American Poetry

by Bradford Morrow

  in upper left hand street

  beyond listen recognition

  when sand was a man

  sheets came down

  chance people commence

  cement with strings

  underfoot wingy shadow paste

  anchor by kiss and newsprint

  never see the Mayor here

  2.

  I carry in my tambourine bird

  Chance the pubescent overboard sky

  I like floors I like gulls

  the foggy obscenity arrival

  take a number fog everywhere

  h e a r d

  precious big s p o k e s f o g

  not simply sex loneliness and the beach

  finespray night or day but blank

  when fog was a boy cloud

  in the old mist tradition

  oh what run to run for nothing

  pier ass l o n e l y s e a

  who’s turn to run the c u t

  beach run with rain

  once upon a time when there was no watcher

  fog eating rock

  soft as this way

  and that w a y

  3.

  The money isn’t flowing yet

  of three I see at Seaview restaurant

  caution, caution, caution

  “Your number is 11 A”

  thee could ask for anything more

  life, as a bit

  life, as a toll

  you my spoon

  with acid free rain dumb

  focus on Western Venus

  harnessed professional pretend

  the active art of Venus

  whirl into the lonely world

  oh smile for nothing

  buff hell no one to talk to

  thereby self-operating idea napkin

  glue cards with rain

  once upon unbroadcast time three houses three

  poem the bit rift and bond

  language impossible swing

  walking baseline of Venus the model city

  the train at the end

  beginning a world

  never the same

  mingle unanimous playground

  wordbone throw

  yes difference where spoon of soup you are

  being nothing or

  a flower outside limits

  penny rocket shapely mind

  will come true

  Orion: Opening the Seals

  Robert Kelly

  Opening the throat

  What

  sound can tell

  or later

  the letter

  found letter, lost alphabet

  the lost language in live lips

  found.

  ?A

  1.

  A forehead or a brow

  face,

  a face

  here, near to the speaker

  be on my side

  amor ti vieta

  not to love me back

  my face be near

  be a sound so close to my face

  I think I’m speaking

  2.

  for love is a high school of persuasion

  a study in power

  for I gave my power to him and he took

  A is for Apple.

  That is what she did,

  gave her power away & he did take

  and she takes back, now,

  wiping her forehead from the sweat of the day

  3.

  her brow a storm cloud

  new-bent in heav’n

  across the speaker’s line of sight

  deictic marker of something that is near

  or being close. A is close, close to

  who am I when I am speaking

  when I find in my mouth something to say

  and that is A.

  Something is near to the speaker

  as a bird is near to the sky

  4.

  I am part of what I say,

  (one is a part of what one says)

  I am your element

  (one is made of what one says)

  speak me free

  (one can be liberated from what one seems to be

  only by what one is, I suppose is what it means,

  are you?)

  5.

  across the tops of some new leaves

  just put out by the powerful hedges

  I see a cleft or cranny in the rock wall

  tall as a woman and shaped a little

  like the space between

  her two hands loosely held together

  palm to palm

  in the gesture often sold as “Hands, Praying”

  made of painted plaster, based loosely but three

  dimensionally on the celebrated drawing by the German

  master Albrecht Dürer

  who signed his pictures A

  (with a little D beneath it and within it)

  a father swallowed up inside his son.

  6.

  A as in prayer. A as in rock.

  A open as in a throat

  open to say your name.

  Your name is power, Evening,

  mother of all living,

  your name is lightning, locker room,

  your arthropod intelligence, chambered

  up through the mammalian grease

  to meet the milky light,

  sky light of Hellas? Hell is a bright house

  where a certain dark relief

  spells out of the silence

  a long, long word it takes eternity to read,

  a word that probably turns out to be my name.

  7.

  (The sky was bright and empty over Lockerbie

  one day I was there, got some money,

  mailed some letters, bought a notebook—where did I

  put it?—ate some lunch—and where is lunch

  now, where are all the animals I ever ate,

  burnt wreckage of desire strewn over Lockerbie,

  when the wood fell out of the sky,

  they say it exploded, or was exploded, but I say it broke,

  the word broke and fell to earth,

  the word of someone’s hatred finally spoke,

  and over the supple hillsides of the dale of Annan

  crap and clothes and body parts and inarticulate machinery,

  you break a word when you speak it,

  “silence once broken can never be mended.” —S. Beckett

  8.

  Of course A is longest, how could it not be,

  in the first sound

  all others are entered

  also, the first word speaks all the others,

  aleph, the opening,

  the first word spoken, the original sin.

  For sin is in the father’s bosom

  and must be spoken out into the forgiving light

  until the healing dark can claim it,

  Father+Mother+Crucified Son (aleph, mem, tav) spell emeth, “truth”

  9.

  but as I was saying before sense obtruded

  the cantilena hardly

  ever pauses,

  my music will suck you till I die,

  to make you everything, vast inanimate plural,

  as if one human mind

  were the same as a valley full of gravel,

  vast finity of sand.

  10.

  Am here

  where you told me to be

  to be who you are,

  am here the first

  leaf on your tree is me,

  I am your family,

  this dark indefinite question

  questions you

  you are my straight answer.

  I believe that we can bring this from the mind.

  Two Poems

  Nathaniel Mackey

  … that there existed a scout of love from whose effects of grief no one could escape …

  —Wilson Harris, Black Marsden

  EYE ON THE SCARECROW

  The w
ay we lay

  we mimed a body

  of water. It was

  this or that way

  with

  the dead and we

  were them. No

  one

  worried which …

  Millet beer made

  our legs go weak,

  loosed

  our tongues. “The dead,”

  we

  said, “are drowning

  of thirst,” gruff

  summons we muttered

  out loud in our

  sleep …

  It was a journey we

  were on, drawn-out

  scrawl we made a road

  of, long huthered hajj

  we

  were on. Raw strip

  of cloth we now rode,

  wishful, letterless

  book

  the ride we thumbed …

  Harp-headed ghost whose

  head we plucked incessantly.

  Bartered star. Tethered

  run …

  It was a ride we knew we’d

  wish to return to. Every-

  thing was everything,

  nothing no less. No less

  newly

  arrived or ancestral, of

  late having to do with

  the naming of parts …

  Rolling hills rolled

  up like a rug, raw sprawl

  of a

  book within a book

  without a name known as

  Namless, not to be

  arrived at again …

  It was

  the Book of No Avail we

  were in did we dare name

  it, momentary kings and

  queens,

  fleet kingdom. Land fell

  away on all sides.

  Past

  Lag we caught ourselves,

  run weft at last

  adequate, shadowless,

  lit,

  left up Atet Street,

  legs tight, hill after

  hill after hill.

  Had it been a book Book

  of Opening the Book it

  would’ve been called,

  kept

  under lock and key …

  Hyperbolic

  arrest. Ra was on the

  box.

  It was after the end of

  the world … To lie on

  our backs looking

  into the dark was all

  there was worth

  doing,

  each the aroused eye

  one another sought,

  swore he or she

  saw,

  we lay where love’s

  pharaonic torso lay

  deepest, wide-eyed

  all

  night without sleep …

  “String

  our heads with straw,” we

  said, half-skulls tied with

  catgut, strummed …

  Scratched

  our strummed heads, memory

  made us itch. Walked out

  weightless, air what eye

  was

  left …

  Someone said Rome,

  someone said destroy it.

  Atlantis, a third shouted

  out …

  Low ride among ruins

  notwithstanding we flew.

  Swam, it often seemed,

  underwater, oddly immersed,

  bodies

  long since bid goodbye,

  we

  lay in wait, remote muses

  kept us afloat. Something

  called pursuit had us by

  the nose. Wafted ether

  blown

  low, tilted floor, splintered

  feet. Throated bone …

  Rickety boat we rode …

  As

  though what we wanted

  was to be everywhere at

  once,

  an altered life lived on an

  ideal

  coast we’d lay washed up

  on, instancy and elsewhere

  endlessly

  entwined

  SOUND AND SEMBLANCE

  A sand-anointed wind spoke of

  survival, wood scratched raw,

  scoured bough. And of low sky

  poked at by branches, blown

  rush, thrown voice, legbone

  flute …

  Wind we all filled up with caught

  in the tree we lay underneath …

  Tree filled up with wind and more

  wind,

  more than could be said of it said …

  So-called ascendancy of shadow,

  branch, would-be roost, now not

  only a tree, more than a tree …

  It was the bending of boughs we’d

  read about, Ibn ‘Arabi’s reft

  ipseity, soon-come condolence,

  thetic

  sough. We saved our breath, barely

  moved,

  said nothing, soon-come suzerainty

  volubly afoot, braided what we’d

  read and what we heard and what

  stayed sayless, giggly wind,

  wood,

  riffling wuh … A Moroccan

  reed-flute’s desert wheeze took

  our breath, floor we felt we

  stood on, caustic earth we rode

  across … It was Egypt or Tennessee

  we

  were in. No one, eyes exed out,

  could say which. Fleet, millenarian

  we it now was whose arrival the wind

  an-

  nounced

  •

  Night found us the far side of

  Steal-Away Ridge, eyes crossed

  out, X’s what were left, nameless

  what we saw we not-saw. We ducked

  and ran, rained on by tree-sap,

  dreaming,

  chattered at by wind and leaf-stir,

  more than we’d have dreamt or

  thought. We lay on our backs looking

  up at the limbs of the tree we lay

  underneath, leaves our pneumatic

  book,

  We lay on our backs’ unceased reprise.

  North of us was all an emolument,

  more than we’d have otherwise run.

  We worked at crevices, cracks,

  convinced we’d pry love loose,

  wrote

  our names out seven times in dove’s

  blood,

  kings and queens, crowned ourselves

  in sound. Duke was there, Pres, Lady,

  Count, Pharoah came later. The

  Soon-Come Congress we’d heard so much

  about, soon come even sooner south …

  So

  there was a new mood suddenly, blue

  but uptempo,

  parsed, bitten into, all of us got our

  share … Pecks what had been kisses, beaks

  what once were lips, other than we

  were as we lay under tree limbs, red-beaked

  birds

  known as muni what we were, heads crowned

  in

  sound only in

  sound

  From One Big Self

  C. D. Wright

  My Dear Conflicted Reader,

  If you will grant me that most of us have an equivocal nature, and that when we waken we have not made up our minds which direction we’re headed; so that—you might see a man driving to work in a perfume and dye-free shirt, and a woman with an overdone tan hold up an orange flag in one hand, a Virginia Slim in the other—as if this were their providence. Grant me that both of them were likely contemplating a different scheme of things. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY the church marquee demands on the way to my boy’s school, SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING. I admit I had not thought of where or which direction in exactly those terms. The radio ministry says g-o-d has a wrong answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off. …

  *

&nb
sp; Dear Virtual Lifer,

  This is strictly a what-if proposition:

  What if I were to trade my manumission for your incarceration. If only for a day. At the end of which the shoes must be left at the main gate to be filled by their original occupants. There is no point and we will not shrink from it. There is only this day to re-invent everything and lose it all over again. Nothing will be settled or made easy.

  If you were me:

  If you wanted blueberries you could have a big bowl. Two dozen bushes right on your hill. And thornless raspberries at the bottom. Walk barefooted; there’s no glass. If you want to kiss your kid you can. If you want a Porsche, buy it on the installment plan. You have so many good books you can’t begin to count them. Walk the dog to the bay every living day. The air is salted. Every June you can hear the blues jumping before seeing water through the vault in the leaves. Watch the wren nesting in the sculpture by the shed. Smoke if you feel like it. Or swim. Call a friend. Or keep perfectly still. The morning’s free.

  If I were you:

  Fuck up today, and it’s solitary, Sister Woman, the padded dress with the food log to gnaw upon. This is where you enter the eye of the fart. The air is foul. The dirt is gumbo. Avoid all physical contact. Come nightfall the bugs will carry you off. You don’t have a clue, do you.

  *

  My Dear Affluent Reader

  Welcome to the Pecanland Mall. Sadly, the pecan grove had to be dozed to build it. Home Depot razed another grove. There is just the one grove left and the creeper and the ivy have blunted its sun. The uglification of your landscape is all but concluded. We are driving around the shorn suburb of your intelligence, the photographer and her factotum. Later we’ll walk in the shadows of South Grand. They say, in the heyday of natural gas, there were houses with hinges of gold. They say so. We are gaining on the cancerous alley of our death. Which, when all is said or unsaid, done or left undone, shriven or unforgiven, this business of dying, is our most commonly held goal.

  Ready or not. 0 exceptions.

  Don’t ask.

  *

  Dear Prisoner,

  I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference

  Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing

  You could use. In a court of law. I found.

  That sickly sweet ambrosia of hope. Unmendable

  Seine of sadness. Experience taken away.

  From you. I would open. The mystery

  Of your birth. To you. I know. We can

  Change. Knowing. Full well. Knowing.

  It is not enough.

  poetry time space death

  I thought. I could write. An exculpatory note

  I cannot. Yes, it is bitter. Every bit of it, bitter.

  The course taken by blood. All thinking

  Deceives us. Lead (kindly) light.

  Notwithstanding this grave. Your garden.

  This cell. Your dwelling. Be unaccountably free.

  *

  Dear Dying Town

  The food is cheap; the squirrels are black; the box factories have all moved off-shore; the light reproaches us, and our coffee is watered down, but we have an offer from the Feds to make nerve gas; the tribe is lobbying hard for another casino; the bids are out to attract a nuclear dump; and there’s talk of a supermax—