Poeming My Students

Sometimes I give out a poem without speaking

Just to let you sit there and read it without speaking.

Let you taste the words, taste the air.

Let you sit there and breathe there

and read there in awkward silence.

Sitting and reading in the strange presence

Of neither great art nor great nonsense

But just of breathing, breathing, breathing.

Mnemosyne And Ezra

I.

this dredging up

debarking first

and after, the

deforesting

or uncorking

the slush bottle,

sweet but rancid

hand and mouthful,

stings with bleach water

stings with nettles

unwinds the wraps

carefully bound

See this here, here

under the rule

of year and hour

and each in full,

another page turned -

There! a streaked sheen

smudge, a cold splash

of quicker sin -

and turned back to

the front cover

the bricks laid out

each in anger

then stacked again

motarless wall

toppled sideways

rebuilt anew

II.

Jeruselem's

own shackled-eyed

prophet-mason

knees in rain-muck,

the register

in his right palm

a count of those

left, the remnant,

his shredded robe

muddy under

his prostrating,

weeps and weeps now.

Bitter and Salt.

Charlie Crippen

Underneath it all, Charlie Crippen supposed there was something to be said for fratricide; that is, the act of killing one's own brother. It seemed much neater, much tidier than - and neatness and tidiness were two of the most important elements of Charlie's world, so much so that the cake falling on the floor evoked a dreadfully shrieking end to his eighth birthday party - than actually attending his brother's wedding on this blustery, cloud-covered November afternoon. The front of the church was a well-scrubbed white; the stain-glass adequately reflected the single-tone sky. Stark, titian leaves fell madly all along the church's front drive and circle, pitching an urge in Charlie's soul to return home for his rake, or a broom, or a mop; or something to clean up with. Where most others would see a picturesque day for a Fall wedding, he only saw the leaf-edges shatter on impact, each particle multiplying out into an ever-increasingly dirty, dirty world.

Outside the church, as Charlie drove around towards the back to park, the bridal party made its way from another white-washed building to the chapel, which must have offered a too meager preparation suite for the girls and forced them to ready in the former. The bride's dress was crushed whiter-than-egg-but-not-quite-snow-white (how many wedding dresses are really white-white nowadays, Charlie thought, there's always some modifiers. How messy!) and complemented nicely her glowing face and obviously pregnant figure. The other women helped hold her dress and sidle heavily down some stairs as they entered the back of the chapel without seeing him, just as he put his car in park. A bit of aerial flotsam blew past.

But it wasn't the church's driveway or parking lot that made Charlie think of familiar murder. It was the messiness inside the church. He couldn't stand messiness of any sort: blubbering, gushing tears and flushed red cheeks, running snot being sucked up the nose with a snort and sniffle, the yelps and whelps and boo-hoo-hoos; and underneath it all, the hearts crying out "No more! I can take no more..." while secretly thirsting, bleeding for more and more and more. People love punishment, Charlie knew, and people - for all the protests and wailing - created lives that exactly fit what they wanted: a fat woman who whines to be thin chooses her fatness because she'd rather remain as she was than give up food or laziness or the money it would take for surgery. Or a man who complains about his job but chooses to stay there rather than living with a lower income. All of life is choices, Charlie said to himself as he withdrew the key from the ignition, and we choose to work because we don't want to choose to not eat; we choose our relationships, no matter how fucked they are, because we refuse to choose loneliness; and me, who chooses to come to this messy, dirty wedding where I'm not really welcome because I can't bring myself to choose the consequences of not coming.

As Charlie Crippen reached to open the rear door of the chapel, he heard the last notes of his sister's fine alto as she sang some Italian aria he had never heard. Charlie didn't know much about music since his piano lessons had ceased around age eleven for hygiene reasons. He felt at the right door handle's cold faux brass, then released it and sniffed his fingers before wiping them on his pant leg. Realizing that he didn't have a handkerchief or napkin to open the door, he grimaced, reached for both handles of the double doored entrance and made his choice.

From the inside the chapel, heads whipped around at the screeching of the main doors and a loud voice crying out "Stop! The child is mine!"

Susan Anthony

Susan Anthony, named after the old suffrage movement leader, boarded a plane for Singapore, not intending to come back. Through the gate, down the walk, and into her seat, she sighed contently that America and the past would be quickly 20,000 feet below and then an inseparable gulf behind her.

As soon as the plane was airborne, she ordered a glass of wine, then asked instead for a coke, then changed her mind and ordered a diet coke, then thought again and asked for a water. "Today is a day for changes," she smiled to herself, "and why not? Whatever this new life holds for me, I'll face it undrugged." She resolved herself to vegetarianism and water for the duration of the flight. "And my life. The rest of my life."

She sat windowside and by some act of the love of the God, she thought, she had a free seat next to her. The only empty seat on the plane and it was her buffer zone from the rest of the passengers. Her carry-on only contained a cell-phone and a copy of Les Fleurs du mal in the French, which she could barely read. She flipped open to the near the middle of the book, to the middle of a poem and read this:

La gerbe épanouie
En mille fleurs,
Où Phoebé réjouie
Met ses couleurs,
Tombe comme une pluie
De larges pleurs.

"It sounds wonderful. I wish I had spent more time...no, energy, or attention, or something, to French." She had a rough idea of the meaning, and could pronounce each word with a rough accent, though any Parisian would know that her tongue had not learned those sounds until adulthood. "Why didn't I spend more time on it? What was I doing for all those years?" Her questions, spoken aloud though softly, went unanswered. The people around her were now sleeping or plugged into the movie. "This is how it always was. Me alone, but I never had time for myself. How does that happen to a person?" She read the poem's lines again and sighed.

It didn't matter, of course, since America and her past had dropped into the depths below her, and as she looked out the window still saying those words, the ocean came up and the land fell away. "Ahh, now I'm truly gone."

She opened her cell phone and pressed the power button, began to wait for it to load. Within seconds, the stewardess was hovering over her, admonishing her that she couldn't use it while in flight. Susan apologized and made it put it away - the stewardess began to move up the aisle - then reopened it dialed a number that she had memorized. "Today is a day for changes," she whispered, and also "How does that, or this, happen to a person?" She pressed Send.

The sheaf unfolds into
Countless flowers
In which joyful Phoebe
Puts her colors:
It drops like a shower
Of heavy tears.

-Charles Baudelaire

Two Haikus

Cats scratch at the door
keep us from sleeping all night
I retaliate.

This gray wet morning
I find the dog ate their food
I apologize.

Either A Lie Then Or A Lie Now

In these later days too, full
of the easy battle,
pipes and languages
and whisky, we carried on until the next day

Myself, flicking round the edge-circle, a drop of solder
waiting on the next licking snap to turn me silver
Christ also bored; patience for the unknowable hour;
brow lifted heaven-ward, waiting on the Father.

And then we found out
what we had forgot about:
the heavy gut-drop of loss
and abiding ourselves forgotten

A first attempt at translating my own work.

As an exercise for myself in French, I attempted a straight translation of my last posted poem, And sometime drink whiskey with me. I made no attempt to carry over anything but the most basic of senses - the words themselves and the meanings of the clauses. It helped that it was a fairly simply poem to begin with. Here is the French version:


Et un jour bois whisky avec moi
pour que je vais te dire de
ma cache de mots ramassé
secrètement soigneusement
plumé
d'un bouche-piège de grand-père de quelqu'un. Ce Vieux Babillard Mâchoire-Fente-là.

Ou je vais te dire autres baliverne, mensonges, comme la soir fuit de façon précipitée.



I found to my surprise that the rhythm I uncovered with the English version, though modified, still seems to work. The syllables in lines four and five match perfectly. The hardest part was figuring out how to say "That Old Jawing Slit". I settled on, with help from two dictionaries, something that translates more literally as "That Old Talkative Jaw-Slit." I wish I knew French well enough to invent words - I just don't have a good enough grasp of the morphological nuances to do so.

The impossible part was what to do with line seven in the original poem, the line with the three words drawn out of the cache. I considered finding straight translations, but the actual meaning of those three words is secondary to their impact (though they were chosen for specific reasons) as dusty old relics. And I definitely do not know enough French to tackle those sort of nuanced pragmatics.

In retrospect, I would have tackled a different poem for my first go - one that didn't rely so much on lexical precision. My next goal, besides my own work, is to try a translation of e.e. cummings i will wade out, which I have also written about here.

And sometime drink whiskey with me

And sometime drink whiskey with me
so that I'll tell you of
my cache of collected words
secretly carefully
plucked
from someone's grandfather's mouthtrap. That Old Jawing Slit.
absquatulate, bafflegab, zograscope.

Or I'll tell you other nonsense, lies, as the night flees headlong on.