INTRODUCTION
POST SYMBOLIST ROMANTICISM: The Poems of Rachel Dacus
by Oswald LeWinter
CONTENTS
The Poems of Rachel Dacus
Drake's Estero
Salvavida
Fertilizing
Miniatures
The Snap
The Fire That Waits
Riddle
Blood-Cycle Brooding
Singing in the Pandaleswar Caves
The Palm
Horse on the Lawn
Copyrights
Morning Mnemonic
Piano Lessons
Thunder-Edged
Earth Whale
Gifts of the Dead
Ode to My Purse
At the Thousand Cranes Auto Repair
A Road Trip
Thick Marine Layer
Why I Like Weather
War News
Poet William Stafford Interviews Painter Wayne
Thiebaud (Poem in One Act)
Fistulas
Tunneling in the Library
POST SCRIPTUM
Copyright notice
POST SYMBOLIST ROMANTICISM: The Poems of Rachel Dacus
by Oswald LeWinter
Rachel Dacus was born in Buffalo, New York in 1949 and grew up in
San Pedro in Southern California. She majored in English and French
Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Earth Lessons, her
her first collection of poems, was published in 1998 by Bellowing Ark
Press. Her poems have been published in numerous print journals and
online sites that include The Atlanta Review, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner,
North American Review, Comstock Review, Rattapallax, Poet Lore, The
Alsop Review, Stirring, Melic Review, and Adirondack Review, among
others. She has appeared in three important anthologies: Ravishing
Disunities (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), The Poetry of Roses,
(Abrams, 1995), and The Best of Melic (Melic Review, 2001.)
The poetry of Rachel Dacus focuses on the quintessential problems of
the age we live in: an age in which each of us is confronted by the
tensions that arise from having to deal with the paradox inherent in
limitless possibilities encroached upon by the ethos of tradition and
formalism. As many critics have noted, ours is an age in which
poets are forced to struggle between the disabling orthodoxy of minor
excellence and a not yet fully realized reinvention of the great
themes of existence, each on its own terms, requiring its own generic
forms.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that the best and most creative
new poets cast their verbal nets far and wide into the vast sea of
possibilities, language, form, and intention afford them. Rachel
Dacus is such a poet and her work exists in the largely undefined
space between these two extremes, busily creating a new world without
either rejecting the past or the unique universe her poems create by
occupying it. Tradition is never disabling, nor is it slavishly
worshipped. Although the new world of these poems emerges in
recognizable semantic structures, its essential element is a mystery
which is metaphysical; Romantic, although not in a visionary sense,
or in a puerile irony, but rather in a post-symbolist sense reminiscent
of Yves Bonnefoy and Francis Ponge.
Another outstanding attribute of these poems is their author's courage,
her willingness to write in terms that are unabashedly unacademic, a
practice clearly demonstrated in (Singing in the Pandaleswar Caves):
my voice
threaded through a hundred voices
and slipped out a hole in the dark.
Or,
I am careful of hosannas vaulting
to contralto heaven, of earthquake bass
and monkey clarinets in priestly procession.
(Drake's Estero, Point Reyes) is a poem which demonstrates the poet's
incessant search for le mot juste, a poem in which,
pines teal the skyline,
and,
Finches rubble the quiet.
"teal" and "rubble" which are stunning enough to create their own
reality are accompanied by such vivid images as,
dowitch and sandpiper heads bob
like sewing machine needles.
This poem seems, at first glance, a heuristic description of a sea
scene. But several readings yield the poems darker hues, its
very subtle preoccupation with the destructive elements of nature,
the transience of life, of:
All things
not as they seem.
There is neither Romantic grief in the poem nor the hint
of any elegiac impulse. Life is simply the way life is:
while his beak scissors a crab.
Two gulps, then flanged feathers refold.
Again, the smooth ballet.
A fine sense of the possibilities of alliteration drive the poem
to its conclusion.
For Dacus, poems consist of words and the breaths that occupy the
space between them. But Rachel Dacus requires no Ars Poetica. The
poems themselves are the most succinct evidence of her poetic pratice.
I have dealt with this one poem at length because it exemplifies the
poet's parallels and divergences from the poetry of the American poet
of a slightly earlier generation, Adrienne Rich. But where Rich's poetry
is grounded in an urgent and dramatic sense of history arising out of
a vivid poetic tradition, Dacus's poems that adumbrate historical
themes(The Palm and A Road Trip are two excellent examples) are
narratives saturated with history as a living, unpredictable force
whose connection to the present is made coherent through the
syntactic and semantic links the poet provides.
I have mentioned above, the absence of romantic grief and lack of
elegiac pathos in Rachel Dacus's poetry as well as her manner of
treating death that reminds me of the work of Yves Bonnefoy. In
Fertilizing, a poem deals with Nature's propensity for resurrection,
It's the opposite of grieving,
scattering nitrogen pellets
to feed
roses that might have been
cut when you died, I learn
to trust unlikeliness.
the poet uses the occasion of resuscitating "shagged bud unions" to
mourn a loved one:
You step out
and away from life in the dark soil.
And I lean in, and toss.
Here distance serves to avoid bathos, as does the brilliant ambiguity
of the verb, "toss". Practice and treatment in this poem remind me of
Bonnefoy's superb, Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve.
Dacus shares the concern of Ponge for a writing less metaphorical,
closer to objects and to concrete situations that are, in the
words of one contemporary French poet, "a matter of replanting a
foothold on the earth where we are." But she never surrenders her
work to an overdependance on prosaic detail.
The poetry of Rachel Dacus is ultimately the product of an un-heroic
age fashioned more by scientific than by classical concerns. Her
subjects and their treatments belong to a different and more
chaotic world order than that of Du Bellay or Blake and must be
treated zoomorphically in order to attain the vividness the genuine
poetry of our age demands, while also attempting to create a new
humanism whose antecedents within the existing tradition will not
be easily discernible. She achieves this admirably, avoiding the
drabness and inadequacy of poetic description, or a reductive
dependence on an too easily attained excellence distinguished by
adhering to the fundamental ambitions of so many established poets
of her generation. Her best work, and there is little that does
not reward our attention and deserve our praise, leads the reader
to an account---through cumulative stages of linguistic
development---of a totality in which a new view of the universe
and our relationship to it emerges.
THE POEMS OF RACHEL DACUS
Drake's Estero, Point Reyes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Today, pines teal the skyline
and red-tailed hawks swoop from dense stands.
Finches rubble the quiet. At low tide,
in golden light, all seems to rest
until you do and eyes sharpen
on water's edge, a roiling topography
where dowitch and sandpiper heads bob
like sewing machine needles. All things
not as they seem. A startling rush overhead,
and birds light to peck and poke
like a studious class. Under the bridge
glides a bufflehead duck, buddha on glass.
We hold still, pretend to be bridge posts
while his big, soft eye forgives
our ruse. The black wings beat four times,
to hold him up while his beak scissors a crab.
Two gulps, then flanged feathers refold.
Again, the smooth ballet.
First appeared in North American Review
Salvavida
~~~~~~~~~
Salvavida bajo su asiento.
It took me awhile to translate: Lifesaver
Under Your Seat. Under this fragile body
of lofting steel, our tennis rackets and rain
coats, our bathing suits, and below that,
turbulent pockets and updrafts.
And under that, what no lifesaver
can cushion. But in air they soothe
in every tongue: salvavida
is below your asiento, and that's all you need.
That, and at the press of a button, everything
in featherweights - the five-ounce can
of tomato juice at ninety-minute intervals,
two cookies and twenty chips, a pillow
small as a cloud measured with fingers
on the window. They float up the aisles
to keep you warm and half-asleep,
to make sure that salvavida is handy.
Someone like the mother you ought to have had,
who salvas your vida while it hurtles at five hundred per,
someone who says, in case you speak English -
and only up here: Salvation is at hand.
First appeared in BigCityLit.com
Fertilizing
~~~~~~~~~~~
It's the opposite of grieving,
scattering nitrogen pellets
around shagged bud unions,
feeding high-season hunger.
Thorny canes, more likely to sprout
pine cones than blossoms,
rock in the wind.
Feeding roses that might have been
cut when you died, I learn
to trust unlikeliness.
If I penetrate the shade
beneath each bush too deeply,
tossing nutrients, a stab draws blood.
I look up, sucking the wound
under spiny branches that caliper
the span of a cloud and measure
the richness of cabbage
and coffee feeding calloused feet.
You untangled branches.
Master gardener, you cherished
each new leaf and fed
its lavish urge. Blood's pulse
distances. You step out
and away from life in the dark soil.
And I lean in, and toss.
First appeared in Rattapallax
Miniatures
~~~~~~~~~~
-- Aurangabad, India
His teeth are ground square and tinted red
from paan-chewing, the custom in his village.
The master painter with a one-hair brush
keeps a suffocatingly hot shop. I fan myself
and he leaps to switch on the electricity,
explaining that he works in noon sun
to grind minerals into colors for paint.
Fire seems to be his medium,
and it darkened him as he bent over copies
of old paintings. He daubs with earth and sun,
this chocolate man, reviving small, flat people
in lapis, amber and malachite – people who are pink,
blue and astonished. Their bookplate-sized scenes
on silk look like every miniature until
you notice the hairs in an elephant's ear,
the gleam of the diamond on the emperor's ring
as his hand rests on a concubine's bare thigh.
Their entire Moghul palace would fit
into a deck of cards – cards whose shuffle and cut
describe the luck of the painter's father
when he bid his life savings on an antique book
at auction and won for his sons a living – to thrive
by reproducing in oven heat their gemlike
ancestors with hair-fine fidelity.
First appeared in Carquinez Poetry Review
The Snap
~~~~~~~~
My sleep is cut in half by a latch's snap -
What was that, a closing door? I look
around in the dim and quiet room. Perhaps
my beloved came in the night and took
a strand of my hair in his graceful hand,
transforming its dark tangles into gold.
Waking in brightness, I can understand
why the scarlet leaf cracks away, why old
seasons revolve to admit the new. Why should I dread
doors snapping shut, the clap of an incoming call,
an envelope's rip ¾ any harbinger ahead?
They are only the beat of coming awake. All
change opens into the immortal room
where pure light flashes across age-old gloom.
First appeared in Pierian Springs
Riddle
~~~~~~
Thirty-three hundred wing beats a minute
-in figure eights from those jointed hands-
keep the ghostly wings
hovering between worlds.
To see them folded and the bird
a minuscule sphinx on a maple twig
was something like seeing time
suspended. Eternity's long beat.
A clawed foot lifted
and pawed behind what must
have been an ear. Christmas trees whirling!
The throat feathers flashed red, green,
red—an indecisive stoplight
gone wild, freezing me,
then just
gone.
First appeared in North American Review
Blood-Cycle Brooding
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One more unpeeling of the womb,
close enough to the final time
that I can relish the tiny tearings,
the way muscles unclasp
from what might have been --
One more the shredding of a bed
that waited fruitless five times seven
years for an egg and dart
to decorate its aching lap.
Once more a blood-gravity pulls
me into a planet's centripetal spin,
the dropping-down cramp
mimicking birth-pang,
open mouth delivering
a new poem, breath
heaving and rasping.
And what do I have left
from all those empty moon-circles?
Scraped squeaky clean, the blood-room
has birthed generative words.
They sleep twitching in their cradles
or sun themselves nude on public rocks.
Tribe after diatribe of oaths and chants
spilled from lips too like another portal.
Yes, in this blood-tide of verbs
I brought myself forth
through a mirror, witched awake
out of the pounding dark.
First appeared in Defined Providence
Singing in the Pandaleswar Caves
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At noon in a dim chamber fifty feet under
Pune's dusty roar, my voice
threaded through a hundred voices
and slipped out a hole in the dark.
It became an eye watching
the cave's ear swallow taxi bleat,
creak of neem tree and truck honk.
The cave's black cup caught the notes
and pushed them on beyond a precipice
marked, "Beware of God."
Since then, my throat has kept
a dark space.
I am careful of hosannas vaulting
to contralto heaven, of earthquake bass
and monkey clarinets in priestly procession.
I press back from the temples of chattering
prayer wheels, and into silence -
the inner bell of nothing
thinner than a muezzin's aria.
Sound of no sound sinking
deeper than a stone's freefall in a well.
The sound that hits water
as a human slap with a celestial echo.
First appeared in Adirondack Review
The Palm
~~~~~~~~
The Egyptians prized the date palm's fertility,
but its unisex flowers are small, whitish
and clustered as a crowd of nuns in deshabillé.
Theophrastus coined its common name,
deriving it from Phoenician raiders
who spread the palm in their wake
like a trail of arrows.
A swag of serrated green knives,
a bristle of blades – it is so much older
than anything you can say
to hurt me. The buzz of verbs and names
you underhanded this morning
cannot compare to the shock of an orange frizz
of dates on its piano nobile.
The slender trunk is sheathed
in sawed-off leaf stumps,
a collar of wounds as precisely lapped
as feathers. You could never be
so well armed, nor shoot
as straight as the palm's crown shaft
into the distant autumn sun.
Could never match its rigid,
rattling arguments.
First appeared in Boulevard
Horse on the Lawn
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On the lawn a hobby horse
rocks on a metal spring,
wind-galloping. His painted
eyes cannot see the girl
who skulks among trees,
waiting to loft on his leap.
She cannot see her mother
in spider-light brooding
over ironing, pulling sheets
between the mangle's plates
while stories above, the father
measures the ocean with a flat stick.
He cannot see the linen weep
between hot rollers, fall
in folds, smiling days
piled white to the sky.
He prisms the house,
planes its corners, smudges
his gray matters on walls,
sanding corners so no one
Can see around them
to the horse's stare
and the child who breaks
into a gallop, hooves billowing.
First appeared in Full Circle Journal
Copyrights
~~~~~~~~~~
Keen as scissor points, first stars
pink the edge of day as my father
opens the sky's wishing doors.
See the queen's chair?
And I perch up there
in the glimmer. Later
in his studio, the slam of silence
and scumble of bristle on canvas.
Ocher, azure, madder. He smears
color with the flat of palette knife.
In his boat of concentration I glide.
The single light bulb bares the room.
My father can conjure in hue and line
whatever his shrewd eye turns on.
Now it turns on me, a frame: Don't move.
His voice claps my small ears
and as I wail he grabs my face:
Watch out! I can shake your stars.
An authorial sparkle in his eyes
vanishes into moonrise and time's flood.
Night's many tides pull me back
to that original gleam – never mine.
The years, those spangled doors
swing back and a likeness - not his -
resolves under my inscribing.
First appeared in Prairie Schooner
Morning Mnemonic
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From a twig in the vast candelabra oak
the hummingbird's castanet ticks off time
by inches. It paces my feet as I climb
past grounded doves that huff and squeak
into flight, trailing handkerchief wings.
I slip through a slur of slowing cars, weave
a list of duties through brain's chatter, but leave
routine behind as the jazzy morning rings,
telegraphing something I once knew:
how to pot-stir, sage up an inner brew.
I bend to the impulse to run away and see
poppies' wild alleluias on chartreuse hills.
To hear a dither of voices as water spills
down a ladder of monotone symmetry.
Recall if I can this one forgotten thing:
to rock grass water under sheer sun - and sing!
First appeared in Rattapallax
Piano Lessons
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The black and white keys had a watery shine.
When depressed, they sang arpeggios
and pizzicatos that clung to air, sea-jewels
sung by fish with silver throats.
On Saturdays, my mother's piano cries
vanished into my ears. She played to keep afloat.
Panicked notes flocked through the house,
falling, rising, crashing. There was no escape
from her harmonizing. I absorbed symphonies
of longing before the age of reason.
My adolescence tuned sorrow,
grew minor and fugue.
She sang the alto part in undertones,
a child humming to distract herself.
Her laments ratcheted my capriccios,
broke my delicate strings, but gave me
resonance and invention.
The keys may be beaten now by rote,
but I reside in the tempo-shifts,
in the surprises - the uninscribed
prestidigitations that leap,
the fluid trail I leave as I fly.
First appeared in Blue Unicorn
Thunder-Edged
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sun under chin,
she rambles after them
as they garden the hillside.
Brushed with light, she rides
low among slim stems,
thunder-edged.
Slipping through holes
in wind, she rolls
under a flower's hem.
Buttercup, they call
her, but tuck her into a null
crib to listen to thin
mosquito hours. Again
and again, no one.
The child's ear hums
with moon's footfall
on the hill, a cloud-tall
lady who kindles the lights.
By day, rolled up tight,
she is given to those who prick her
scalp with needle fire. She blurs
and shrinks into thickets,
rooting fists on stone.
In the shimmer of alone,
how she spins
light, how sparks flee
the first wound, how it brims.
First appeared in Prairie Schooner
Earth Whale
~~~~~~~~~~~
The soil surges with elusive tides.
By my apartment an oak dives
head first into a hidden sea
while bird chatter rattles the sky.
The oak sings to me when it pleases.
From its black flanks and branches
come disturbing lullabies
and simple songs of white breezes.
The oak's dismantling sighs
Roar below the city surface
from deep in evolutionary gloom
the depths where fire flowers
and magma pearls bloom.
Oak notes quake the planet
as continents cross its face.
The poles shift in a vast rhythm
of history being erased.
The oak hears beyond time
and dives for song, headlong.
On its tossing tail alight
generations of lives in flight.
Gifts of the Dead
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
for Joe
Dream of someone dead, they say,
and you've had a visitation.
I ran down last night's dream halls,
yellow passages in sooty ruins
and I wasn't surprised to find you –
even forgot you were dead as you raced
with me in hide-and-seek. Your smile
held something back. I suspected a can
of black-eyed peas to make a new year
I can believe in. You always keep stories
in your pockets, dust your fingers with them
as we talk, your Texas drawl lazy roping a laugh.
Gifts of the dead are their closed circles,
the possibilities they raise that no unfinished
story can. Lives with no end-
point stay in their owners' closets,
but yours are there for our taking
to the park, to sit on a bench and chat.
You often feel the dead just behind
your shoulder saying, Go ahead.
That's how they are – always ready
to wrap a tissue of remembrance
around afternoon's solemn light.
Odd, how you rise today in smoke,
in the violet scent of dead leaves
piled on dark earth.
First appeared in Comstock Review
Ode to My Purse
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The three French handbags came
with lifetime warranties. Clasping
heavy straps, I cinch them saddle-tight
against the grasping world.
Dark wells, they incubate details,
stash my days in hidden rooms.
My black postman's case clacks
clock-neat on thigh, ticking tasks.
Weekends I sling a red pouch that eats
torn tickets and topless lipsticks. Keys
to many locks eel through my caramel creel.
Open Purse, I say: swallow phone, glasses, cash.
Bring home to me, magician's hat. I chant,
lovely Coach-crafted clutch, catch! You
soft maw, yawn to gorge and stow
my emblems. Stretch and hold the zoo
of me, the proof, spoil and tool.
First appeared in Atlanta Review
At the Thousand Cranes Auto Repair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The women were making and the men waiting
in the room provided. Folding a square piece of gold,
the Japanese woman looked up from behind
her sunglasses and said: A thousand paper cranes.
For a party. For luck. The men's eyes
fuzzed and snapped: NO TALKING to strangers
during auto repair. A woman with a fan of years
on her forehead moved across the space
to sit beside the folder, pleating the room.
Another question launched the tale
of the last thousand cranes, made at a dying
grandmother's bedside. (Hers? Mine?
This woman might appear someday at your bed --
for luck, she would say) Everyone was listening
openly now. Their necks leaned in parallel.
Feet dropping down, they flew on story currents
and watched being after being take shape
and rise from luck-bending, blind invention's
darting, dark skinned fingers.
First appeared in Stirring
A Road Trip
~~~~~~~~~~~
I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the
whole American people which declared that their
legislature should "make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation
between church and State. – Thomas Jefferson to the
Danbury Baptist Association,1802.
He's on the road because He needs elbow room
and a stretch of open where He can go, vroom-vroom!
He's doing wheelies for the Danbury fathers
and Pennsylvania Quakers who shun
paying their taxes to Congregationalists.
He's careening into cirrus-streaks,
bolting lightning to ground, scattering
ideals like prairie stars.
The skies were too big and Monticello's dome
too small, but Jefferson limned a vast geography
of state and religion – let's see, grace connects to liberty,
bisected by community. He threw up a wall
between soul and country's imperatives, then prayed
in the Senate Church. Hemmed in by customs
he penned a secret tract: Let them shake,
let law be rock, and let God roll.
But even Jefferson could not envision
the heavenly Highway-hound's momentum,
the lifts He would give to every Papist, Roller
and doler, myriad beliefs popping like prairie stars.
Despite Jefferson's apprehensions, the Harley
slips and weaves, easy as the air that flows
across a snake tattoo that reads: Tread Lightly
on My Amen. The white hog passes everything,
so fast it's invisible – or mythical, a white horse
for a White House, steed that may only exist
as a people who won't be taxed for faith
or bound by laws springing up weed-wild --
a people who can build their creeds
of nothing but heart, wind and speed.
First appeared in Adirondack Review
Thick Marine Layer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-- for Jim
You slide from honeycomb dark
into my dog's black eyes. His body still
on the rug, ears tipped forward toward the window
to catch a silent voice. Live lightly,
you said before you left. The morning
greens, the first flourish in a long, unlit time.
What is trying to reach me through the sun's
insistent ray? I hear the five hundred voices
that sang in your laugh, though silence
that encloses and dulls. I can see nothing
of life persisting but an orange arrow
painted on the pavement. It points
to your being everywhere but in the photograph.
How is that you bite back
from the dented apple scooped up in a decayed
orchard, and from a worm hole insinuate
memory into the present? I eat all the way
through to the bitterness of a seed.
Later, a night branch rasps on the drainpipe
the tale of your long outward voyage.
How badly I want to know
your destination, but a thick marine layer
blurs our two coastlines. The boundaries
thin in a bird's call. It rings loose
change against the gold
standard of your absence. We live
now outside the countable hoard.
Why I Like Weather
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Famous for always being there, it takes no hikes
or long vacations, leaving forty beeps on the answering
machine. Evasive, evocative, weather
is as much what you see through as what you see.
This afternoon my dog and I headed out
to find a pyramid of taffy-rolled cloud
wrinkling the sky’s forehead. We circuited
the neighborhood, bemused by vast aerial doings.
The cumulus spread away, thin as bouillon.
Sun winked on the flanks of an airplane -- last buffalo
roaming the high plain. "He's smiling again"
I said to my dog, as if the sun
were a cloudy-headed Apollo
dashing from horizon to horizon.
I often take comfort from weather
as a folk remedy. It’s good for blame, lovemaking,
moods, price dips, metaphors in talk of politics. Whether
you can think straight may be attributed to it --
"I'm under a cloud today." Forecasters will say,
"There's not much weather out West" --
as if air, moisture and electricity
flowing at the speed of thought around the globe
does not achieve the status.
Farmers and scientists pigeonhole energies
with chewy words: drizzle, Nor'easter -- like naming
your bloodstream Sally or your elbow Sam.
The sway of a temblor underfoot
makes me think weather churns underground,
loose and roving as comets and sea spouts,
ball lightning, St. Elmo's Fire, the katabatic winds
called foehn, Chinook, cow-killer.
Does the equator's airy calm -- the doldrums-- seep out
of the planet's bellybutton?
Is that a huge stomach I hear underfoot?
I like the Hindu belief that ultra-fine weather
circulates in our bodies, too subtle for computed tomography.
I suspect similar currents whirl inside earth's core
spinning magma like clothes in a dryer.
Weather crashes planes, sends killers
on rampages. Is it subject to the moon's pull?
Does El Nino come from rays of hypnotism?
I like to believe anything’s possible, exercise
the muscle of wonder so it does not atrophy
and make me overly scientific, a calculating cynic
who sees a cloud and thinks only of ice.
We're made of weather -- electrons twirling
like tiny twisters, blood-tides rushing and pumping.
How can anyone predict how we'll blow?
Or what will come of our combative forces --
disease, health, madness, illumination?
Wild planets with fierce cycles of emotion,
we wobble on elliptical trajectories
toward idealized destinations,
subject to massive buildups of uncertainty.
We can be exalted as the galaxies and atoms
who share our mad momentum. -- But enough of chaos.
We need the comfort of names and laws.
A name can call you, but no one can be predicted by it.
And that's why I like weather: its events evoke
daily self-explorations that slam restlessly
hither and yon, seeking shape then frantically undoing it
for something better -- or perhaps just wilder and wetter.
First appeared in Bellowing Ark
War News
~~~~~~~~
I have been listening so long and thin sound
passes through the Iraqi boy
who tells a reporter he likes the artillery's
slam and stutter,
shredded syntax of a new life.
I keep my ear to the susurrus
of wind behind the news, remain
orchestrated by a camellia's
urging. I hum the double helix
so as not to lose my place.
The shot soil's rank scent
can make you lose count of potholes
under your free wheels. We are shadowed
by the American Indian woman as she flies
home to Tuba City, her dog tags clanging.
She is shadowed by a woman who sails
on her uwound hijab's black wing.
When my feet again find earth
I will answer questions, but first
they must clear the verbs of landmines.
Words are armed. Let them lay
down their mountainous arms
and wash their ululations
among the reeds of a marsh-river.
First appeared in The Pedestal Magazine
Poet William Stafford Interviews Painter Wayne
Thiebaud (Poem in One Act)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
LIGHTS COME UP ON TWO MEN, SEATED AT A TABLE. ONE
HOLDS A PAINTBRUSH, THE OTHER A PENCIL. BOTH ARE
DRINKING.
BILL: The paint's so thick it makes me want a dollop
of grainy white paint in my coffee.
But I'm a plain man, content to write of barns.
WAYNE: It's pastry impasto, Bill -- call me imposter,
but don't ask if it's Fine Art. Squeezing zinc white
into butter cream rosettes was simply fun.
Fudge-squish in a cold case world.
BILL: Like the poem I once wrote but didn't. Someone
sent me a hundred dollars for it. Out there somewhere,
after I died, is a poet short a pair of real nice
shoes.
WAYNE: That was my job as a kid: up every morning in
dark chill enough for the dough. Mysterious, isn't it,
how it takes shape?
LIGHTS DIM, SPOTLIGHT ON A PINK CAKE ON A STAND.
BILL: Yes, like crossing a field of unmarked snow to
milk the cows before sunup. Falling crystals, the
precious clods like snowdrops peeking through – we
both know it's all bakery theater. May I ask, Wayne,
why those gumball machines?
WAYNE: Astronaut helmets filled with candy planets. I
figured they'd laugh and forget.
SOUND OF MARBLES SHOOTING, BEER BEING POURED.
BILL: Tell them, Wayne, that Schopenhauer, a
pessimist, played the flute. Why those vertigo streets
and upended fields where rivers might run out?
WAYNE: I was never great at perspective. I just
popped a fly out of gravity, and TILT!
It all comes down to a feathered headdress, a satin
shoe, a man seated, back view,
freeway of thoughts behind a hill.
Fistulas
My body is making fistulas, the dentist says. I
picture tiny fists swelling inward from my gums, fists
that must fight but be ultimately popped. Face down,
face facts: from here it will be all fizzle, churning
in my own soup, frozen manna, ruthless falling of
hairs and breasts. Fine, then, let the tissues winnow
and sulk, take away those probing picks. This plumped
and dumbfounded flesh is heat-hagged and fistic as
Donatello's Magdalene. It lives by dint, in a swelter
of sweat, wants to keep its swell, and swear by a rue
of wit.
Tunneling in the Library
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The storm outside flails and bangs,
but in here it's the ink drying that unnerves
as I inch (drip, drip) along a dark line,
feeling a hand on the other side
of this page. It writes that things have not changed
in a long echo of far-off cries – quarreling lovers?
I move faster, shiver. But I'm dry, save for a plink
on my neck when I turn a page.
A thin man with long silver hair ducks behind
the shelves. Tall until I walk toward him, he scurries
among six-inch high stacks of thumb-sized books.
Is he the author? Looking at me he pens a note
and tucks it in, vanishes by standing still
as a stalagmite. I've lost all sense of words as
sounds
of water encircle. So much scholars,
phantasms dripping off the page.
It's late in the day as I caravan holding
onto serif tails catching hold of other tails
in what begins to be a stampede.
A saddle-smell wafts through the closeness.
We may be lost on the narrowing trail,
reduced to vowels trotting between
humped consonants, images pulped, but when we fall,
we go together, scrambling like roadrunners
off the cliff, caught in a great comic buoyancy.
Tumbling, I yield to habit:
pluck his note and read.
All poems copyright (c) 2004 by Rachel Dacus
Welcome to Newsgroup alt.centipede. Established
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. REMEMBERY: EPYLLION IN ANAMNESIS (1996), poems by Michael R. Collings . DYNASTY (1968), Poems by Klaus J. Gerken . THE WIZARD EXPLODED SONGBOOK (1969), songs by KJ Gerken . STREETS (1971), Poems by Klaus J. Gerken . BLOODLETTING (1972) poems by Klaus J. Gerken . ACTS (1972) a novel by Klaus J. Gerken . RITES (1974), a novel by Klaus J. Gerken . FULL BLACK Q (1975), a poem by KJ Gerken . ONE NEW FLASH OF LIGHT (1976), a play by KJ Gerken . THE BLACKED-OUT MIRROR (1979), a poem by Klaus J. Gerken . JOURNEY (1981), a poem by Klaus J. Gerken . LADIES (1983), a poem by Klaus J. Gerken . FRAGMENTS OF A BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1984), poems by KJ Gerken . THE BREAKING OF DESIRE (1986), poems by KJ Gerken . FURTHER SONGS (1986), songs by KJ Gerken . POEMS OF DESTRUCTION (1988), poems by KJ Gerken . THE AFFLICTED (1991), a poem by KJ Gerken . DIAMOND DOGS (1992), poems by KJ Gerken . KILLING FIELD (1992), a poem by KJ Gerken . BARDO (1994-1995), a poem by Klaus J. Gerken . FURTHER EVIDENCES (1995-1996) Poems by Klaus J. Gerken . CALIBAN'S ESCAPE AND OTHER POEMS (1996), by Klaus J. Gerken . CALIBAN'S DREAM (1996-1997), a poem by Klaus J. Gerken . THE LAST OLD MAN (1997), a novel by Klaus J. Gerken . WILL I EVER REMEMBER YOU? (1997), poems by Klaus J. Gerken . SONGS FOR THE LEGION (1998), song-poems by Klaus J. Gerken . REALITY OR DREAM? (1998), poems by Klaus J. Gerken . APRIL VIOLATIONS (1998), poems by Klaus J. Gerken . THE VOICE OF HUNGER (1998), a poem by Klaus J. Gerken . SHACKLED TO THE STONE, by Albrecht Haushofer - translated by JR Wesdorp . MZ-DMZ (1988), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . DARK SIDE (1991), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . STEEL REIGNS & STILL RAINS (1993), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . BLATANT VANITY (1993), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . ALIENATION OF AFFECTION (1993), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . LIVING LIFE AT FACE VALUE (1993), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . HATRED BLURRED (1993), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . CHOKING ON THE ASHES OF A RUNAWAY (1993), ramblings by I. Koshevoy . BORROWED FEELINGS BUYING TIME (1993), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . HARD ACT TO SWALLOW (1994), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . HALL OF MIRRORS (1994), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . ARTIFICIAL BUOYANCY (1994), ramblings by Igal Koshevoy . THE POETRY OF PEDRO SENA, poems by Pedro Sena . THE FILM REVIEWS, by Pedro Sena . THE SHORT STORIES, by Pedro Sena . INCANTATIONS, by Pedro Sena . POEMS (1970), poems by Franz Zorn All books are on disk and cost $10.00 each. Checks should be made out to the respective authors and orders will be forwarded by Ygdrasil Press. YGDRASIL MAGAZINE may also be ordered from the same address: $5.00 an issue to cover disk and mailing costs, also specify computer type (IBM or Mac), as well as disk size and density. Allow 2 weeks for delivery. Note that YGDRASIL MAGAZINE is free when downloaded from Ygdrasil's World-Wide Web site at http://www.synapse.net/~kgerken.
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