Category: Poems & poem-like things

Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

String theories

This entry is part 31 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the thirteenth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Anything Long and Thin
by Paul Zweig

All traffickings upward out of the earth
Or sideways across it: longitudes,
Desperations; the glue of sentences . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-18-05]

* * * *

Living On

Consider what one might learn
by meditating on a corpse:
how the flesh can crawl, the bones
of a beautiful face break
the crust of fantasy like little moons
out of the ground, vacant snail-shells
still glistening with an off-white rheum.
Or consider swallowing two squares
of LSD & looking in the mirror:
what perfectly disintegrating visions
might be yours, & with what slight effort.

It’s exhilarating, really, to find this
blind matter – that it somehow coheres
despite its utter insensitivity to longing
or loneliness. It gives itself
only half-grudgingly to the chance
mouths of the shark or the brown bear.
True horror comes disguised
as cold necessity: learning about cells
in the fourth grade, our bodies began
to dissolve into prisons
or office towers populated by soft-
walled cubicles. Then atoms:
solar systems with pin-prick suns,
barely enclosed eternities
of inner space. The schoolroom clock
made a mockery of turning.

To know that emptiness, they suggested,
was to know ourselves. They could have said
that matter is incredibly rare,
a temporary resting state for energy.
They could have told us
about fictons, their mad spinning
that somehow keeps the lover’s caress
from encountering a null set,
bodies collapsing into a shrug
of cold fusion. What a comfort
it would’ve been, maybe,
to learn about the stubborn corpse
rippling outward for millions of years,
if only in bone shards or a line
of footprints in some fossilized beach
that come to a sudden end: indelible
record of buoyancy, & the killer wave.
__________

For more on fictons, see here. Please note, however, that I mean something different from Robert Heinlein, whose fictons inhabited a thoroughly Newtonian, narrative space. My fictons are massless and carry a negative charge.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Gleaning

Yesterday afternoon, I picked and ate a ripe cherry tomato from my garden. For those who shuddered at my report of an early snowstorm two weeks ago, the real news here is the unprecedented lateness of a frost. Those white shooting-stars that were bent down by the snow? They’ve put out new blossoms.

It’s hard what to know what to make of it all, but this much I can tell you: the tomato was delicious.

Deep in the weeds,
the wrong shade of red for autumn:
last ripe tomato.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Restoring the words

This entry is part 30 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the twelfth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

One Summer Before Man
by Paul Zweig

Listen! The undergarments of the women
Are rustling OM. It is the Sanskrit
Of skin, the Hebrew of hair. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-18-05]

* * * *

One Autumn Before Computers

A giant puffball bulges among
the dried stalks of goldenrod
like a misplaced hope.
I stuff it in my coat pocket & look
around for others, without success.
That evening, I chop its spongy cloud-flesh
into a sauce with clams.

Then, too, there was the spruce tree
a porcupine had recently girdled.
It stood in the dense center of a galaxy
of needles, some fallen pale side up,
some dark green – a pleasing blend.
Out at the feathery edge, a scattered pile
of hickory shells. I crouched there
tracing words with my finger
over & over in the soft dirt,
as if into the uncomprehending palm
of a young Helen Keller.

I try to imagine what it would be like
to write for such an audience:
one autumn before home computers,
on a Xerox machine at the university,
my father making a copy
of a copy
of a copy
until my poem rose from the page like mist.
I forget the point of the exercise, now –
something about the need to keep
the originals, maybe, or to write
as firmly as we could.

Or years before, at another college,
going with him into the library
after hours, to run off copies on
what must’ve been one of the very
first Xerox machines, enormous,
full of lights & noises –
the only thing stirring
among all those wordless books.
“Will it make a copy of me?”
I was five years old.
“Sure. Close your eyes.”

I remember the heat as its beam raked my face,
my mounting excitement
& the letdown that followed,
squinting at a piece of paper heavy
with drying ink. What would I have done
if, as I’d expected, the machine had given
birth to my identical twin?
Imagine someone with whom
deceit is impossible.

Thirty-five years later, I still recall
how the sky looked when we went
back out: fast-moving clouds
back-lit by an almost-full moon.
It was a revelation.
“Clouds at night!” I whispered,
taking one last glance behind me
into the shadows.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Sacrifice

This entry is part 29 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the eleventh poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

The Art of Sacrifice
by Paul Zweig

Our breath on the altar is offered in love.
The fuck-you we smile is offered in love.

[Remainder of poem removed 11-18-05]

* * * *

Sacrifice

The yogi who fears the little death of ejaculation
treats every release of his semen as a sacrifice.
Beyond the bliss of union, he seeks power:
flight; perfect foresight; invisibility;
the ability to possess a body
as the gods do, lording it over the tongue.
He chants religious verses as he comes,
oh light, oh ether.

There are no magic powers, there is no little death,
there is only a letting-go – however fleeting –
of that death-grip in which we hold
our precious ones & zeros,
Shiva, Gauri.

In the half-light, half-dark of dawn,
headlights on the new highway
outshine the moon that hangs full in the cleft
they used to call Skytop,
oh father-face offered into the mother-face.

Beyond building highways, the engineer seeks
a world that yields and merges
with the flawless model.
But moving the mountain laid open
countless veins of pyrite.
That rent web of fool’s gold
now bleeds acid into two trout streams,
svaha.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

In slough time

This entry is part 28 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the tenth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or so to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Hope

A stalk of yellow weed isolated in sunlight;
The tinge eastward toward Queens over tarred rooftops.

A wake furls slantwise across the empty river . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

The Catch

We were playing hide-&-seek. At the last moment,
I dove under a black rubberized tarp
that had been lying out back for several months.
I heard her finish the count & come looking,
rounding the corner of the house on rapid feet.

The tarp rustled from my heavy breathing.
A beetle made a racket
burrowing out from under from my right ear,
which was pressed against the ground.
She ran past, the beetle wiggled free
& everything grew still.

After a while, I heard the approach of slow footfalls.
This time, I held my breath as if
my life depended on it. The steps came up
to the edge of the tarp & stopped.
“Nobody under there,” I heard her say.

Is it better to fish without luck,
or to stretch a net & accept the inevitable by-catch?
The silence after that second attempt
has yet to end. From time to time,
a harvestman runs over my carcass on seeing-eye legs.
What mountain is this, I start to wonder,
keeping the smooth sky from a tangled earth?
__________

For bycatch, see here. For an excellent, brief essay on harvestmen, see here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Want

This entry is part 27 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the ninth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or so to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

A Theory of Needs

I want what has been sliding
Toward me from the corners of the earth;
What the wind lulls along the early morning streets:
The dancing fit of history . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

Bargain (antipoem)

The lead story in the business section of the newspaper the other day said
that Halloween now generates the highest retail profits of any U.S. holiday.
The labor news section of a newspaper in a parallel universe I sometimes visit
leads with a slightly different story:

DEATH NOW MADE IN CHINA
Components Manufactured in Mexico, Industry Experts Say

The article goes on to point out that Americans increasingly opt for
the convenience & everyday bargain prices available to them
in stores modeled after vast warehouses, where the economies of scale
& hefty taxpayer subsidies allow retailers
to make death more affordable than ever before.
In this alternate universe, advertising copywriters & public relations people
garner all the power and prestige afforded poets in our own society,
or griots & griottes in West Africa.
They author odes to sweet oblivion in all its disguises:
sex, drugs, saturated fats,
excitement, distraction, consumption.
We are holes, they sing. Fill us, fill us, fill us.
If I were one of them, I think I’d write a panegyric to the very fill itself,
that Clean Fill which – the crudely lettered roadside signs announce –
is always Wanted. Because in this much grimmer & grimier universe
in which I seem to be thoroughly enmeshed, all I can do is sputter
& wave my arms about like a moth stuck to the front grill of a truck.
I insist on raising embarrassingly sincere questions about, say,
the need children seem to have for some secret place –
a field grown up to thorns, maybe, or some beloved mess of trees.
An Unimproved Woodlot, the bards of the bargain would say.
Ripe for Development. Part of a tax-free
Opportunity Zone, where soon you’ll be able
to stop at the new Village Commons or Town Centre
for a Grande cup of Americano on your way to somewhere else.
A tricky place, this parallel universe: it’s hard to know
when you’ve arrived. One minute you’re there, the next you’re not.
I want to need to want to need to want, they chant, ad infinitum.
But most days that sounds like so much work! I’m glad I don’t live there –
though it can be, as they say, a nice place to visit.
There’s plenty of parking.
At the end of a long day, though, all I want is to put my feet up
for a little while before sinking into sleep,
which is, in this more humdrum & sadly impoverished universe,
still almost completely ad-free.
I need a new television, they tell me: one with High Definition,
whatever that means. I like the wildlife shows.
I don’t want to miss the minutest detail in those epic battles for survival,
those great escapes.
__________

Credit (or blame) for this goes to a post in Creature of the Shade, which led me to James Howard Kunstler’s newly blogified Clusterfuck Nation columns for the first time in months.

The deliberately unlyrical antipoem was pioneered by the 20th Century Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, and was characterized by “a sense of the unspeakable and a comedy shout,” according to Miller Williams.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Just now

I open the Blogger “create” page and glance up from the table while it loads: snow! Fat wet flakes falling in my garden, on flowers that have somehow managed to persist without a frost almost to the end of October. With only one drooping blossom left per plant, the white shooting-star – a native of South America – suddenly looks stooped and awkward, like someone who has showed up at the wrong party, and is just beginning to realize his mistake.

Half-disappearing
behind a screen of falling snow –
drab autumn color.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The burden of becoming human

This entry is part 26 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the eighth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Jacob and the Angel
by Paul Zweig

Like a dried husk, split into a grin,
I stood on the slope of a hill, and listened to
Something rising over the crippled acacia . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

Hiawatha and Deganawidah

A pine knot exploded, & I checked the stew.
I saw my reflection among the floating bits
of what used to be an enemy
& that false face was yours, my prophetic friend.
You had helped yourself.

I heard everything then: the hissing fatwood,
flames licking the kettle’s greasy lip.
Two or three chickadees scolded through the open door.

I have been caught like that more than once,
among the pines & yellow poplars
in the next breath after some rare animal
has passed, fur rippling, out of sight.
The air seems fully open, like an undiscovered wound.
One hears distant voices of what may or may not be
other, ordinary walkers.

I stagger; you swing down from where
you had hidden yourself
among the rafters of the longhouse
& hold me up, show me how to make peace between
the factions in my body. Heart, spleen,
the insurgent belly – these separate fires all come
from a single ember, I intone on cue.

Then to dispose of the contents of the kettle:
let us dig its grave between the roots, you say,
in the legend that has already replaced my recollection.
There was never a fresh hole at head height
that leaked slow sap in the November sun.
There was never a cannibal feast.
When next we look in the revelatory muck,
you’re already flashing the antlers behind our heads
& I can’t account for the sudden leap in time.

I give you this epic, says the omniscient narrator,
what more do you want?
The shell beads dangle from his outstretched arms.
__________

Based on the Seneca legend recounted by Paul A. W. Wallace in The White Roots of Peace. The epic referred to is not Longfellow’s poem – a mish-mash of Iroquioan and Algonquin traditions – but the Great Peace (or Great Law) of the Iroquois confederacy, also known as the Book of Rites: equal parts epic and constitution.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Snowball’s chance

October’s theme for qarrtsiluni is Change and Continuity, which, as some readers may have noticed, I’ve been riffing on here as well. I submitted the following series of linked prose pieces, but on reflection, my fellow editors and I felt that it didn’t really hang together all that well; the third threatens to overwhelm the first two, and really deserves to stand alone.

This editing is a tough job, and we worry about the extent to which blogging has made us lax in the standards we apply to ourselves and each other. It’s a peculiar, god-like dilemma: how to be appropriately merciless and compassionate at the same time…

1.
I stood watching traffic and thought: a winch, a windlass. Some iron drum on a medieval instrument of torture, allowing pain to be administered in increments no thicker than an eyelash. That kind of wheel.

The day before, a friend of mine had been impossible to console: he had received two pieces of terrible news that morning, he said, and the one he was willing to talk about involved a young teenage girl in South Africa – the daughter of a woman he used to work with – raped in her own room by three masked men. “You know, there’s this persistent myth that AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin. Preferably dry sex.”

I wondered about the other piece of news, but said nothing. We were playing cards, one of those games where the jokers can steal any identity and the player who finishes with the lowest score wins. I was winning, and whistled under my breath.

2.
In my last dream before waking, I am trying to find a poetry reading in a restaurant basement. Raw sewage is oozing through the cracks in the floor and under the stairs, green, incredibly foul. The manager shrugs: the health inspector won’t come around for another two months, and anyway, the city floats on a river of shit and stale urine. I find the exit and take deep gulps of the alley’s gentrified air. Here’s some fancy brickwork, an old brass hitching post. Every passing hand rests briefly on its cool metal skin.

3.
The news isn’t good, almost by definition. Polar icecaps are melting; the Amazon is drying out. All across Siberia, methane gas percolates through the warming soil, suddenly unencumbered by a frozen ceiling. Millions of years of freeze-dried shit and corpses have a sudden date with the anaerobic rulers of the planet, whose patience and whose appetite are equally infinite.

The wheel has turned too far, it seems, and now the ligaments are beginning to snap. In the long-term forecast, there’s an 80 percent chance of the extinction of most multi-cellular life forms on earth. Our ancestors were cold and lonely and desperately afraid of their own extinction, and read in the heavens a promise of unlimited semen. Now we will be plenty warm, I bet. And life will continue without us, in whatever form; those who believe in biogenesis can take comfort in the thought of earth’s own bacteria seeding the stars.

I remember once as a kid, toward the end of January, putting three or four snowballs in the freezer for some reason. I found them six months later while trying to make room for blueberries, and it took me a few moments to recognize what they were. The snow had turned to lumps of ice, gray and lifeless: such a fragile crop, impossible to preserve.

How will we describe the snow to our great-grandchildren? It drifted down from the night sky like flour, we’ll say, or sometimes like a rain of flowers the color of light: little vajras, wheels with six spokes. It gave cover to mice and to the ugliest of wounds. It made us dream of oneness. Wasn’t it cold, they’ll ask, and we’ll say no, you could burrow into it as into a down comforter. Sometimes a ruffed grouse would burst from the snow right in front of you in the middle of a still morning. It changed by the day and by the hour, and when the sun came out you could see the shadow of the sky itself: blue, blue.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

When it breaks

This entry is part 25 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the seventh poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

A Fly on the Water
by Paul Zweig

        I
It is eating me.
It is everything hungry in the world,
And wants me, and I’ll tell you, I don’t mind. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

Qarrtsiluni

It isn’t death I dread, but the lidded coffin
& all that soil coming between me & the sky.

The earth is for living in, or under,
safe between the third and fourth ribs
of the great land whale.

Chewing the fat
with our boneless ancestors,
we could relearn the art of metamorphosis –
from the larval worm, how to wait
in the darkness for a stone
skin to split

& mixing dust & water,
bring clay to life with our own
perilous breath.

It isn’t death we fear, but the pain that precedes it
& this waking, all alone, in a strange bed.