One doesn’t need to know their private intentions.  The work tells all.
—Susan Sontag

A full moon hanging in the last part of the night,
a few crickets grinding it out a little longer,
their inner workings will not let them stop,
rhythm like a train climbing,
rhythm like a hammer,
a laundromat chorus of washing machines,
a mechanized loom threshing out the soft yarn

And the first cars in the distance humming
through New Jersey towards New York or Philly,
a pedal tone for some ancient, modal chant

And the moon, its plains and craters
bright and sharp, even from this distance,
especially from this distance,
silent partner
unchanged by all this commotion,
its silence unbroken by an early jet passing,

unchanged from the time of single cells, dividing,
to the creatures who can gaze at it now,
the fires always burning on their plains,
who have found the fire of the sun inside a rock.

Inside the house, the lights come on.
The man sits up, stares at the floor.
The woman covers her eyes with a blanket.
Did you sleep all right?
but there is only the sound of running water.

I dreamt again of the ships, the tall ships

Don’t forget to take the garbage to the curb.
And call Visa about that overcharge, will you?
And we need to stop by the Shop-Rite—we’re out of milk.
And don’t forget the tank’s about on empty.

Forget not yet the tried intent
Of such a love as I have meant

In the last part of the night
when the night is an ink spilled into water
and things have not yet made it back—

§

Ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples,
steel U-Store-Its, smokestacks, Golden Arches,
landfill mountains, gas-station islands
have not yet made it back from being skyline,
from being one line,
from being settled on the murky bottom
for divers’ salvages, arriving alone,

the bus driver thrumming at his vinyl helm,
the new guy getting to the office early,
the halls one off the other, rooms
all waiting for something, waiting
with an attitude you must catch them off-guard to see—

Arriving alone, the fast food manager,
the rows of plastic seats an empty chapel

White cereals in the whites of kitchens,
white bread, white noise of televisions.

It’s morning again in America.

Fears of impending global financial crisis.
Testimony before the Senate Judiciary.
And the Philadelphia Phillies
have won the first of a possible seven games.

§

History is theirs and the people make it
and tree to tree the starlings flit
and glide and fritter away the only hour
of the dawn, trees clenched
as if heated and bent and doused in the cold water
of the day, the sky
a pale blue neither far nor near—

what the sky was to the Peloponnesians
sailing at Greece, the Etruscans
firing themselves on dishes to be smashed
by the Romans’ thousand-year tantrum, the sky
they saw through the smoke of the ships at Veracruz,
the sky that absorbed the flag over Iwo Jima.

I guess everybody just trying to, ah,
pick up their game, you know?
And do everything we usually do,
just that much more harder and, you know,
that much more better.

And what would the dogs do?
The dog would hold on to my clothes and bite me. 
Where did they bite you?
If they would let the dogs go they would definitely bite us. 
When you got to Guantanamo what happened?
I could not see anything or hear anything
and I was like that for about two weeks.

And the trees are too thick to cross,
the trees that flank the interstate,
the trees along a field’s far edge,
their vines and branches clinging into clouds
the way the atom’s forces draw
its intentions into matter

This hard work, boss, wait’ for the word.

the engine noise and deadened barking
suspended in the trees themselves,
already memory: boys with basketballs
and dogs at war with cars
and muffled back doors closing in the night—

the trees that stand up at the cities’ edges
and dive up through the asphalt from their
secret tunnels dug before the war,
trees that tower over every house
along a street where the talk runs on
like the fences out of sight.

§

I’m not saying I don’t like it here.
It’s a pretty town—it is—and I definitely
don’t have to worry about getting attacked
on my way home from work or whatever.
But we’re in bed at 9:30 every night!
It’s not like I want to go out to the bars
and do the whole party-girl thing: Woo-hoo!
It’s yellow and green shots in a test tube!
but I want to do something at night.  It’s like
Michael just decided: we’re married now,
it’s time to start acting like we’re sixty.
He’s all, Gotta get up early, Claire—
and I respect that, I do, I just
want something more out of my existence on this
planet than going to work and going to bed
and watching “How I Met Your Mother.”
I know, I know—I hated Philly.  But I miss it.
And Michael, he’s a big help: Let’s go to Aruba!
Like, we’re gonna come home to some different life or something.
Okay, he says, you want to go back to Philly?
You want to move to New York?  How about Seattle?
Well, sure, Michael, how about Seattle.
That space-needle-thing?  And what, that crazy market?
I’m not really bitching about a lack of fish.

§

Let them come to New Jersey

where everywhere the big sky flames
and trees spread out their solemn wings

And the roads are unbroken by silence,
the roads that branch and branch,

roads thrown down like a net on something wild
which stares back through it,

roads like a thought in front of what is real,
a sentiment
that gives the mind an easy path,
the mind that keeps its eyes before its feet,

the mind, that would destroy the thing that is
to have the thing it can understand

§

Jat Jamma?  I don’t know, some grass hut name.
They ran right the fuck over this guy.
Can you imagine?  Getting trampled to death
by fat chicks trying to save two bucks on a vacuum?
And this guy wasn’t any midget, either.
They just stuck him out there, like, Hold the door, pal.
And what’s he gonna do, say no?
GENTLEMEN GOOD MORNING
You see they laid off Jimmy-bird?  I told him:
Jimmy, it’s getting slow, you know?
Just show these guys you want the job, that’s all.
SAME CREWS AS YESTERDAY ANY QUESTIONS
So I’m done with him.  I’m done.
I mean, Jesus Christ, that job he did on Terlaine?
And he’s like, Oh, I got the carpal tunnel,
and all this crap.  Like it’s my problem.
AT YOUR LEISURE GENTLEMEN AT YOUR LEISURE
You coming, Tone?  Guy was from Haiti.
Yah, he was like six-six, two-seventy.

§

Las sich nach New Jersey Kommen

where everywhere the big sky flames,
where farm fields stretch their bodies under blankets
and streams push on through undergrowth,
on under highways, on around parking lots,

the bushes thrusting up through blanked backyards
like water blossoming from broken pipes

where, through that jungle, the houses look like outposts,
thatched huts on islands that have never seen a ship.

So tractable, so peaceable are these people
that I swear to your Majesties
there is not in the world a better nation.

With what delight could they have driven around,
if they could joy in aught; sweet interstate!
through hill and valley, rivers, woods and plains.

Oh, it was fucking gorgeous, I’m tellin’  ya,
the sky so blue it looked like a cartoon.

§

And these are the names of the men that shall stand with you:
of the tribe of Reuben: Elizur, the son of Sadeur;
of Simieon: Shelumiel, son of Zurishaddai;
of Judah: Nashon, the son of Amainadab

Of Harrison Ave, John Plinckett, brother of Corey.
Of Prospect Street, that guy who does duct work.
Professor Richardson, when he gets back from sabbatical.
Joey the Goose, originally from Brooklyn.
Allison Carter—yah, I know,
but she’s got balls THIS BIG, you know what I’m sayin’?
And who’s that guy there with the little mustache,
always gives you this stiff-ass wave—
kind of a wack job, am I right?
But the guy can schedule a train like nobody’s business.
I don’t need to know about his personal life.

They don’t need to know about why the big sky flames
and trees spread out their solemn wings
while they stroll campuses and stand in chapels,
talking into their hands, into the air.

And I would say, I am just a normal worker,
and work, and get my salary.
Did you ever learn anyone’s name?
They have no names.  They have borrowed names.  They have numbers.

§

They strolled the campuses.  They stood in chapels.
They stood in chapels, under the huge stained glass.
They drifted in silent, powerful automobiles.
They lived like Tudors.
They lived in projects.
They strolled the grassless lawns.
They lived in trailers, surrounded by dogs.
They lived in Tudors.
They lived in the White House
surrounded by dogs and Secret Service.
They were surrounded by disembodied motors.

They worried about the economic climate,
the falling dollar, collateralized debt.
They divided their items at the supermarket:
what the food stamps covered, what they didn’t.
They bought futures and shorts, blue chips and penny stocks.
“Spare change,” they said outside the Starbucks.

They worried about melting glaciers.
They worried about getting shot in the stairwell.
They worried about eating carbs.
They worried about getting turned away at the hospital.

They sat on marble benches
watching water erupt from the angels’ mouths.

They worked in automotive.
They worked the streets.
They were working in polyrhythms at the time.
Working the crowd.  Working an angle.
Working every shift they could get.
Working the room.  Working the land.
Working the theme of middle class ennui.
Working it.  Working out.
Working in oils, working in clay.
Working in shit up to their knees.
Working on their marriages.
Working on their flaws.
Working together to bring peace to the Middle East.

One doesn’t need to know their private intentions.
The work tells all.

§

And so we went there to the warm land.
We went to the terminus of a railroad and passed through
the land of the Osages and on to the land full of rocks,
and next morning we came to the land of the Kaws

I was there to shop but these people were, like,
ready to charge machine gun nests or something.
And then this chant broke out?
Two sugars and skim, please.  No, not that, you idiot:
“Push the doors in!  Push the doors in!”
And then the whole freakin’ crowd just started to move,
and the only place to go was into the store—
I swear to God, at that moment—No, skim milk.
Do I sound like a Jersey bitch from hell, or what?
So anyway, we come crashing through the glass—
I didn’t even see the guy, I’m telling ya,
it was like a horror movie—just grunting and breathing
and God knows who, like, thrusting into me.
And I see the guy lying there and everything—
I mean, what was I supposed to do?
And now everybody’s like, “You bought somethin’?”
Like I killed the guy by buying a freakin’ camera.

§

First of all, sir, the President has said
we are not going to engage in “Indian burns”
under any circumstances.
We are not going to engage in giving out so-called “froggies.”
We will not do the five-knuckle chuckle in front of anyone.
We are not going to engage in “forearm shivers.”
We are not going to engage in any kind of “wedgie”—
be it “super,” “destructo,” “hanging” or “blueberry.”
We are not going to engage in giving “flat tires” in hallways—
or in any other facility, for that matter.
We will not be “cyber-bullying,” I can assure you.
We are not going to engage in scratching our balls
and forcing someone to sniff our fingers.
I have given explicit instructions on this point, sir.
We are not going to engage in serving up red-eye farts.
We are not going to refer to anyone as a “fuck-nut.”
We will not, at any time, be buttering doorknobs.
So you’re asking me to answer a hypothetical.

§

In the last part of the last part of the night
which is morning, which is day, which is filled with light,

a light that is like a silence behind the noise,
a light that becomes what it touches,
a light that is like a love so deep
you don’t even know it’s there—

Light squandering itself on the hoods of cars,
light pooling in leaves and laying flat on asphalt
and boring down into the tiny caves of the grass,

Fore God, my Lord, well spoken,
with good accent and good discretion—
a light that is everywhere and therefore nowhere,
a light that is asking you to answer a hypothetical,
a light that has lit up Lawrenceville like a LAMP.

§

And so we went there to the warm land.
We passed by the projects and the Quickie Marts
and we wound through the looping miles of suburbs
where every house and hairdo looked the same,
and I saw how the people of that land were
and I thought they were not able to do much for themselves—
they were forced to leave their homes all day
and their children played behind metal fences.
And I saw how the trees were
and how the ground was covered with black tar.
And I saw the looks on the faces of these people.

We passed down into the hollows of a train station,
into a cave where the trains jarred the floor
and I saw how these people were,
how close they were pressed together,
how afraid they were to smile at each other,
for the killers walked among them
and those who would sell the tally machines
to count up the souls in the camps
and those who waited for the others to get sick
so they could come for their houses walked among them
and those whom anger had touched too deeply,
who had crouched deep into the foxholes of themselves
or crawled deep into the wooden horse of sadness
and those who would watch you gang-raped from the window
and those who saw the demon everywhere
longing only for one chance at its throat—

§

One doesn’t need to know their private intentions.

Hon, we should get that hibachi back to Oliver.
Does it still have coals in the bottom, sweetheart?
God it’s gorgeous out, isn’t it?
I have never seen so many birds!
Look at that fat little guy on the dead branch.
And the sheep?  We really lucked out with this spot.
Remember the place we looked at downtown?
Above the bar?  Can you imagine?
Oh, damn, it’s Karen.  Hello?

What is it I see but can never approach,
out past the field, out past the trees
out past the dark that fills their passageways—

always disappearing as I approach

That’s way too much work for one person, Karen.
They’re not going to give you any help with this thing?

out past the last blue ceiling bending down
behind the woods to touch the ground again—

and always the tugging, the tugging of something,
when I come out from the trees to find them:

the tall ships in the harbor, floating, waiting,
with not a soul on board,
their decks as worn and smooth as driftwood.

You have to sit down with your boss, Karen.
And if he won’t listen, you have to go to his boss.




PART 5: WAITIN’ FOR THE WORD

This hard work, Boss, wait’ for the word.
—John Berryman, Dream Song 10

A dusty light in October, a pained leaf blower,
an Hispanic man with a leaf-blower on his back
like a sci-fi jet-pack.  As though he stood today
on the edge of a new frontier:
the frontier of the 1960’s.
In the field beyond the house, some sheep
sheep-walk the hours,
considering the grass with studious mouths.
Winter may come, or it may not.
He lives in interesting times.

Space is open to him now.
His eagerness to share its meaning
is not governed by the efforts of others.
The Price Chopper is open to him now.
The front of the bus is open to him now.
A million women on the internet
are holding their legs open to him now.
He moves the leaves to the margins of the driveway,
squinting to see
what’s right in front of him, always
New Jersey: land of farms and highways,
land of oxygen and SUVs.
Their land.  His land.
A light that is like a long reaching-after,
a light that will never be better.
The trees look digitally enhanced,
sharp with the shadows of far-off mountain ranges
or the moon on a clear night in Maine.

Beyond the trees, bold clouds ride low,
as clear and strange
as islands that have never seen a ship.

§

I know it’s a hassle, but I’m glad New Jersey
is finally doing something green.
Honey?  When they’re done with the lawn,
will you carry them to the curb?
We forgot last week so we have a ton.

Pile the bottles high at Lawrenceville

I know you’re tired, hon.
Do you want to just watch a movie or something?
Do you want to just sit and read?
Do you want me to just be quiet and go away?

Shovel them under and let me work

And the cars in the distance humming towards
New York or Philly, New York or Philly,
filled to all their empty seats with purpose—

They will get to the bottom of this.
They will break it apart.
They will break it down.
They will put the pieces back together
to make some creature that may have never walked
but could have.
Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?

The dusty light, the trees too thick to cross,
their vines and branches clinging into clouds

And roads unbroken, roads that branch and branch
like the aqueducts of Rome, like the trees themselves,
the fissures in the Etruscan potter’s plate

Shovel them under and let me work

Too thick to touch, the field’s far edge,
the dark that fills its passageways
that disappear as they approach
like shining mountain ranges made of fog
dissolve to scattered towns with backyard clutter

And the touching silence of distant ships,
of towers, domes, theaters and temples
dissolves, as they approach, to backyard chatter.

§

Well, I think these things have CYCLES, Carson.
Ten thousand years ago this was all under ice.
Bela, stop that!  Come here!  Come!
When I was growing up, it was THE COMMIES.
you’d be sitting in class in your knee-length checkered skirt
and the siren would go off and all of us
would DIVE under our desks because—DUNH-dunh—
THE COMMIES WERE ATTACKING!  Joe McCarthy…
“I have here in my hand a list of names,”
and everyone got hysterical.  People lost their JOBS.
They went after all the FOLK SINGERS.
It was SILLY, Carson, it was JUST SILLY.
Oh, STOP that, Bela.  Stop that RIGHT NOW.
When you were about ten years old, Time magazine
put a fried egg on its cover with something like,
“Cholesterol: The Silent Killer.”
We were all supposed to eat margarine and Wonder Bread.
ALL the scientists said so.  Well.  GUESS WHAT.
People love to get hysterical.
That’s what sells magazines, Carson.
And that’s what sells all these PILLS everyone’s taking.
They’ve got Eliza taking all these PILLS now.
Well she’s OUT OF IT.  Not FOR ME.
What’s that?  Grape Kool-Aid?  So kind of you!
But I think I’ll just have the water, thank you.
Oh WHAT is she into NOW.  Bela!
You just can’t resist those smells, now, can you.
No you CAN’T.  No you CAN’T.
George, I really think we should turn back now,
my hip is starting to do its thing.
No, back the way we came would be best, I think.

§

By the mass, and ’tis, like a camel indeed.

Methinks it is like a weasel.

It is backed like a weasel…

Or like a whale.

It is very like a whale.

§

Senator, there is a lot to respond to in your statement.
I would respectfully disagree with your statement
that we’re becoming more like our enemy.
We are nothing like our enemy, Senator.
While we are struggling mightily to try to find out
what happened in Abu Ghraib, they are beheading people
like Danny Pearl and Nick Berg.
We are nothing like our enemy, Senator.

These Arabs, Senator, slink around in their oil fields

while we are struggling mightily to find out
how so many could be beaten and waterboarded
in U.S.-run detention centers,
and how so many Iraqis could be dead
since U.S troops invaded—Senator,

we’re still trying to find out what happened
in My Lai, and in Dallas in ’63,
and in U.S.-backed coups in Chile, Malaysia,
Venezuela, Argentina, and Haiti—

We’re struggling, Senator, to try to find out
why even under the threat of destroying the planet
we just keep burning more gas and coal,
and driving more miles, and talking louder and louder

as though we lived in a dream, Senator,
and could shout ourselves awake,

like when we were sick as children, Senator,
burning with fever, the black gate swinging open—

Oh, Senator, how we are struggling!

And all they can think to do
is behead Danny Pearl and Nick Berg.

§

And passengers ask the conductor:
Do you think these jeans make me look fat?

If Tom leaves from the same city at the same time as Jane,
traveling at a constant speed of 68 miles per hour—

Hey, what was the deal with the “spork,” anyway?
Remember those?

What place is THIS?  Where are we NOW—

the mountain rising beyond the edge of the ocean,
the joy bricked under the faces on the sidewalk,
the fire of the sun inside a rock

Onlythere is fire inside this rock,
come in under the shadow of this viewing platform
and I will show you something different from either
a parafrag splitting a city block,
or a Panzer making rubble of a church
I will show you something wicked cool, like,
Whoa!  Dude! 

Dude?

§

Remember how I told you there was one
original item in this room?  Remember
the chair behind George Washington in the painting?
Now, if you look closely at the back of that chair
you’ll see a carving of a sun.  Ben Franklin,
who sat at this desk right here and is said
to sometimes just put his foot out a bit, like that,
and trip someone up as they came to the podium—
you younger folks, do you remember Ben?
Any of you remember his experiment?
I’ll give you a hint: he was flying a kite…
Very good.  Now look again at that chair up there.
Who can tell me if that sun is rising
or setting?  Setting?  Rising?  There seems to be
a little debate about this.  Ben Franklin himself,
when this convention convened, said he couldn’t tell
if that sun was rising on a new republic
or setting on the hopes for that republic.
Remember how Ben Franklin was pretty old?
He’d certainly already done his part, am I right?
Remember how we talked about the treaties?
The Post Office?  Poor Richard’s Almanack?
With a “k”?  Say it with me, now: Al-man-ACK.
Now, truthfully, people, we stood on the brink.
Remember, history wasn’t history yet—
to these folks, things looked pretty freakin’ scary.
The British could re-invade at any moment,
the French from the north, the Spanish from the south—
and we had a lot of issues between the colonies
that could have broken into a civil war.
You ever hear, “Just showing up is half the job”?
Ben Franklin knew it was crucial just that he be there.
He rarely spoke.  He had trouble standing.
But when, after months of wrangling, these men
finally pulled together behind a deal,
he did stand, and addressed George Washington,
and what do you think he said about that sun?
“But now at length, I have happiness to know
that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
It is a rising and not a setting sun.
Folks, it’s been a pleasure to be your guide.
As you leave, security will guide you out.
If you’re touring the city today, please do take care.
It’s another day of record-breaking heat.

§

Two years.

Ten years.

Twenty years.

Fifty years?

§

Still wait’ for the word, Boss.
Still wait’ for the word.
I got the codes.  I got the briefcase, Boss.
Hard work, Boss, haulin’ roun’ this briefcase.
Feels like a ton, Boss.  Feels like the weight of the world.
And always bein’ careful it don’ go off, Boss.
But that’s the thing been botherin’ me, Boss.
First we work like dogs, we work like slaves
to make this thing—
and it’s just so we can stay up all night frettin’,
frettin’ we gon’ use the thing we made.
It’s like these highways, Boss, it’s like these jet planes—
we ain’t supposed to use them either, is we—
these tractors in the field, these furnaces,
these power plants that make these cities shine—
shine, Boss, just like your world shine up there.
We workin’ since we had thumbs, Boss.
We workin’ since we single cells, Boss,
tearin’ ourself in half to make these cities.

§

A dusty light in October, a pained leaf blower,
a light that was like a long reaching after,
the oceans and icecaps still intact,
the trees stretching out, still crowded thick
at the suburbs’ edges, the clouds of birds
still reaching down to touch their tops:
How-much-we-have-left!  How-much-we-have-left!
It was theirs now, the way they walked in the streets,
the way they lined their cars up going and coming
and swore at each other with a kind of glee,
the way they sat by themselves when they wanted
and watched the snow settle down its desert
or listened to the wrenched chords right themselves
and ate what they wanted and said what they wanted
at least to themselves, at least to what gods
at-least-to-themselves, at-least-to-what-gods
they pictured as they wanted: they had
beat the Germans, the Japs and the Commies
and taught the Viet Cong a lesson;
they had beat Saddam and Milosevic
and Bin Laden been runnin’ from cave to cave—
they damn near had AIDS beat and cancer
was giving them options, giving them time;
they had something called “secret evidence,” crime
was down again and productivity
was up, the markets were showing signs
of steady improvement, key indicators
were hopeful, they’d found water on the moon,

§

How do I feel?  How do I feel.
It just hasn’t really sunk in yet, you know?
I mean, you wait this long for something like this—
twenty-eight years I’ve waited for this.
Twenty-eight years—
and something always goes wrong for us, you know?
I really just can’t believe it, to be honest.
I mean, we can march down Broad in the parade,
and we can watch Charlie and Chase and J-Roll
holding up that World Series trophy, but

Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails
and put my finger into the print of the nails,
and thrust my hand into his side—

§

You ain’t gotta take that many carts, son.
We gonna get ’em all put back in time.
They ain’t gonna bother us none in Valley Stream.
Not after what happen Friday.
We gonna be the valued employee today.
We what be making this company thrive.
And we not just be important because of these here carts.
Oh, no.  We be important as individuals.
Ha!  You remember after 9/11,
how happy and friendly everybody was?
How we gonna send our money to them families?
How everybody suddenly woke up to the possibility
of living together in peace and harmony—
How people actually look you in the eye?
People was actually tipping me—
“Well, he a nigger, but at least he ain’t a A-rab.”
Haiti, right?  The boy from Haiti.

§

Okay.  Okay.  Let me try something else.
Look out this window, Chief.
Come on, just have a look.
See that woman with the shopping bag, on her cell?
You think she’s discussing the end of civilization?
Yah.  I didn’t think so either.
Okay, how about this guy—
looking into the window of the bookstore—
you think he’s looking for something on nuclear winter?
Isn’t it just a little more likely
DOCTOR OAKLEY TO THE TRAUMA CENTER DOCTOR OAKLEY
he’s after a bedtime story for his daughter there—
something about honeybees or firemen?
How about all these people in front of the coffee shop,
chatting away, sipping their mochas or what have you.
Do they look like they’re talking about boiling in their own feces?
Now who do you think needs the help here—them, or you?

§

The clouds are leaving and the sun stands over them.

The light is golden, the field is wide.
The parking lot is wide, the sky is wide—
wide is the road that leads to the Quaker Bridge Mall,
the trees left sharp with shadows, sharp with light,
everything pulled out clean from the fire

And who were the people who were questioning you there
and what were they asking you?

They were the Americans from the Army
and I would say, “I am just a normal worker,
and work and get my salary.”

I’m just a gigolo, and everywhere I go—

Thou art indeed JUST.

A handful of starlings tossed into the sky
to judge the wind for a fairway shot,
the oceans and icecaps still intact—

a light that is like a long reaching after,
a light that has never been better.

§

And what will be said about them when they are gone?
That they saw the sky for what it was?
The trees for what they were, the grass?
That they did better than their ancestors?
That they loved their children?
That they got up every morning and went to work?
That they were like children themselves, really,
borrowing things to play at being adults.
That look at these hieroglyphics—how cool is that?
That what they felt is ultimately more important
than whatever it was, exactly, they were doing.
That at least they left us these condominiums,
and countless gigs of research
and a flight path to the moon—
To the moon, Alice!
That most of what they did was actually legal.
That what is life for, if not to stroll campuses
and stand in chapels, under the huge stained glass?
That they had faith?
That given the crudeness of their instruments.
That, Dude!  I found an arrowhead!
That all we can do is hope that they were happy.
That they were good people, damn it,
and if they gassed somebody, they must have had a reason.
That they were good people.
That they were free?
That there goes one of them now!  Oh—
no, it’s just black ink shining bright.
That did they really die of pseudo-science?
That it’s obvious to us, of course.
That are you sure you haven’t combined
the actions of one creature
with the conscience of another?
That who are we to judge them, we of the future,
who do not yet even know who we really are?

§

I should like to object to the indictment.
I should like to say that in my opinion,

as far as    THE AMERICANS  are concerned,

the indictment does not conform to Article VII.
I can explain that.

§

So, do you want to just sit and read, then?

I want to go walking the path by the harbor
where the sun rakes its fingers in through the thin trees
and the ocean has filled every gap in their ribs,
every gap in the trunks where the death could blow through
and the harbor is held by your own arms around it
and there stand the boats that have been there forever—
their masts are all bare and they’re all through with wind—
and you could sit and watch while the sun makes them shadows
and you could just keep walking away through the dream
but wherever you go you will be in this place.

§

No, no one could live on the moon, hon.

Well, there isn’t any air there, for one thing.

Well, yes, they did, but they had to come right back.

Oh, that was an awful long time ago, now.

Yes, even before Mommy was born.

Well, it just hasn’t been that important, I guess.
It’s just a big rock up there, floating around.

§

The clouds are leaving and the sun stands over them.
They sail and glimmer, drifting by.
Here is a flame-legged spirit, dissolving.
It IS backed like a flame-legged spirit…
And here go two lovers, one’s feathery hands
firmly on the other’s airy shoulders.

Honey can you hear me in there honey

They are melting together, gliding backwards,
back to the town where their real life can begin.

STILL WAIT’ FOR THE WORD, BOSS.

And here is a walrus, and here a woolly mammoth.
And here the bones have been put together
to make some creature that never walked—but could have.

WE READY WHEN YOU IS, BOSS.

Honey, how do I get the lint out of the dryer?

How do I turn this wheel that turns my life,
Create another hand to move my hand

My client cannot tell
what the nature of his participation
is supposed to have been.

A ragged strand of geese, each tugging singly
at his private burden, shouts into the sky:
Honk-ick!—call.  Honk-ick!—response.

WE WAITIN’ BOSS.

Gentile or Jew—

We are on the line 157 337.
We will repeat this message.
We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles.




*PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THIS POEM’S SOURCES








Christian Barter’s first book, The Singers I Prefer, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize; his second book, In Someone Else’s House, is forthcoming in 2012 from BkMk Press. His poetry has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Georgia Review and Poetry Daily and has been read on The Writer’s Almanac. He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony and a Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton. He is a trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park and an editor for The Beloit Poetry Journal.

1,8,2: Thomas Wyatt, “Forget Not Yet.”

2,1,1: “Ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples lie / Open unto to the sea, and to the sky,” Wordsworth, “Lines Composed on Westminster Bridge, 1802.”

2,5,1: Ronald Reagan, campaign slogan of 1984.

3,1,1: “History is ours and the people make it.” Salvadore Allende.

3,4,1-5: from an interview with Eddie House, Boston Celtic, after a game.

3,5,1-7: Adel Hamad, interview, with Amy Goodman, 31 May 2008, transcript from humanrights.ucdavis.edu.

3,7,1: John Berryman, Dream Song 10.

5,1,1: “Let them come to Berlin.” John F. Kennedy, 26 June 1963.

5,5,4: “And each man kept his eyes before his feet,” T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland.

6,1,1: Jdimytai Damour, a Wal Mart worker at Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, New York, was trampled to death by shoppers the day after Thanksgiving in 2008.

7,1,1: Las sich nach Berlin Kommen (“Let them come to Berlin”), op cit Kennedy.

7,5,3: Columbus, in a letter to the King and Queen of Spain, about the Tainos (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown, pp. 1, 2)

7,6,3: “With what delight could I have walked thee round, / If I could joy in aught; sweet interchange / Of hill and valley, rivers, woods, and plains.” Milton, Paradise Lost, IX, 114-116.

8,1,4: Numbers 1:5.

8,4,4: op cit, Adel Hamad interview.

10,1,4: White Eagle, on being shown his new reservation, from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown.

11,1,3: “First of all, sir, the President has said we are not going to engage in torture under any circumstances. And so you’re asking me to answer a hypothetical.” Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General confirmation hearing before Congress, 6 January 2005.

12,4,2: Hamlet, I,ii.


Part 5

1,1,5: “We stand today on the edge of a new frontier, the frontier of the 1960’s.” John F. Kennedy, July 15, 1960.

1,2,3: “Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.” John F. Kennedy, May 25,1961.

1,3,6: “This land is your land, this land is my land.” Woodie Guthrie.

2,2,1: “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. / Shovel them under and let me work— / I am the grass; I cover all.” Carl Sandburg, “Grass.”

2,7,1: Hamlet, to Pollonius. Hamlet, III, ii, Shakespeare.

2,12,2: “Dull would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its majesty. / Ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples lie / Open unto the fields and to the sky.” Wordsworth, “Lines Composed on Westminster Bridge, 1802.”

4,5,1: op cit Shakespeare.

6,1,1: Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General confirmation hearing before Congress, 6 January 2005.

7,1,1: “Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: / What place is this? / Where are we now?” Sandburg, “Grass.”

7,7,6: “Only / There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland.

12,2,3: John, 20:25.

13,1,4: Jdimytai Damour, a Wal Mart worker at Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, New York, was trampled to death by shoppers the day after Thanksgiving in 2008.

15,2,3: “For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction.” Matthew, 7:13.

15,4,3: Adel Hamad, interview, with Amy Goodman, 31 May 2008, transcript from humanrights.ucdavis.edu.

15,5,1: “I’m Just a Gigolo,” Brammar, Caesar, Cassucci, as adapted by David Lee Roth.

15,6,1: “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend / with thee,” Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord.”

16,1,15: “One of these days—Pow! Right in the kisser! One of these days, Alice, straight to the moon!” Ralph threatening his wife, Alice, on the hit TV show The Honeymooners.

16,1,28: “O none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.” Sonnet 65, Shakespeare.

17,1-3: “I should like to object to the indictment. I should like to say that in my opinion, as far as Schaefer is concerned, the indictment does not conform to Article VII. I can explain that.” Dr. Pelckman, defense attorney for Konrad Schaefer, standing trial at the Nuremberg Trials for using jews in human experiments.

20,8,1-2: Edwin Muir, “The Wheel.”

20,9,1-3: op cit, Pelckmann, Nuremberg Trials.

20,12,1: “Gentile or Jew, / Oh you who turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland.

20,13,1-3: Amelia Earhart’s last received transmission

Click here to return to the poem.

In the fall of 2011, composer Cheryl Leonard and visual artist Oona Stern sailed around Svalbard, a remote archipelago above the Arctic Circle. They had first met in the Arctic in 2008, when both arrived on individual grants from the National Science Foundation. They connected on the ice, and committed to making the collaborative portrait you see below.

The following images, journal entries and recordings are the arranged raw material from Leonard and Stern’s experiences at two specific sites: Coraholmen, an island north of Longyearbyen, and the Monaco glacier at the northern tip of Spitsbergen. At this writing, Leonard and Stern are still creating multilayered installations for each Arctic site they visited, diving into the affinity they feel for this terrain. One of the installations, featured at the Insomnia Future Music and Techno Festival in Norway, brings the Monacobreen surge glacier to life and is included in the video below. —Elaine Bleakney

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  Field recording: Coraholmenbeach
  Playing with a handful of the lumpy coralline algae pieces, waves lapping on sand, distant glacier calving.

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  Field recording: Coraholmenicepond
  Standing on the surface of the ice pond and shifting my weight around, underwater recording

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  Field recording: monacoiceslosh
  Bobbing up and down in the zodiac surrounded by floating brash ice

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  Field recording: Monacoicemelody
  Small brash ice pieces hitting each other

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Cheryl Leonard is a composer, performer and instrument builder. She is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, ASCAP, American Composers Forum, and Meet the Composer. Leonard’s commissions include works for Kronos Quartet, Illuminated Corridor and Michael Straus. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Oona Stern is a Brooklyn-based visual artist whose installations call attention to history, urban development and cultural practice. Past installations include the sound of grass growing, for Bloomberg NY, and island path, a ‘drawing’ landscaped into the lawn on Governor’s Island in New York City. deDomination, a poster project, was installed in the New York City subway. Stern’s work has been exhibited at galleries including Diaz Contemporary in Toronto and Castelli Gallery in New York. She is the recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and others.

Monacobreen installation by Cheryl Leonard and Oona Stern
Audio, video, rocks, paint; 2011
Installed at Kurant Gallery for the Insomnia Future Music and Techno Festival
Tromsø, Norway

Two of the poems in this sequence, Labyrinth 34 and Labyrinth 37, first appeared in Eye of the Telescope.

Untitled (Single Man) © Frank Yamrus

At Length: You’ve been a producing artist for some 20 years, but it’s been 6 years since your last solo exhibition in New York. Why has it been so long?

Frank Yamrus: Yes, you are absolutely correct. My last one-person exhibition in New York, Bared & Bended, was a collection of 42 images—landscapes documenting my first and only winter in Provincetown on Cape Cod. These images were made in 2004 and at that time I was struggling with a personal relationship and starting to feel burnt out by my photography career. It seemed quite natural for me to seek refuge, in this place that I call my spiritual home, for contemplation.

Over the course of my winter on the Cape, I found great solace in this landscape, seemingly familiar but now blanketed by winter’s elements and surrounded by thick wintry light. After making this work, I put my camera down to reevaluate my career in photography. It was not until a couple years later that I felt the creative juices flowing, and again, it was a personal crisis—of sorts—and while in Provincetown, that inspired me to reach for my camera.

This six-year lapse reflects the time it took me to make this work and, to be quite honest, to feel comfortable with releasing this highly personal body of work to the public. Early in the process I showed some images to get feedback, but then went back to work very privately and quietly. I rarely shared any of these new images made after 2008. Last year, when Brian (Clamp) and I sat down to look at the work, he was surprised at the depth of the portfolio.

Untitled (Smoke) © Frank Yamrus

AL: It’s no secret that your newest body of work, I Feel Lucky, really results from—or at least was sparked by—a mid-life crisis. What role have the photographs performed, in the journey that you’ve made as you approached and passed the age of 50?

FY: As a photographer I don’t think I knew of another way to process this landmark event, so it was quite natural for me to reach for my camera and make these photographs. That very first impulse to take a picture felt unsurprisingly familiar and yet awkward, as I was not convinced I was ready to make work. However, once I made the first image, I was seduced, and the project began to slowly, but consistently, reveal itself. As I documented this journey, it gave me the opportunity to take another look at my life’s decisions and retrace my path to 50 as well as look beyond.

Initially, I made photographs about the “big” decisions, and some of those images feel appropriately iconic. As the project expanded, the “smaller” moments gave life to the narrative and helped me to see a more congruous life. Most of all, this process was empowering, as the images became cornerstones of my understanding, each image leading to another, creating dialogue to address the complexities of identity and life. Ultimately, I felt confidence and inspiration from these pictures and the response to this work has reinforced those emotions.

AL: Throughout the series, we witness the whole gamut of dispositions and emotions that you’ve experienced—humor, introspection, loss, joy, frustration, uncertainty, self-gratification, confidence—and yet, together, I Feel Lucky appears to be just a small glimpse of Frank Yamrus.

FR: Life is full and very complex. I agree this is but a glimpse of Frank Yamrus. Diane Arbus once said, “[a] photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” I subscribe to this sentiment and my imagery is, and has always been, about process and not about resolution.

The I Feel Lucky images, individually and collectively, inform. They are the evidence of life’s full spectrum of offerings: my hopes and dreams, my joy and sorrows, my happiness and pain, etc. And in spite of the filters of time and memory, the human desire to fabricate and stretch reality, these images feel authentic, and provide clarity and insight. Surely they capture the essence of my identity but, by no means, reveal all my secrets or truths.

Untitled (Boo Boo) © Frank Yamrus

AL: Does this survey of feelings, then, suggest a lack of answers, a lack of catharsis in facing up to and surviving a questioning of identity? Or would you say they represent an acceptance or acknowledgment of who and where you are?

FR: This survey of feelings is the very foundation of self-identity, and does not represent a lack of answers at all. As my personal history played out before the camera, these were the very elements that were the most closely scrutinized. I found this process to be emotionally rigorous and intellectually challenging, but in the end, oddly comforting and extremely rewarding. One of the many beautiful things about age is wisdom, and this investigation certainly uncovered the wisdom I acquired over my life’s journey. I was not looking for “answers,” although that in itself may be “the” answer. Fundamentally, I was interested in the evolution of identity. For example, two of the images I made for this series, Untitled (Lucky) and Untitled (Fountain), explore my relationship with my history and, ultimately, my identity in Provincetown.

In Untitled (Lucky) I’m disguised behind my shirt—not wanting to be recognized and not wanting to tempt fate—in this land that I once called sacred, that was my altar as I processed the loss of many friends. Sometimes I do not recognize myself in this reverent landscape under any other circumstances. Other times, when the stars are properly aligned, I embrace the entirety of that history confidently. My face is unmasked in Untitled (Fountain), as I mischievously glance at the camera and brashly spit a fountain of salt water. Fully exposed to the summery sunshine and brilliant blue water, I playfully seize the spirit of Provincetown and stake out my future in this land that holds my past.

AL: Provincetown is clearly of pivotal importance in your life. Why?

FR: When I made those landscape photographs on the Cape in 2004 that I referred to earlier, I wrote an essay about Provincetown that feels true to this day. “Provincetown is my home—it is comfort food and my favorite reading chair. It is the smell of a newborn’s hair or that moment when you first wake up in the morning snuggled against your lover. It is the place that offers me the intangibles: security and happiness, as well as the place for discovery, development, and ultimately a source of inspiration. I have spent endless summers in Provincetown but it is not where I reside. It is home, the place I visit, physically or emotionally, when I need a fix.”

Untitled (Sunset) © Frank Yamrus

AL: You published the series as a book. Do you see this as the ideal way for an audience to engage with the photographs?

FR: There a few things that I love about the book format for this project. First and foremost, the privacy and intimacy the book offers for these portraits is undeniable.

AL: One aspect of the book which works really well is that the photographs don’t appear to be arranged chronologically. It’s difficult to tell which image was made first and which last!

FR: Generally speaking, books tend to lend themselves to a linear read, which was not appropriate for this collection of photographs. With the I Feel Lucky book, I purposely avoided employing a chronological sequence. I was interested in creating an experience that reflected my non-linear process of examining, or perhaps more accurately, re-examining, these pivotal decisions and moments in my life. The dialogue created by the placement of the images was rooted in visual elements rather than related issues, feelings or chronology. This telling of my story had no beginning, middle or end.

AL: And as photographs, they’re printed at what, these days, is considered small-scale—measuring 20 x 28 inches. What determined the scale?

FR: As we all know, size matters, and for this work, this issue of scale was a delicate balance. My gut reaction was to make small prints to keep with the notion of private moments. I’m a fan of small images, and love the physical act of walking up to an image in order to digest it. However, I usually experiment with image size, and as I scaled-up the images from 5 x 7 to 10 x 14 and then finally to 20 x 28, these images came alive: facial details, gestures and background information commanded attention.

Another consideration, of course, was how the photographs would work in a gallery. My goal was to create a group conversation with the images, and as visitors walk into ClampArt they can hear the internal dialogue. At least I can. Image size and the density of the installation contributed to this success. When I took the 20 x 28 prints to the gallery, I felt this size met this goal and was happy that I was not printing on a larger scale, which oftentimes demands more visual space between the images.

Untitled (Disappear) © Frank Yamrus

AL: It’s interesting, too, that in a number of the photographs you’re not alone. Different people come into the frame and you provide little indication of their place in your world.

FR: The importance of my relationships was integral in my understanding of self. Although I don’t identify the people in my pictures, they are truly part of my life—sometimes playing themselves and at times playing others.

Untitled (Disappear) was constructed around the notion of anticipatory loss. As Sunil Gupta writes in his essay Everyman: Frank Yamrus, “Untitled (Disappear) is chilling. It evokes an insoluble mystery, a doubt that will linger forever. The nocturnal blue and the closed eyes remind us of impending gloom. This is a moment of recognition that a shared intimacy is no more. The image is more a requiem of a relationship than an image of the relationship itself.”

I don’t believe you need to know that the model in bed with me is Larry—my long-term partner of more than thirty years—to understand the significance of this photograph. In Untitled (Red), Lucas, a new love, serves as my model, but the image is more about a disconnect—anonymous sex and fetishism—than about our relationship.

In Untitled (Brooke) and Untitled (Stone), my models allowed me to explore the notion of fatherhood and visualize myself in a role that feels so completely foreign to me. The comfort I needed to make these pictures feel real was dependent on my close relationships with these models.

Lastly, in his essay The Borrowed Mirror, Bill Hunt addresses an image of me and my dad and insightfully captures my use of others in these photographs. He says: “Untitled (Dad) combines the dimensions of reality and fantasy effectively. The figure in the snapshot is less important than our sense that Yamrus’ search for meaning is entirely framed in this mirror. It is an image of reflection, handsomely and thoughtfully composed.”

Untitled (Dad) © Frank Yamrus

AL: Those who have followed your career for some time will recognize in this body of work, references to earlier photographs. Was this something that you consciously sought out?

FR: Yes, one of the underlying relationships that exist throughout this series is my relationship to photography, and my own work became fodder for this series. Being a photographer is a crucial part of my identity, and quite naturally referencing my own images became part of this process.

For example, I spent eight years in the moors of Provincetown making work about the loss of many friends to HIV/AIDS. I played off those images, that time, and my relationship to Provincetown throughout this series. Untitled (Sandman) and Untitled (Cemetery) are two examples. This tribute not only reflects my deep fondness for this place but also the importance of that time in my life and its impact on my career.

Untitled (Sandman) © Frank Yamrus

AL: Some will argue that self-portraiture is generally understood as the domain of the female artist. As a male, do you bring something different and new to this genre? If so, what is it that?

FR: I believe this argument has strength if we look at the genre in more contemporary terms; however, now we must consider the recent proliferation of self-portraits created for social media and how these pictures are shaping the complexion of this debate. Who hasn’t taken one or a hundred pictures of themselves to post on Facebook? However, my intention was to jump into this conversation with the same brutal honestly and raw vulnerability that I’ve noted in self-portraits made by women photographers. Even though my series is a blend of documentary and fiction, reality and fantasy, there is no denying its candor, humor and honesty. For me, that is what feels fresh about this work.

AL: From the point of view of commerce, do you feel there’s a place in public/private collections for these images? What transition, as an artist, have you made by placing highly personal images into the public domain—by way of the book and an exhibition?

FR: A number of these images have found their way into public and private collections, so my answer is a resounding “yes.” Although these images represent personal moments, I believe they also have a universal appeal as evidenced by these acquisitions. I generally don’t think about commerce while I am making work. But once it’s done, the work needs to find an audience. Sometimes this task is more challenging than making the work itself!

With respect to transition, I’m not quite sure enough time has transpired for me to answer this question. Initially, as I stated earlier, I was a bit skeptical about putting these images on public view, but thus far, I’ve received tremendous support. For the most part, I’m objective about the images as single pieces, however, collectively, as a body of work, I’m still attached. Interestingly, this attachment does not feel any differently than it did with other bodies of work I’ve created. Perhaps in years to come, I may feel differently about putting my face, my body, my being on public view but it’s much too early to tell. Although this work feels complete, I’m certain I will add pieces here and there. Who knows, I may go through this process as I approach 60. Right now, I’m ready to move on.

Untitled (Chapstick) © Frank Yamrus

AL: You seem to have survived 50! Do you really feel lucky and what are you moving on to?

FR: I do feel lucky, grateful and at the moment tired. The exhibition preparation and book were very consuming over these past 18 months. Next, I Feel Lucky moves to the Albert Merola Gallery for an exhibition, which will feature the images made in Provincetown, to kick off their summer season on May 18th. After that, a well-deserved vacation, perhaps some romantic walks on the beach taking corny pictures of sunsets and if my luck holds out Penelope Umbrico will find these pics on Google and incorporate them into one of her typologies! As far as new work, I’m interested in exploring my new hometown, New York, and its people.

Frank Yamrus lives and works in New York. In February 2012, I Feel Lucky was a solo exhibition at ClampArt in New York City coinciding with the publication of the accompanying book. I Feel Lucky will next be exhibited at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, May 18–June 7, 2012.

Onstage, saxophonist Colin Stetson is a steampunk Harry Houdini.  If your first experience of his solo work is seeing it, you won’t believe it.  Latched onto a brass machine nearly as big as he is, Stetson blows powerfully and continuously into the instrument in a way that seems to defy the limits of human endurance, creating sounds that will be unlike anything you’ve ever heard one person produce.  Before you can really process what he’s playing, you’ll be struck dumb by the spectacle of his performance.

But as impressive as his playing is to watch, Stetson has already achieved an excellent reputation purely on the strength of his playing.  Your first encounter with his music was likely not as a solo performer but his work backing up some of the biggest acts in rock music.  He has loaned his talents to albums by Tom Waits, Bon Iver, Feist, TV on the Radio, and fellow Montreal residents Arcade Fire.  Stetson won a share of the Polaris Prize for his work on Arcade Fire’s recent album The Suburbs, but his full-length solo release New History Warfare, Vol 2: Judges was also among the ten finalists.

Judges and Those Who Didn’t Run, an EP of new material released this past fall, combine Stetson’s conservatory training and study of the jazz avant garde, his raw physical performing style, and the theatricality and songcraft of rock to create a uniquely compelling sound.  Low-frequency drones, half-vocalized screams, fluttering percussion and the occasional Laurie Anderson guest vocal make for songs that seem to come from somewhere deep in your memory, or even from your own bones.

Stetson took a rare moment of mid-winter’s rest to talk to At Length about his breakout year, his physical limits, and his rather daunting New Year’s resolution.

Check out an excerpt from the title track of his most recent EP Those Who Didn’t Run below.
Those who didn’t run (excerpt) – COLIN STETSON by Constellation Records

At Length: The first thing I want to do is congratulate you on what was by any measure a really successful 2011.

Colin Stetson: Thank you very much

AL: Not only did you release two solo records this year that got a lot of attention, but counting your work with other artists like the Arcade Fire and Bon Iver, it seems like you participated in just about every significant thing in music. I imagine you must have kept really busy.

CS: Yeah, I’ve been going pretty non-stop for a number of years, but this was by far the busiest I have ever been.

AL: Do you have a feeling of having crossed some threshold in popularity this year, with more people seeking out your music or artists seeking to collaborate?

CS: I definitely feel there’s been more recognition, so more people know what it is I do, and I’m definitely getting a lot more offers. Unfortunately, I have to say no to a lot of them — there’s only so much time in the day.  But, yes, definitely over the past year things have picked up.

AL: Your music is tuneful and quite accessible, but I think that most people would probably still consider it difficult for the average music listener. Now that you’re playing for new audiences — like at All Tomorrow’s Parties — what kinds of reactions do you get from people who are hearing your music for the first time?

CS: At shows overall I’ve been well-received. There’s something that goes on, I don’t know what it is exactly but there are certain barriers that are broken down when you’re in a space with the audience and you’re physically there. It seems to extinguish a little of that pre-conception of what it is they’re supposed to like or how they’re supposed to react to certain sounds and certain music. A lot of that garbage just goes to the wayside in a live context. That is, if I’m playing well.

AL: Right.

CS: No matter who I’m getting up for, I’m always jacked and excited, and I have the appropriate allotment of nerves for the shows that I do, but not in terms “I hope that they accept me.”  It’s always more tied to just getting out and doing what I consider to be something really physical and emotional. I liken it to the years that I was an athlete in that regard, where you are truly a performer and you have to be on top of your game.

AL: Unlike someone that goes out there with just a laptop, one of your shows can be like a really amazing dance performance or a basketball game or something equally physical. You’re putting out such an amazing amount of physical energy when you’re playing that I imagine that can’t help but be more infectious.

CS: Well, I hope so. I hope it continues to be so if that is the case. It certainly is the most difficult thing that I know how to do and it really keeps me on my toes in life.

AL: When I listen to your music, or when I watch you play, it seems almost as if you and that giant saxophone become like one beast, and I think that comes from in part the way you seem to want to explore the limits of yourself as a player and the sax as an instrument in a very physical sense:  you record all your tracks in single takes and you seem to push your own physical limits. Why are these particular sorts of constraints important to you when you’re making your music?

CS: The physicality of it has always been a pretty fundamental element to making music for me. Because it is a physical process with the saxophone — especially the bigger ones, but really all of them in their own right are quite physically demanding. So for me, as I’ve been playing more and more solo, and developing this music more, it just organically came about that the music I’m able to perform is tied to what I am physically able to endure. So once I consciously realized the degree to which that is the case, it really became a mission. Since I recorded the first record, I have set a few certain parameters that would dictate how I would make this music. So as I perform it, I also record it — with single takes and no overdubs and all that — to preserve that essence of everything being tied to breath, and being tied to physicality. The two are linked and one is an extension of the other. So for me, it’s really one and the same.

AL: I know you run every day and do yoga to keep yourself well-conditioned, but have you ever had performances where your body has failed you in some way?

CS: Amazingly, no. I’ve had performances where I’ve not felt particularly awesome, and others where I have felt particularly awesome. There was one, a few years ago, playing a solo performance at the Moers Festival in Germany. This was the biggest solo show I’d played at that time. I had been opening for the National on tour and it was the ninth show in a row I had played, and it was over an hour-long performance. At some point near the end of it, I was playing one of my longer songs — about twelve to fifteen minutes of circular breathing — and there was a point at the very, very end of it, where I had to take it up a notch. It’s a crazy huge thing for me when this happens, when my mouth breaks and I have to take a quick breath and let everything slack. It only takes a split second and not that many people in the audience would notice that it actually happened, but I really notice.

When I compose these things they’re very set in stone. I used to improvise when I performed, and I would have skeletal landing points where I would go to different places as I saw fit. And in that way it was all open for interpretation and everything bent to how I felt that particular day. Music would be initiated by how I felt and what I could accomplish at that particular time. But now the compositions are such that there’s not really much I can do besides go straight through and I have to perform up to the right level, otherwise the sound won’t be the right sound.

AL: You mentioned circular breathing, which is a thing that everyone wants to talk to you about. I’ll be far from the first person to ask you about Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who made circular breathing a big part of his performance. He’s also somebody who liked to vocalize through his instrument and create unusual, almost electronic textures with his playing. I don’t know if he was an influence on you, but I’d like to hear how you developed the techniques that you have come to use in your playing.

CS: Rahsaan Roland Kirk was definitely a huge influence. I started right around the age of 18 or 19, and when you’re in college, you exposed to all these bigger, newer, and different ideas. All this stuff that in the past you overlooked or you hadn’t been exposed to yet. So I got to hear a lot of different things, with certain players like Rahsaan, Peter Brotzmann, Mats Gustafsson, Evan Parker, all the things that people were doing. It was part of the repertoire, so I would try to mimic everything to absorb all of that technique and assimilate it into my own growing vocabulary. But at the same time what was probably more important was the act of cross-instrument transcription, where you remake the work of guitar players and singers and electronic music and things like that. Where you are actually really trying to recreate the forms that somebody is making on a different instrument, rather than recreate the techniques that were already created on the same instrument that you’re using. And that was something that was really priceless for me. Particularly people like Jimi Hendrix and the electronic music of Nobukazu Takemura early on — that was huge for me.

AL: I’ve seen a quote from Jimi Hendrix in which he said that he always wanted to work with Rahsaan Roland Kirk but never got a chance to.

CS: Hendrix passed at a young, young age of what — 27 or 28? Who knows what would have happened had he lived? Talk about being merged with your instrument or being one body — that was just the pinnacle of that for me.

AL: Judges came out about a year ago, and had a very consistent sound and a darkly apocalyptic feel. Then you released a two-song EP this past fall, the title of which was the first line of the track “A Dream of Water” from Judges. Was this material left over from the Judges writing process, or was it conceived of as as a separate project?

CS: No, these are things that I started after Judges came out. I was already getting pretty hard into the composition of the next volume. The newer songs are much weightier, longer forms than the last record, and there was starting to be such a body of pieces that I couldn’t really see them all fitting on to the next volume and making much sense. These two on the EP were things that I immediately had written and were just resonating with me at that point.. The more that I thought about them and looked at it all in context, these two particular pieces were thematically something that fell more in between the two volumes than really sat on the third, so that’s how I organized it. They represented a bridge, so to speak, between the two.

AL: The overall structure of the trilogy isn’t completely obvious to me after listening to just the first two volumes. Could you tell me what New History Warfare means to you and why you needed a trilogy to flesh out these ideas?

CS: When I went to record the first record, it was the first time I had done a solo record at all. It was the first time that I started to organize this music that I had been writing for years, a lot of bits and pieces that had been swirling around for years in a more improvised setting. When I set out to codify it all, to put it all into album form, the songs started to become actual songs, but yet that first album is still really unformed. There’s much more of an improvised element to that one, much more so than the second one or the third one. And so going into it I realized that it was just the tip of the iceberg for me. I knew I wanted to record it with this element of multi-miking, and I had all these kind of ideas — kind of wants and desires — and I realized that it was really going to be a thing that was going to grow and something that I was going to learn from. It was a statement that was not going to be this singular thing, it was going to be a developing story. When I was putting that together I made it into a trilogy because I tend to think of things in that cinematic way. Its this archetypal format, and at the same time it’s a challenge to put something together in that form, so it all just made sense for me.

AL: You mention multi-miking, which contributes a lot to the unique sound of the records. You’re not only miking up what an audience would hear if you were just playing in a room, but also miking up the interior of the instrument and some other things as well.

CS: Well there are a lot of things that the observer would hear that you never get from just from a microphone in front of the instrument. First of all, if you’re sitting right in front of the instrument, 3 feet in front of it, or you’re sitting behind me or just to the right of me, you are getting a completely different picture — even just at that little difference in vantage point. The instrument itself creates an enormous amount of sound and a multitude of different sounds as well, so the idea was to capture all these things that you really can feel, like a lot of the bass that you can physically feel in the presence of the instrument. If you have just one microphone in front of it to take in that one snapshot that that one microphone can do you’re going to be losing a lot of the subtleties. The saxophone can have a pretty good response down in the low end. You’re creating some 40 Hz tone there, and you’re going to be feeling that when you’re in the presence of the instrument, but most mikes are not picking that up. So really I’m miking it very invasively, trying to get everything that’s there, so that when it’s on record it can all be dealt with. Listening to a record is a completely different experience, and completely different reality, than the live reality, so I try not to recreate a live experience but rather to recreate a surrealistic or an alternate reality for the music, something that specifically exists on record and abides by the strengths and weaknesses that exist in that space.

AL: When I first started getting into jazz and had the chance to listen carefully on a good pair of headphones, I started to notice that these musicians aren’t just electric guitars coming through amps. These are actual people breathing in between the notes, and that adds a level of intimacy that you just don’t get when you’re listening to something like a pop record, or a rock record. And with your music it not only feels like the listener is in the room, but that they’re able to walk around you as you play. It’s really something else.

So what’s up for 2012 for you?

CS: Well, I had a nice little break in January, which has been pretty lovely — first time in a long, long time. I’ve just been at home working on volume 3, and now I’m well on the way to being done with the recording.

AL: Oh, that’s great.

CS: And I’ve been doing a few projects for other people. Some soundtrack stuff, but mostly in 2012 I’m with Bon Iver on the road, and taking time between those tours to tour solo a little. There might be some collaborations with a couple of different friends coming throughout the rest of the year, one which should be landing in spring or summer. And then rehearse with a bunch of different things, irons in the fire for the fall. And it looks like Volume 3 will be landing sometime either in the fall or by this time next year.

AL: That’s great. I’d would really like to catch you live at some point soon.

CS: Great! Well I’ll be around.

AL: The New Year’s has just passed and I don’t know if you believe in New Year’s resolutions, but if you, do you have a resolution that you made for this coming year?

CS: My resolution is pretty much always the same. With tiny little personal tweaks, mostly it’s just “be better.” It’s a really vague, really general notion, but I do I like events that cause us to have these moments of reflection, and it’s a nice time to reflect on how and what this life is at this point in time — what and how it has been, and then to look into the future as to it how it can be, and how I can be better in every way. Be better to myself, better to my partner, better to my friends and family, better in music. Progress is kind of a key for me. So that’s it.

AL: Well that’s awesome. That’s a lot on your plate.

CS: I don’t know what else there could be, besides just moving ahead and continuing to be the change that you make for yourself.

Think of it all as two songs, ours and theirs,
And theirs composed of one high note, too high
For us to hear, and played so constantly, so
Uninterruptedly that they themselves
No longer hear it, if they ever could.
And ours, its crooked passage up and down
The scale of feeling, unforeseen and fated,
Note vanishing as soon as played, and played
By vanishing into the song it is–
How could it not astound them, air, just air
Resisting air, inflected with the sound
Of never-enough, and too-soon, and if-only—
Brief shapes of air between the silences
Only the song articulates by breaking.
And so imagine: it wasn’t the husband blundering
In and snatching the baby from the flames
That could have saved him, but the mother-goddess,
The glistening one herself, who held her hand
Against the heel pad, and the pliant tendon,
The skin the fire would cure now soft as ether—
An ether nearly anything could tear.
Touching the tiny foot she felt afraid,
And liked the feeling. And though the baby kicked
And kicked to feel the fire all over him,
Kicking with all his might to get free
As the flames rose, she only smiled at his strength
And gripped him tighter and would not let go.



2.

The gods laugh, that’s what they’re good at, laughing.
They laugh at the crippled god, his shriveled legs,
His hobbling, and his mother, in a little
Shadow play of suffering at the sight of him,
Her crippled baby, laughs the loudest, and then
Laughs even louder when she hurls him out
Of heaven, and he falls, and while he falls
The laughter echoing around him is
The measure of the pure unbreathable cold
Height of the heaven he’s falling from and through,
Hilarity of light and air, delight’s
Effacement of everything but itself.
And the crippled baby tumbling to earth
In a charade of terror? Don’t let him
Deceive you—he’s a god—he’s laughing too.



3.

The sodium streetlights down the avenue
Were vague globes where the dark turned orange,
And the orange dark. The avenue deserted,
The buildings all abandoned, or soon to be,
I drove, I can’t remember where, or when,
Though it was late, or early, and the night
Was heaviness my headlights had to push
Through slowly, till I passed a side street where
I saw two figures fighting, two men, one pummeling
The other against the hood of a parked car.
A woman nearby screamed, for God’s sake, stop!
And suddenly the hero of the story,
God-crazed with justice, without thinking, I
Slammed on the brakes, and, running hard to throw
Myself between them, shouted Hey Hey Hey,
Suddenly bigger and stronger than I was.

Well, that’s the story, anyway.  In the one
I’d later come to tell about what happened,
I don’t exactly say that I was fearless,
Or even that I ran to help; I say
Instead I walked as slowly as I could,
And hoped with every step the guy would stop
Before I got there. I smile then, sheepishly,
As if to say I know it isn’t right
To seem too much the hero of a story,
It makes a better story if you’re not,
And thus makes you a better hero. And so
I then say when I got there I discovered
It wasn’t a fight at all, but only shadows
The street light threw down through a wind-swept tree
Against the car hood, and no woman screamed,
Although, in truth, she did, or might have, I don’t know
Really, I couldn’t say if she was there,
Or not, it was so late, after all, or early,
in the orange darkness of a strange
Dark city I was lost in, and besides
My heart was pounding so hard as I drove past
I couldn’t tell you what it was I saw.



4.

What if they got it wrong, the tribe of singers,
And none of it was true: she never sailed
In the benched ships, she never went to Troy,
And there had been no bed befouled, no god-bound
Slaughterhouse of honor to be sung about?
What if the unsung were the only song,
The simile reversed, the rank and file
Massed for a sleep walk into corpse fires just
A figure now for storm clouds out at sea,
The storm itself a storm and nothing else,
Whipping great breakers onto breakers till
Even miles inland from his mountain top
The goatherd sees it turning day to midnight,
Summer to winter, sees it and shivers, driving
The flock before him to a cave where, safe
And dry now, he can watch the fabulous black
Sky crazed with lightning till the storm has passed.



5.

If they are only moments of ourselves,
Sifted from all that in us isn’t them,
Sifted and distilled, as in a dream,
To monsters of sensation who can give
By taking and take so fully and after feel
So far from thinking anything at all
It hardly matters how the other feels–
Then who was I last night, and who were you?
And who now is it asking, warning, taunting,
What wouldn’t we too suffer or abandon
For the pleasure of that moment of
Our feeling nothing beyond our feeling that?
And haven’t we? And who on earth could blame us?



6.

Hers were the bright veils of disclosures of
What shines by hiding, the no sooner here
Than gone sensation of desire dis-
Entangled from desire and cut loose
As mist about the body, in the heart,
The sight of her a dazzling emptiness
He swirled another mist around, gold mist
Inside of mist, a swirling doorlessness
That nothing but itself could penetrate.
And there inside it, the about to have
And having, and the having had of sleep
All flashed at once like different facets of
The single shining of the thing it was.

We’ve known it too, for moments, you and I,
Each in our own way, together, or with others,
Enclosed, and drifting, arrogant as gods
Who in the gold mist of that complete forgetting
Forget that in the killing fields below
Their shining sons, the fretted over, doomed
Swift Runner, Wily, Breaker of Horses, all
Cry out for them to bless the sword they raise
Against each other, to bless the hacking down,
The butchering, the dragging in the dust,
Not knowing that their parents aren’t their parents now,
Now they’ve never been parents, they have no children,
The only cry they’re hearing is their own.



7.

Murmur of house flies in the window where
The twisted strips hung softening in the heat,
Swaying and trembling as the stuck flies, slimed
And furious, struggled across an inch-wide desert.
Some were caught by both feet while the wings whirred
And buzzed as the body tried to lift free of
What wouldn’t let it.  And some with one wing caught,
The other whirring, could only sideways slide
And crawl around itself against itself
Over and over in a ragged circle,
Sliding and crawling till it finally stopped.
But the ones I watched most were the strongest ones,
The most determined, who would fight free of
The paper and then below it on the sill,
With forefeet glued together, and still wet
With glue, for hours would mop the gummed head with
The very gum it tried to mop away.
Sometimes I’d pencil a circle around one and
Then come back later to see if he got clean
And got away. But no one ever did,
Or if he did he only got an inch
Or so beyond the tiny winner’s circle
Of my attention before I’d brush him off
Into the pile of the other once great fighters
Filling the trough between the sill and pane.



8.

Because she was his mother and a god,
Even down at the bottom of the sea
She could hear him crying, sprawled in the dust
Before the body of his friend. Because she was
His mother she could cry and beat her breast;
But because she was a god too, she could rise
As water out of water onto the shore
Where she could cradle him, his god-like head,
The way a mother would, to soothe but not
To save him, no, not that, because, more god
Than mother, trapped in flawlessness, she was
The glistening one, who glistened even then
Among her sisters who like sisters came with her
To cry as only they could cry whose names were
Mist and Fair-isle, Down-from-the-cliffs, First Light,
Bright Spray, Bather of Meadows, Eyes of the World.



9.

The ocean’s river circles the great shield’s rim.
Inside it is a field, a vineyard, vine poles
Weighed down with gold grapes ripening like grapes,
Each dew-wet cluster soon to be stripped and crushed,
Forever soon to be, here where they climb forever,
And down the one footpath the pickers run,
Their wicker baskets swinging by their sides,
Young girls and boys, all running to the field,
And in the midst of them a child is singing,
Plucking such clear notes from a golden lyre
That the gold air all around him, could it hear him,
Playing and singing dirges for the dying
Where nothing dies, even that air would long
To be the air it isn’t, if it could long.



10.

The wave is building as it approaches shore,
Out of itself upon itself, the long
Back steepening with shine until the crest
Curls over and breaks, exploding into spray
Against the backwash of the wave before it–
Earth shaker, steadily, day and night, the surf
Pounds on the shore and, in the suck and drag,
Takes back a little of it, grain by grain,
In time-lapse plundering that in its own
Time, soon, will have it all back, beach and salt
Marsh, river basin and the rising plain–
The ancient citadel itself now less
than the collateral damage of a moment,
crushed in the giant downbeat of its crashing
into the silt the idiot force will carry
over the earth and into it and out
again, ten thousand years away, beside
another ocean in another field
where an old man sees two white stones propping up
a dead tree stump, not rotted through by rain,
and wonders if it’s the grave mound of a man
dead too long to remember, or just two stones
marking the finish line of a forgotten track
Or its halfway point where the homestretch starts.



11.

After the son dies, or the father, or the friend,
And the corpse fires all burn out; after the smoke,
The visible stench, so pleasing to the gods,
Has risen to the gods who send it back as black
Confetti, raining what began as men
Today upon the men who will tomorrow
Honor them by making more of them;
After the play hunt and the play kill of
The funeral games, and the sacrifice and feast,
When the watch fires gutter and go out and the whole
Field blackens into outer space—it’s then
And only then that even the most enraged
Can sleeping find a refuge from his name,
And for a little while the name drifts free
Of epithet and set piece into sound
No one is making. Think of a schoolroom between
Class when a teacher wipes the blackboard clean
And claps the two erasers and releases
The disarticulated powder of
A day of rules —think how they float now, the words
The men are made of, while the armies sleep,
By the wine-dark sea till the rosy-fingered dawn
Between books, before the page is turned.









Acknowledgement: Section 3 (“The sodium streetlights down the avenue”) of this poem first appeared in TriQuarterly.

Alan Shapiro is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including, most recently, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin). He is a former recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Shapiro will publish his first novel, Broadway Baby (Algonquin), later this month.

If you were hired by Classics Illustrated and told to choose a book—any book!—to adapt into a comic, what would it be? Why that book? What would it look like?

The responses dig into the problems of transforming work from one medium to another with wit, sympathy, and just a touch of sarcasm. We’re very pleased to present new work by Kevin Cannon, Pascal Girard, Melissa Mendes, Andrea Tsurumi, and Noah Van Sciver.


***


A “CLASSIC” IDEA
by Kevin Cannon





***


By Pascal Girard





***


MEDIUMS
by Melissa Mendes





***


THE PEEP OF DAY (1836)
by Andrea Tsurumi





***


SEX, DRUGS, AND COCOA PUFFS
by Noah Van Sciver





***


***


Kevin Cannon wants to be an important businessman, but mostly he just draws comics, such as the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Far Arden, and the much-lauded mini comic Beard Hero. In his free time he listens to professional hockey on the radio and collects first-edition Arctic narratives on eBay.

Pascal Girard was born in Jonquière in 1981. He received his interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts from the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi in 2004. He lives in Montreal. His book Bigfoot won the best book of the year at the Doug Wright Awards 2011.

Melissa Mendes is a cartoonist and illustrator living and working in Hancock, MA with her best beau Charles Forsman and their best cat Bruce.

Andrea Tsurumi is an illustrator and cartoonist living in Astoria, Queens. She’s also currently an MFA student at the School of Visual Arts.

Noah Van Sciver, a native of New Jersey, was born in 1984 and is currently located in Denver, Colorado. He draws a weekly comic strip for the Denver alternative paper Westword called “4 Questions” and is the creator of the much-loved comic book series Blammo. His work has appeared in Mad magazine, Mome, The Comics Journal, Best American Comics 2011, and numerous other comics anthologies. He has recently completed his debut graphic novel about a young, melancholic Abraham Lincoln called The Hypo for Fantagraphics Books.

The sequence’s two threads begin with the same poem, which is a response to translations of two fragments from Sappho.

The first thread is below; please click here to see the other one.  To read writers’ explanations of their responses, as well as brief bios for the participants, click here.

The project is ongoing, and we will update it periodically.

Click here to view or print this sequence as a PDF.



TELEPHONE PROJECT 1


these toys [
after and with Sappho

The hope gets hold of me that I won’t share
anything that the blessed gods [themselves desire—

no lending those toys that smell of clay or graphite
however much apportioning was thrust

into tissue, gray or pink.  I’m sick
of placating them with string or wax—

after all I have to work.

I look toward the beekeeper keeping bees at home
that she knows damn well will sting and swarm.

—Kimiko Hahn


***


As in Cincinnati

Stung, the beekeeper becomes
the kept.

Tending to him, his honey-makers
drone and go,

leaving only their delicate cells, the holes
in a poem

by Sappho.  And after
the last bees

have gone, the sound is
of vacant houses,

of vagrants inside, building fires
in the living room.

—Idra Novey


***


Fever Fragments

Can you forget what happened before?
—Sappho, “Six Fragments for Atthis”


The picture is still so clear to me
I cannot imagine you cannot see.
The fire’s marks are red, and burn;
I turn and turn for your return.

Then I see what I did not see:
you see a different part in me
that when the cold and dark return
the fire in you will burn and burn.

*

All smoke now, the white stars, the stupid wax
that crouched too fast under the hooded heat.
No stub of toe, no crust of tears, no sex
but dissipating wisp, finished, incomplete.

*

I would make accusation a form of love
except it has been done before.

*

Sundays we watched the Giants fumble
another play, but somehow stumble
to a big touchdown.

Your hands were sure, ran down my zipper
and caught so well I took you for a keeper,
took you in my mouth.

*

I suspect the lonely ones who compose long poems
of hearts unbroken.
My suspicion is ungenerous, I confess,
fever of the forsaken.

*

Sappho, teach me to lay a curse on him that sits:
when boys eat his ass, give them a mouthful of shit.

—Jee Leong Koh


***


“Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself”

In the middle of the gallery: white string on a cold floor.
Everywhere else: guards guarding against
my strategies—

And though the signs said not to touch,
you could have touched me again,
they wouldn’t have minded,
no, the guards might have liked something fleeting

to stare at for a while,
something else to remember.
As would I—

—Catherine Barnett
[n.b. the title is from Richard Tuttle’s installation at the Whitney]


***


Bienvenida: Santo Tomás

In the middle of the yard, a goat,
bound at the hooves,
wags its grotesque tongue.
Everywhere else, I am falling in love,
and today that will change too,

for an old man has heard my uncle
drag the small beast to the block,
the music, the laughter
inside the slaughter.

The old man will come
the mile by foot
from the barrio’s far edge,
up the long dirt road,
unshod, a ratty tank-top,
with a brand new Vegas cap,
a cut black strip
of inner tube draped
around his neck,
and he rolls in front of him,
the whole way, a common
jug, emptied of all its molasses,
immense, to his hip in height
and three times
the old man’s girth.

My uncle is strumming the guts
out of his ukelele
when the old man arrives
and sets the huge jar down,

pulls the bike tube
off his nape and stretches it
across this massive ceramic
yawn, holding the strip
of galvanized rubber in place
with one big muddy toe,
then finds the first down-
beat to join my uncle
in the kind of mooing chorus
they think has tricked all
the thousand blossoms
they never kissed.
The old man plucks
from the makeshift bass
not so much a moan
but a pulse to range
a full octave
into each man’s chest,
the sinews of the old timer’s arm,
straining, the long muscle
of his back, taut,
his quadricep, his calves,
his black foot pumping
blood into his whole
miserable body,
his maw flashing
every one of his seven
good teeth to heaven,

and if a man become
the heart of a giant, the song
of a giant, each one of us
laughing like a giant,
if each one of us fulfill
the exact measure of a man,
and if the goat is singing
as its dying
among men who are singing
and dying, the youngest
cousin among us, butcher,
slaughterer, sings too,
reaches into the carcass,
wholly still now,
yanking from its belly
the entrails, like small versions
of the sky, releasing them
from his fist onto the block,
a bloody pile of white string.

—Patrick Rosal


***


Bienvenida: Santo Tomás (continued)

Three instruments, then, and still
no song, of love, death, uncles, or
old men.  Or giants.  Or goats.  Or
cousins.  Three passages are more
difficult than they look, and we
keep looking into them for saints
& someones & legendary strings
as if we knew where all this was
going.  Were going.  We’re going.
When you wish upon a star, Saint Thomas
wonders what you are, where he is too
to you and what you hold onto.
Like that other time you made the same
mistake and killed farm stock
for a song.  That was bad.  The song
was not good.  And we weren’t.
But someone has to, uncles
simply play and old men show up
like John Lee Hooker?  We already feel
the big “as if” as if we don’t belong
even though we took it all
the way the first time, that last time
it sounded good.  That’s what playing is,
Saint Thomas, without looking it up
we know it whether confirmed or not,
it’s a kind of way, of going there.
It’s where, we hear, you’re from,
Saint Thomas, your welcome, you’re welcome,
a tune you can hum before you holler
another name somewhat closer to home.

—Joshua Weiner


***


Saint Thomas: The Other Amelie

Here she must have stood
when she knew it—

Waves rushing in, aborting
flotsam, claiming her song,
coco heads wobbling on strings
invisible, the decapitation already lost
in the sibilance of the honing stone.
Begin to tell what I am,
machete, before you hide back into the sheath—

Here she must have waited,
behind the palm trellis,
a splinter of island’s flesh
summoned to wean the newborn
then return, scars dressed in crushed sage,
milky breasts upping the price,

when she remembered the goat licking
the tether around its neck with such
dreadful ease, sounds abrasive and hallow,

before she mounted the taxi scooter
and noosed her way inland,
skirting the arboretum boasting
rare plumeria—she too forced upon
this land, pliant settler duping the sphinx moth
with sweet smells, succulent yet nectarless.

Begin to tell what I am, machete,
and tell before your spare that crazed goat.
Show me home.

—Mihaela Moscaliuc


***


Amelie (An Echo)

But it was a shipwrecked message―

flotsam
in the sibilance

of the honing stone―

flesh
dressed in crushed sage

with such dreadful ease

sphinx moth

sweet smells

machete―

—Dana Levin


***


So the Flesh Spoke

At evensong, one night under the weight
of rafters in the stone, the monks asleep
in the inkwells, nodding past the hour
to gather meaning in the frayed sleeves
of discontent, not attuned to early vespers…

the bones became aroused,
undid the connections, let slip
tendon and thin, other strands…

I could not sleep, I said
to someone in their dream,
standing beside their bed
calling myself the clatter
of their rebellious bones…

The line picked up again,
the receiver startled into place…

the switchboard came alive
like the ghastly google of nerves
in a bleached whale struggling
to get back to sea…is anyone
there?

—anyone

—Afaa Michael Weaver


***


June 9, 2010 10:35 Pacific Time

One night
one afternoon
anyone: Blanche Lincoln
anyone: Bernanke
anyone: Pau Gasol
anyone: Lindsay Lohan
anyone: Stephan Strasburg
anyone: Meg Whitman
anyone: Blanche Lincoln
anyone: Lady Gaga
anyone: Derek Fisher
anyone: Rod Blagojevish
anyone: Marsha Revel
I could not sleep, I said.
drifting through deep water in plumes or layers
one nightraftersmeaningof discontent                                   …

let slipother strands…
I could not sleep, I said
someone

myself


the receiver

the switchboard

anyone

—anyone
—Juliana Spahr


***


Owl Music

Who who
were you yesterdayin the starless night     *          where did you go
Who who do you hear                        *          can you come with me

The crickety summer deceives us        *          underneath
so many           *          a swath of pollen and hazeSo many individuals so many
stridulations    *          so many retrograde eyes

Who who stays hungry           *          who will scare

At sundown it seems harder               *          to eat the air
than live the same way every dayso we take flight         *          owl music
pinions and talons       *          into the harmless night

Who who will resent my camouflage
my plumage                 *          my desire for concealmentmy predatory and nearly inaudible work
not wise but able to look downover mammals             *          their scurry their scary delay

Only to strangers         *          to those who will never see you
can you say what you believeWho who
will hear my owl credo

CREDOI have run from and risen from the real and dimly
adumbrated shapes of suburban thingsand then run back to them      I believe with ease
in things that nobody can seebut not in what I cannot hear

I do not believe that art is a form of religion
an unforgivable selfishness that takesthe time I always owe to other people
I do not quite believe it but I have come close

I have seen my own span of attention
shrunk to a burnt lightbulb’s tungsten wirelit like a pinpoint star on the back of a spoon
a spiderweb concatenationa matrix of expiation
a mock-up of a better nation               *          a trap to catch fliesand songs come at naptime or else      *          at the end of a day
miniscule in endless promisesto find a way out of the Klein bottle              *          out of the air
nachtmusik*          dignified spotlight

Who who threw
these deteriorating clothesinto their heap mound on mound
by the noble creekbedamid the curious insects wet logs sticks
where pine needles scatter      *          their scent rises over the commontracing and tracing across the private lawn

The crickets claim subscriber rights
their comforting abrasive ringblack handle on a rotary phone
we could not bring ourselves to throw awayIt too lies
where horse chestnuts prickle the darkshells split like pillowcases                  *          nothing inside

Who who
would keep eyes closedWho would not want
to suck on a thumb                  *          to becomean animal that you could sing to sleep
although the mind fades         *          recollections fadesex and death whatever they were     *          fade
as the morning stars regard the moon

and the automobiles out of sight along Route Two

stay asleep in their noise         *          owl music continues too
still underneath the overheadand baffles itself in descent                *          to scan the ground

Who who comes down to see
who gets to knowall this raw dirt            *          all this assertive script
of tangled rootlets       small asseverationsone oak’s new fibers reach down just to make
some shelter for another          seedling seedlingseedling seedling seedling seed

Your cover is shallow             you grown-up
you like it that wayYou get ten minutes to yourself         at dawn
before the creek wakes up again

—Stephen Burt


***


Salt Water

Confessor. Mother. Father. Ghost. This who
you talk to when you’re talking to yourself.

The ocean is one version. Gray green
in sawtooth blossoms
all it meets it swallows.

Such sheer abandon: it must be what flows
beneath those little mercies when the nerves
give in to sleep, orgasm, even pissing.

Or the phatic stream of “Jesus Jesus Jesus”
swims free for moments
and it feels like fullrelease, full trust: as if some listener

absorbed the whole rip-tide of consciousness.
As if the vacuum pull
beneath the blueslide to the eel-grass ledges and drop offs

were sentient. Were more than emptiness.

–Peter Campion


***


listen

them salt-water negroes

come drownin your little bit of garden

in ocean

ain’t no peace with them

they got haints spillin

from they                    done seen too much eyes

no mercy                     can pull they heads above sea-level

you been here your whole life girl

you                                          planted

in this soil

for better or worse

they won’t                   never

sweat all that salt outta him

you

join up with that man

them eyes will forever

be pullin you towards the things he

remember

mother father               ghosts

you won’t sleep free

with his heart always

draggin                                    at your roots

and you dig in hard

you rip that poor negro

right in two


–Evie Shockley (May 27, 2011)


***


mother father ghosts

Warming her milk on the stove,
mother then sits to sip her coffee as Iranian radio
crackles out the battery-operated receiver,
the ghost of a noose
whiskering around her downturned head.

My parents were for years
next. We protected you too much,
mother says, the sound of the gallows’ trapdoor

as the kitchen cabinets open and close.
I paint my toenails red

as the screen at Cinema Rex
curls aflame then drifts
into a pile of black,

the aisles lit with bodies

throwing themselves into the locked doors,
in the city that showed me my first
mega-caliber weapon

and my mother her first café glace.
We protected you too much, she says.
They tried, they did,

but a mobile of nooses turned above my crib.
On the wood-paneled TV, Mr. Rogers
changes his loafers or a friend,

who you can’t bear to see cry,
confesses to the tribunal: Today,
I don’t know why I became political.
He is wishing instead
for the coffee we are having
or the Texan light through the windshield

as he sits between my parents
on the bench seat. Ghosts

or Delkash singing out the warped tape
like a chained elephant lumbering into the big tent
would quiet my parents
as the Buick’s turn signal clicked
next
next
next
next

–SS [full name deleted]


***


Poem for Delkash

when I held the envelope
I knew the time
a little harmless
loneliness would guide
my hand holding
the circular
polycarbonate plastic
disc with the blue
letters spelling her name
into the machine
had come
and I heard
her voice in Persian
inside me make
deep ancient canyons
only sunlight
has ever known
some time passes
I suddenly notice
it is afternoon
I am standing
in the kitchen
holding a broom
she stops singing
alone for a while
the music wanders
then her voice returns
she says a word
it sounds like glacier
I’m pretty sure
the song describes
how it feels when
something important
does not happen
most of the afternoon
still listening
I think
beautiful old stove
many people
we will never know
placed their hands
on your dials
hoping things
would never change
I cannot imagine
what it is like
for those who know
they must stand together
thinking for too long
we have waited
for fear which is not
a guest to leave
they might shoot us
but we will stay
here in the street
until we are all
at last older sisters
to each other

–Matthew Zapruder


***


Of Moraines

The sky some denim. The mountain some denim.
Your Hauptbahnhof, your glaciers of omission.
They omit everything: night train to Berlin,

the Ackerstrasse summer, and lucid white arm
of the marriage certificate drowsing in its cool
orange folder. Names writ wet, twinned Balearic

blue. With their pour of pale, their luminous
monitor, moon field, summit, the glaciers pull closer,
further. Someone was watching, measuring—who?

The Alpen yawn open, click closed.
Your heart, smallest chalet, alights on their form.
Then the valley. How to describe the desire you feel

for the dark house, careful triangle, in their long
wintering shadow? Animals traverse their steep,
their corridors, coursing past pines—

lithe, perfumed pedestals—that describe you
in their verticality, darkly. How like fathers they appear
then, like sisters. Like the evenings, which take

on the aspect of loveliest strangers, one who will
come to love you as days and months—yes, years—
pass and shed in the form of mountains, of moraines.

—Quinn Latimer

The sequence’s two threads begin with the same poem, which is a response to translations of two fragments from Sappho.

The second thread is below; please click here to see the other one.  To read writers’ explanations of their responses, as well as brief bios for the participants, click here.

The project is ongoing, and we will update it periodically.

Click here to view or print this sequence as a PDF.



TELEPHONE PROJECT 2


these toys [
after and with Sappho

The hope gets hold of me that I won’t share
anything that the blessed gods [themselves desire—

no lending those toys that smell of clay or graphite
however much apportioning was thrust

into tissue, gray or pink. I’m sick
of placating them with string or wax—

after all I have to work.

I look toward the beekeeper keeping bees at home
that she knows damn well will sting and swarm.

—Kimiko Hahn


***


elegy for the beekeeper

How dazed the body after stinging, how drunk
with death & venom. We wear our good shoes

to the funeral. & our black eyes, fat
with hallucination, hold the image of the swarm

& take it everywhere: the streetlight, to church, the coffin.
Even now, the air is wild with the fever-pitch of wings.

Our girl, small graveyard of marks & stings—
so fast.

We leave her to sleep outside like a cat.
We climb into our houses & our beds, & we miss her.

For years, we dream our deaths little
as the bee’s.

—Aracelis Girmay


***


Bee at the Beekeeper’s Funeral

When they say “swarm”
What they mean is us.What they mean is blackMass of wings, a thousand
Thousand chanters.  Unison.What they mean is body.What they miss is brain
Born of lifetimes, mindMade of centuries. SackedCatacombs and tenements
And what is most sweetIs what they both breedAnd box us for.  Swarm,
What they call swarm,Is the imperceptibleRumble in the gut,
Years inside of otherYears, the stinger’s acheTo break free the abdomen.
What born warriors knowAs Noble Death.  And thereIs me, the dreamer drawn
By a laughing daffodilAway from the others,Brothers and cousins,
That massacre afternoon,Away from glory, nowWith only this to do:
To witness, to tell againWhat the eulogizer said,The beekeeper dead,
And of these wreaths,Their raucous stinkAnd hues.  I’ll tell how
I put my face deep in the bellOf each and every blossomAnd breathe deep.  Oh, child,
I breathe so deep.

—John Murillo


***


Translator’s Block

The poet translated the poem with fear and trembling,
as if somehow unworthy of the source text.

His writer friends thought his suffering ridiculous,
and perhaps they had a point.

Hardly difficult, this poem. A simple narrative
in modern Persian. For setting, the clichéd garden.

Basically, as two lovers kiss on a bench
a bee stings the man on his thigh.

He’s allergic, so the ambulance arrives.
The woman can’t find the key. (Fearing exposure

they had previously locked the gate). One paramedic
hoists the other over the wall.

On the verge of anaphylactic shock,
the semi-conscious Romeo gets injected

in the same spot of the sting. He survives.
Afterward, the key’s found in his pant’s pocket.

“Perhaps,” says the poet’s shrink, “it’s too accessible;
It opens your heart to love, which means danger.”

As she’s talking, the poet unconsciously clicks and unclicks
a ballpoint pen into his thigh.

“You have a point,” says the poet,
“but I can’t see how the lines could hurt me.”

—Roger Sedarat


***



Ball Point Pen

I had never meant to take the ball point pen apart
and yet the spring leapt away, the coiled metal
leaping into the lap of the football player next to me

in Algebra II, the class I walked to the High School
for, where I was widely considered a math prodigy
despite merely being a year ahead. He could have

destroyed me. I had done something terrible. Allowed
myself to explode into his lap. Allowed the pen
to dissolve into its component parts, each a platonic

ideal. The ink pure inkiness.  The spring pure springy-
ness.  I wish there were more here. A story about
how he turned to me and fell in love. A story about

how later on he kicked my ass.  But this is the end.
He put the spring back on my desk and returned
to his own, hunched in his letter jacket until the bell.

—Jason Schneiderman


***


Motherother

Inside me: don’t think
this. If inside is a place
then I am thinking in the suburbs
in the mud/grass
but I hate driving and pizza.

I’d consider mine:
“the boy is mine!” Or, “before,
mine was mine.” (This is
my head. Where is your head?)
Before…I can’t remember.

Before one tree was touched
before another and this
was a lovely diagram
for putting together
a plan for making it a-ok.

If I allow myself an inside,
I find component parts (coiled
metal, archaic weaponry,
plumb line). Some are
for me and some for him.

How generous! But no:
inevitable metal. Shoot
into water the find a lost
bridge. Or there might be
someone. Instead: we walk.

—Jennifer Kronovet


***


The Mother

No one saw her but me
As she stumbled through the living room
Whispering to herself in tongues
I’d not heard
Before, limned, here,
by the streetlamp’s spare
light, her hushed words
now become a song
I think she was giving to the moon:
Why, why me?

—Ross Gay


***


Instructions

Why not you?
He will think he has given you the moon.
He will think you owe him a song
with words like hushed lights,
light from a streetlamp muted
by mist and limbs and sheer curtains.
Look here.
Anything he ever says he will say only to himself
if the first time he stumbles through the living room
your only word to him is no.

—H.L. Hix


***


Anything He Ever Says He Will Say Only To Himself

As if talking could cure a slammed door,
you follow, walking through like an apparition
from an old relationship. And what else does
an apology hold other than the mist of mistakes
from the past, rearing their past addictions?

But you follow not with your feet
but with your words, writing
a letter from this downtown café.
In the background, a voice
talks over your written words
with a mouth like a sunflower
breaking from the concrete,
but you keep writing to him,
in the spirit of this voice.

Look, you say, people are living
all around me and I want in on it;
children are walking like families
of ducks led by their teachers;
couples have a hand in each other’s back
pocket; a woman is carrying her laundry
in her arms. I’m sure any one of them
would say they want more: The children
don’t want to trail behind a teacher;
the couple wants more than passion;
the woman wants the comforts
inside her home. But I’d take it
all. Sometimes, I just want to step
off the curb of the past onto whatever will stay
beneath me. But, over time, I wonder
if asking for nothing, when all is said
and regretted, too much to ask for?

—A. Van Jordan


***


Apparition from an Old Relationship
What dark/men you aroused in your young man’s veins. —from “The Third Duino Elegy”Rainer Maria Rilke

Ancestors gathered to the pulse of hate
generations past still drum in their heirs’ veins.
Those who had guns and gold, those who had naught,
those who were pushed aside, those who wore chains:
their histories continue to divide
neighbor from neighbor, like the ghosts of love
turned cruel. How long memories take to fade.
And those we can’t forget, we must forgive.

—Marilyn Nelson


***


(Unbuttoning her shirt…)

Unbuttoning her shirt in the second dream, she pointed to the hole in the center of her chest, mouthed Look.

I am not any closer to saying what I mean.

Kneeling, with my hands on her hips, I closed one eye and peered into her chest, which was filled with water.

Love has made itself so quiet, a few red fish moving in slow circles.

I want to say like blood.

I want to say like forgiveness, this obedience, looking inside her on my knees.

I mean to cease to feel, to cancel, to give up all claim to—

At some point, she rested her hands on my shoulders and I thought this is my face housed underwater.

This is a death letter.

Every word but mouthed erased.

—Allison Benis White


***


Look

If I had unbuttoned your blouse
as you lay in your coffin, I could have seen
how the tumor that killed you had grown
overnight into merely benign.

I marveled instead at your lips,
the red kept within proper borders.
(The first time in how many years?)
Unlike you, whoever applied it
acknowledged the edges
that blur in a woman your age.

The edge between living and dying
began to blur weeks before you wandered
over the finish line. No celebration
except for that party-girl red
on your lips, no doubt chosen
to match the coy flowers
that bloomed on your silk blouse.

Now I want to name it a shade
that says more than mere red,
which end-rhymes too quickly with dead,
the quick of which I’m still a part
and you dead, which I cannot escape.

Better dead than red,
I grew up hearing patriots bluster,
but came to prefer Better red
than dead. Give me better
than red, give me Raising Hell Red.

Better yet, Everlastingly Red
till the last trumpet blares
and you wake up,
your lips mouthing,
“How do I look?
Do I need rouge?
More lipstick?”
(So long in the grave,
the voice shrivels to wind
down a drainpipe.)

I open my poem-sack,
and lift out the golden tube
wherein a scarlet nib waits
to inscribe on your lips
a shade conjured from sheer
disbelief and indelible dread,
and infused with no more
than the balm of a name.
Neither Hope.
Nor Hereafter
but this gleam
of Wide Awake Red.

–Kathryn Stripling Byer


***


Calcium’s Slender Embrace

Now I see that red means nothing
in this winter landscape
with flurries of snow
across the unfenced graveyard.

Don’t stare into my ruby lips,
My Love; color is wasted on the dead—
a mockery, a hush, a denial
of what the body has become.
I have no use for a dress
drenched in prismed memory.

Say “here lies” if you must.
Wish for one last impossible word
to sum a lifetime. Pretend you knew
me — I was always a field of wild flowers,
more than this patterned dress could ever say.
I was the roots and insects and the dew,
the wind shaken stalks, the bones.

Now I have a new name for shadowed snow
that is more than the crunch and crackle,
a metered response for the end of life.
The slow grinding down, erosion, entropy,
I know as bone and ash scattered on frost,

Or calcium’s slender embrace.
No fanfare for me. I am given to the whisper
wind and then back to the field
like seed. My voice
is the rasp of flake and dust,
the low thrum
of repeated soft impact,
so long in the field
it condenses to shell
the frozen ground.

This body no longer holds
my voice. I can never be written
or captured again. The words fall
and skitter like shrouds and veils
across the sparkled ice.
My name is no longer
my name.
I am calm.
I am moving
toward the promise
of Spring.

–J.P. Dancing Bear


***


Sung (Lacking Words)

I stood where a street ravels dirt
Where green leaves clamor

When somehow in spring
My love came stumbling from a broken house:

Someone with hand flourishes and yelling
Shoved him onto a stretcher.

Ruin of handkerchief his head was bound in,
Blue shirt stained.

I raced to his side, but a child clad in blue–
Why so much of that color?–

Shaved head in a bonnet, dress flowing at her ankles,
Clutched at my thigh

Crying to be taken home.
Nothing I could spell or summon up

For language is always a something else,
A furrow beyond, a yard elsewhere

A fracture in the sensed,
Sempiternal falling.

No snapline here, nor portamento of touch.
Hands grasp at dew

Which is what my flesh turned to
When a child held me in dream’s clear light

As somehow in spring
My love came stumbling from a ruined house.

–Meena Alexander


***


A Bird in Hand

Unclasped, will soar
eventually. Kept, would have soured
surely, on the flesh-clothed
bones a hand is. Spoiled as raspberries do when we
un-tend them, leave too many
for the birds,

birds as hand-
sized fires, extinguished
season to season.

A reasonable sentence.
But the Lord spoke
through a burning bush once and gave
miracles.

Proof that fire has a mouth
and a will? With birds our angels on earth.
To say, I spent most of the day in bed
sleeping is difficult.

Love-making would have made
a less ashen replacement.

Un-held, in dreams, birds fleck and swoon—
silvery, coppery, gold. In harrowing
diving flocks. Like sparks.

–Paula Bohince


***


Borrowed Breath

The sky, an invisible cage that fetters
air with toxic bars bent from acronyms,
opens and pulls back its lone lip
while blackbirds assume a mining canary’s fate.

Fumes creep into lungs small as walnuts,
nip the alveoli, roll the eyes into
final descent—a chorus tumbling on land,
not just a clutch of folded feathers,
but diving flocks, like sparks.

There is no bullet fragment to extract
from flesh, just unseen parts per million,
a kind of counting most don’t fathom
unless playing the lottery, don’t they know
this is another ticket, a borrowed breath?

–Tara Betts


***


and Sharply



Ours to make: sparks; edges; a device

for cutting pictures out of light. We filled

tin trays with water in the backyard

and slowly dipped the paper in. Having

is accomplished not so much by attention,

but by habit. Still, we made lists: cedar,

smoke, the rabbits racing fast across

the grass. Also, the fence to slice the light

into white scissors while we pushed

the paper flat for trimming beneath the water.

She spoke through the window to say

she had planted them herself—still

we forced our way under the branches to wait

while the sun did what breathing does, but loudly.

And always shadows anyway: the junipers bent

to blue beneath our fingers cut, too, lengthwise

where the pictures made sharp frames

of our hands for holding them. We knew wood grows

like trees do, so we watched the tables

all afternoon to see our pictures lifted nearer

to that sun like a hole in the sky, burning.

–Kristina Jipson


***


Internet K-Hole

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” – L. P. Hartley


Like prehistoric petroglyphs they astonish us,
So many photos, from Aquarius
To New Wave to Grunge,
All those million gold cubes:

Sierras of snaps! Saharas of forced smiles!
Proud mullets, handlebar mustaches, muscle shirts, miles of cleavage and biceps!
Gleaming ice cream cones! Look at them.
Kodachromes and Polaroids, curled at edges,
As ancient, suddenly, as vellum, stylus, and parchment.
What fate befell those strange tribes?

A billion harvested emulsions, mulled by time,
Pent for decades in musty drawers
Until Google’s
Voracious magnet pulled them
Like iron filings—

Spent fashions sprint away and speed back again—
Hairstyles three times new and pants gone ironic
Return refreshed to chilly malls
And teeming high school halls.

Whole solar systems of style squandered on unsuspecting kids!
Why is everyone so happy? How could they be?
Or is that unbridled glee merely a try at posterity,
An aching “say cheese” rictus aimed at eternity?

Each gangly pose hints at some mystery, some dream, some clue just out of frame
That will glue the scene together somehow, show us more.
There is always so much more.

Everyone pretending to be sexy
In murky dad-fashioned dens or hot silver of mountain sunlight.
They pose and pose, tongues out, eyes crossed, head-banging to riffs unheard,
Doubled at jokes forgotten,

All the hairspray in the world holding it together,
Parting bangs like waves of the Red Sea!
Observe Venus perched in her pearl-white Pontiac scallop!And the sweaters! Like farm belts seen from the sky,
Jagged patches of cork and olive.It all seems so sad, so graceless, so heartbreaking, the triumph of naïveté.

And that milk-wet flash, constantly caught in car windows and eyeglasses,
A quasar, an exploding star, bleaching half the scene.It detonates in the mirror behind the prom couple in powder blue,
And they squint, impatient to be released burning into their summer evening.

It keeps going! We are powerless before it.
Those downy orange kittens died long ago,
Mischievous mutts gone under grassy yards,
Scarf-tailed goldfish gulped by porcelain—Forest-green shag rugs ripped up and rolled away,
Squat walnut televisions, big as tombs, hauled off!

Bermuda shorts like kaleidoscopes and toucan Hawaiian shirts! Velcro!
Zebra tights, tabby purses, Star Wars pajamas, and pillbox hats!
Water skis wielded like broad swords!
Nightmare Halloween Gorillas and, O, frowning holidays with the folks!
Such animation! Cartwheels suspended for all time, mascara’d winks,
Rabbit ears rising from perms,
Ditzy headstands, sudden kisses, icy beer-chugs,
So much to forget.

Phalanxes of sophomores, acres of acne, greasy floss of waist-length hair,
Sweat-licked volleyball stars, dirt-bikers muddy as barbarians,
Silver radios the size of suitcases, weighted with depth-charges of D batteries!
Pastel sprays of bridesmaids, arrays of such uncanny silk confections!
Cloudy pyramids of wedding cake, Crayola-hot cummerbunds—

Velvet flares of bellbottoms, misty sheen of Christmas lights,
And all that wood paneling: In rec rooms,
On the flanks of barge-wide station wagons.So auburn, so golden, so gone and lonely those years!
Up the BB-pocked water tower, into the murky lake,
Down to the foggy shore at dawn, away, away, away!

Those moments seem so happy, but possibly, on reflection,
After all this time, were no more than more wasted time,
Hours blissfully wasted on waves of blue smoke and sunsets,Or else mere remnants, meaning nothing, flash cubes discarded,
Depleted ammunition, all wasted, all trash. . . .

And yet here, after all this time, forever floating
In his one small happy moment,
Everyone’s fat friend, you knew him too,The one who made everyone laugh until ribs were raw,There he is above the mouthwash-blue
Spangle of warm swimming pool,Like a boulder hurled by a blinded Cyclops,

Yes, he’s still there, cannon-balling
For all time in that affectionate air,
All for us, eyes clamped shut,
Clasped in fetal position as everyone flinches,
Waiting for the splash.

–Ernest Hilbert


***


The Catches

I have a home I don’t like        to go home to.
Stupid people have placed a ban       on stupid.

They’ve all slowed down to savor        what they missed.
What you wished for        is pretty much what happened.

She has amassed important       memories.
He fought so long      he lost the sense of fighting.

What revelations have come         have come too soon.
Despite large changes       nothing much has happened.

I have no memory       of that conversation.
Inside the seed the full-grown flower       is wilting.

Finally we can see over         the falls.
My opposite is not     your opposite.

Of the five women        each one had her reasons.
The mathematician disproved         his own proof.

I love the stars        but can’t name hardly any.
Let’s say for instance        this is what we said.

–David Yezzi