for Four Years” is a beautifully constructed and powerfully affecting lyric narrative—something you don’t see too many of these days. Bringing together the lyric’s highly subjective and resonant language and the linear progression of narrative, Schoonebeek’s poem tracks a sensitive young boy’s evolution from captive of his own ambivalent mother-worship to accidental successor to her throne. That ascendancy and the scrambled family dynamic that makes it possible are presented in the poem as part dysfunctional fairy tale, part Lynchian bad dream, and part TV tragicomedy—a potentially tricky or too-flashy amalgam that Schoonebeek handles with an expert’s surefootedness and clarity of purpose. As if that weren’t enough to recommend it, the poem also offers an embedded and complex meditation on the imagination’s capacity to make up for reality’s privations as well as on the psyche’s related drive to “build from its rubble”—the latter seeming, at times, like no better than a compulsion to recreate the very conditions the psyche has struggled to escape from. Frequently disturbing, almost always darkly comical, and ultimately heartbreaking, “Poem for Four Years” is a bold, ambitious, unforgettable new poem from one of our most exciting young poets.
—Timothy Donnelly, BR Poetry Editor
Waiting for her to finish washing her face off and mother
who was king to me in those days
in her fur
and her robe dragging behind her
found me waiting for her to find me and saying to myself
the curse word
I learned that
summer in daycare I couldn’t define it for her
she said my full name and in this house the word we say when we want to say
that word is blank
do you understand
Like the kings in my books already I could see the worms laying claim to her face
Her expression
blank so I named it
my curse year and think of her now and wonder which was her first and want to
blank myself
in the quavering dew of summer
as mother
would have had me say it
• • •
Of the lessons I learned my wunderkind year there was
god defeats king my mother is god
that’s the king’s dirt in my mouth
that’s god’s soap in my mouth
that’s not how we talk in this house
My friends are monsters they come in a box they die when mom knocks
That isn’t mom
mom doesn’t knock
A rest is when a song observes silence a blank if you will
There is the long rest four knocks
There is the quaver
often it feels over before the beat starts
As a child climbing out of the washtub the lice
in my scalp the suds
in my mouth I thought this is not time enough
I chose a measure of fifty-two rests
I learned that
if I turned my head and shook out the dirt and looked at the song
it even resembled a bed
so I named it my rest year instead
• • •
When god woke me up it was sweeps again
the season
finale the fifth season
She said I loved this man the moment I met him it was the first season he emerged
from the wreckage his family in ribbons
I said my god comedy
is when you demolish a building
to build from its rubble
a building and tragedy
is when you demolish a building
because apart from rubble
it wants to be nothing and you
can go blank yourself
she said
She said the man I love emerged with no father the first season silenced him a rest do
you hear me a blank I love him despite him
once a year disappearing
I love him despite
and now the finale the man she loves dies he succumbs to the light he was major to me
she cries the major key to my minor
And the weather inside her no name for it
it’s like the eschaton
minus the trumpets
but with more cicadas more tinnitus
The song when it seeps at the end is the wrong song not enough rests she says
She says I want to return
to the first season when everyone’s poorly
lit and the man I loved I don’t know
if I love yet
I say mother think of the long rest spring summer fall winter
four knocks
Mother why does the fifth season
disappoint us so
is it because my king spring summer fall winter we don’t have a name for the
weather
Blank yourself
she said
and I named the fifth season nothing
and I named it my sweeps year again
• • •
It’s true
the sun has since ended
The king she’s canceled
the sky
And now when I leave the grounds my people they call me a figurehead
a mouthpiece
a straw boss
The oxblood robe
they say
he refuses to drag it behind him he refuses
our king her inheritor
The wind inside its canceled quiver rests The nothing season is here
I say my people
an insult is when I must rise to the name you call me
must demolish it must
build a new name from its rubble
or else rubble
is the name I was born with
My people if it’s true my name is Straw Prince and I’m guilty of my beard
my god I will shave
my throat in the quavering
my god it will glint like a hatchet blade
My shoes
I will line them up like two rests
My collar as white as my skin I will wear it around my neck
my stockade
With these four knocks if it’s true I must leave the kingdom in search of a mother
to mother the child I don’t
owe my people
I will walk until I come to a slum lord
She will starve
the lice in her fur
and slum lord I will tell her
I want to blank
your face
With these trumpets burning holes in the sky our king canceled
and my family
beside me in ribbons
in this nothing season slum lord when I wander your streets and they quaver and
eschaton
slum lord I feel louder
I feel louder each morning spitting your rests from my mouth I feel louder
than the worms
laying claim to your face
I enlist and entrust
my bones to a traitorous cause now and slum lord
I feel louder than your dead who inherit the crown I feel louder
than their dead’s dead’s dead’s
dead’s dead
In this nothing season
with your blank
in my mouth
with the lice
in my scalp I will hunt for a mother to mother my child and name it
my loudest
year yet