Thursday, January 23, 2014

Address: the Archaeans, One Cell Creatures, Pattiann Rogers

Address: the Archaeans, One Cell Creatures

BY PATTIANN ROGERS

Although most are totally naked

and too scant for even the slightest

color and although they have no voice

that I’ve ever heard for cry or song, they are,

nevertheless, more than mirage, more

than hallucination, more than falsehood.

They have confronted sulfuric

boiling black sea bottoms and stayed,

held on under ten tons of polar ice,

established themselves in dense salts

and acids, survived eating metal ions.

They are more committed than oblivion,

more prolific than stars.

Far too ancient for scripture, each

one bears in its one cell one text—

the first whit of alpha, the first

jot of bearing, beneath the riling

sun the first nourishing of self.

Too lavish for saints, too trifling

for baptism, they have existed

throughout never gaining girth enough

to hold a firm hope of salvation.

Too meager in heart for compassion,

too lean for tears, less in substance

than sacrifice, not one has ever

carried a cross anywhere.

And not one of their trillions

has ever been given a tombstone.

I’ve never noticed a lessening

of light in the ceasing of any one

of them. They are more mutable

than mere breathing and vanishing,

more mysterious than resurrection,

too minimal for death.

Source: Poetry (September 2005).

Birdsong, face it, some male machine, Marianne Boruch

Birdsong, face it, some male machine

BY MARIANNE BORUCH

Birdsong, face it, some male machine

gone addled—repeat, repeat—the damage

keeps doing, the world ending then starting,

the first word the last, etc. It's that

etcetera. How to love. Is a wire

just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say.

So many fewer, by far. He's showing off

to call her back. Or claiming the tree.

Or a complaint—the food around here,

the ants, the moths, the berries. She's making

the nest, or both are. In feathers, in hair or twigs,

in rootlets and tin foil. Shiny bits seen

from a distance, a mistake. But fate

has reasons to dress up. Stupid

and dazzling have a place, a place, a place

though never. She can't sing it.

Source: Poetry (June 2008).

Song of the Andoumboulou 55, Nat Mackey

Song of the Andoumboulou: 55

BY NATHANIEL MACKEY

—orphic fragment—

Carnival morning they

were Greeks in Brazil,

Africans in Greek

disguise. Said of herself

she

was born in a house in

heaven. He said he was

born in the house next

door... They were in hell.

In Brazil they were

lovebait.

To abide by hearing was

what love was... To

love was to hear without

looking. Sound was the

beloved’s

mummy cloth... All to say,

said the exegete, love in

hell was a voice, to be spoken

to from behind, not be able

to turn and look... It

wasn’t Greece where they

were,

nor was it Benin... Carnival

morning in made-up hell, bodies

bathed in loquat light, would-be

song’s all the more would-be

title, “Sound and Cerement,”

voice

wound in bandages

raveling

lapse

Up all night, slept well

past noon. Awoke restless

having dreamt she awoke on

Lone Coast, wondering

afterwards what it came

to,

glimpsed interstice,

crevice,

crack... Saw her

dead mother and brother

pull up in a car, her brother

at the wheel not having driven

while alive, newly taught

death it appeared. A fancy car,

bigger

than any her mother had had while

alive, she too better off it

appeared... A wishful read, “it

appeared” notwithstanding, the

exegete impossibly benign. Dreamt

a dream

of dream’s end, anxious, unannounced,

Eronel’s nevermore namesake, Monk’s

anagrammatic Lenore... That the

dead return in luxury cars made

weep, pathetic its tin elegance,

pitiable,

sweet read misread,

would-be

sweet

The Mermaid, Caitrona O'Reilly

II. The Mermaid (from The Sea Cabinet)

BY CAITRIONA O'REILLY

Between the imaginary iceberg and the skeletal whale

is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case,

the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale

so unlike Herbert Draper’s siren dreams, loose

on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy.

Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face

look more like P.T. Barnum’s Freak of Feejee,

piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare.

She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey,

the green glass eyes of a porcelain doll, a pair

of praying-mantis hands, and fishy lips

open to reveal her sea-caved mouth, her rare

ivory mermaid-teeth. Children breathe and rap

on the glass to make her move. In her fixity

she’s as far as can be from the selkie who slips

her wet pelt on the beaches of Orkney

and walks as a woman, pupils widened in light,

discarding the stuffed sack of her body.

Without hearing, or touch, or taste, or smell, or sight

she echoes the numb roll of the whale

in a sea congealed with cold, when it was thought

no beast could be a nerveless as the whale.

Crows in a Strong Wind, Cornelius Eady

Crows in a Strong Wind

BY CORNELIUS EADY

Off go the crows from the roof.

The crows can’t hold on.

They might as well

Be perched on an oil slick.

Such an awkward dance,

These gentlemen

In their spottled-black coats.

Such a tipsy dance,

As if they didn’t know where they were.

Such a humorous dance,

As they try to set things right,

As the wind reduces them.

Such a sorrowful dance.

How embarrassing is love

When it goes wrong

In front of everyone.

Cornelius Eady, “Crows in a Strong Wind” from Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997). Copyright © 1985 by Cornelius Eady. Used with the permission of the author.

Minnows 2, Ray Amorisi

Minnows 2

BY RAY AMOROSI

Whatever the cost I pay up at the minnow pools.

I don’t know anything of the misery of these trapped fish,

or the failure of the marsh I’m so hidden.

Up above is the island with its few houses facing

the ocean God walks with anyone there. I often

slosh through the low tide to a sister

unattached to causeways.

It’s where deer mate then lead their young

by my house to fields, again up above me.

Pray for me. Like myself be lost.

An amulet under your chest, a green sign of the first

rose you ever saw, the first shore.

Then I wash my horse, dogs, me behind the barn.

Only the narrow way leads home.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

The Fish, Elizabeth Bishop

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly-
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
- if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels- until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Elizabeth Bishop

Alligator Poem

Mary Oliver
Alligator Poem

I knelt down
at the edge of the water,
and if the white birds standing
in the tops of the trees whistled any warning
I didn’t understand,
I drank up to the very moment it came
crashing toward me,
its tail flailing
like a bundle of swords,
slashing the grass,
and the inside of its cradle-shaped mouth
gaping,
and rimmed with teeth—
and that’s how I almost died
of foolishness
in beautiful Florida.
But I didn’t.
I leaped aside, and fell,
and it streamed past me, crushing everything in its path
as it swept down to the water
and threw itself in,
and, in the end,
this isn’t a poem about foolishness
but about how I rose from the ground
and saw the world as if for the second time,
the way it really is.
The water, that circle of shattered glass,
healed itself with a slow whisper
and lay back
with the back-lit light of polished steel,
and the birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees,
shook open the snowy pleats of their wings, and drifted away,
while, for a keepsake, and to steady myself,
I reached out,
I picked the wild flowers from the grass around me—
blue stars
and blood-red trumpets
on long green stems—
for hours in my trembling hands they glittered
like fire.