Thoughts I Left Behind: Collected Poems
William H. Roetzheim

By Alyce Wilson

In the introduction to Thoughts I Left Behind, poet William H. Roetzheim writes, "Let's pull our chairs up to the fire. I've waited / all my life to share some thoughts with you." Through biographical poems, illustrations and self-portraits, he muses on his life and comes to terms with his mortality.

In the course of this journey, he takes time to praise the small things. Like, for example, in the poem "Stretch Marks", where he find beauty in an unlikely place:

spider webs of lacy white along
your side, across your breasts.
The delicate patterns branch and weave,
swoop down the curves
and glide across the planes and slope,
embossed and subtle decorations.

He concludes: "The lines entwine, and seem to spell our love, / our family, our thirty years together." Only a skilled craftsman could turn stretch marks into a beautiful love poem.

Roetzheim turns his eye for detail to portraits of people important to him, such as the somewhat damning portrait of "Uncle Rob", who sharecropped Indian land, making his fortune on the backs of those less fortunate. The poem ends with the indictment:

His invention
was a mobile factory —
a dinosaur creation crawling over dusty fields
while eating beans in front and dropping crated,
packaged beans behind.
E. coli women did the work
from deep within the beast's intestines.

In addition to these portraits, he paints pictures of places he has known, such as "Carlsbad Flower Fields" or "Alpine and Pacific Railroad". A depiction of his first date with his future wife takes place at the "San Diego Zoo", where again he envisions her quirks as praise-worthy assets. While her overalls, he says, were more customary for the farm than for a date, he writes, "through // the sides my view of breats behind white cotton / twists my eyes and pushes pants till I / relate to horny primates trapped, forgotten, / left to beat frustration, spit and cry".

In a section called "Burial Objects", he writes about objects that he finds evocative, whether it's slicing watermelons, viewing the world through a telescope, or even playing with cardboard boxes as a child.

In "Thoughts While Dying", he deals with his thoughts on mortality, one of the finest being "The Zen of Yardwork", in which he writes of chopping down wild tree tobacco: "As I pause to sharpen my ax once again, / a shimmering green hummingbird / pauses for a sip from the flower, / and the tobacco obliges."

Less successful are his poems which are less personal, more like writing exercises, such as "The Book of Sevens", where he writes sonnets about each of the seven deadly sins and the seven heavenly virtues.

Also weaker are a series of poems called "Responses to the Dead", where he pairs well-known poems with his responses. Often, the response fails to match the quality of the original poem. Although in one case — his response to an Emliy Dickinson poem — he finds the perfect blend of playfulness and reflection.

This collection, taken as a whole, provides a full portrait of the poet, his life's journey and the lessons he's learned. As such, it is like a reliquary, housing the precious memories he wants to leave behind.

Rating: **** (Must Read)

Level 4 Press, 2006: Library of Congress Control Number 2005903198