Poem for Jack Spicer

It’s the start of baseball season,
and I am thinking again 
as I do every year 
in early April now 
that I live in California 
where afternoon is a blue 
span to languidly cross 
of those long ones 
you used to sort of sleep 
through getting drunk 
on many beers, lying 
next to your radio 
on a little square of grass 
in the sun, listening 
half to the game and half 
to the Pacific water gently 
slapping the concrete 
barrier of the man-made cove.
I have heard it and it sounds 
like conversations among 
not there people I can’t 
quite hear. But you could. 
And later you would try 
to remember what they said 
and transcribe it on your 
black typewriter 
in your sad, horrible room. 
When I read your poems 
about suicide and psychoanalysis 
I feel very lucky and ashamed 
to be alive at all. Everyone 
has been talking lately 
about radiation, iodine, 
and wind, and you are in 
your grave, far from the water. 
I know I don’t care about you 
at all but when I look 
at your photograph, 
your round head tilted up 
so you are staring down 
at everyone, I remember 
how much you hated your body. 
Today I will go down by the water 
where you used to sit and think
I do not hate my body
even though I often do.
When I die please write he tried
on whatever stone you choose.

Matthew Zapruder

The Calling

East Orange, New Jersey

I open the door for Mormons trekking
through our weary neighborhood,
not seeking new religion or painfully
interested in what they’ll say. I hear them.
They are young blond men—short-sleeve
dress shirts, black ties, and backpacks stuffed
with salvation—stationed in this city
where young guns ache for reasons to release.
Vividly other, they believe in something
enough to risk a walk down Freeway Drive
crisp as targets. What do you believe in?
They call me, spiritual mercenary, to answer.
People are able to pour faith in many vessels.
When the right thing ask we leave our doors
open, I believe we will be ready.

—Kyle Dargan, from Bouquet of Hungers 

“The Heart is the Philosopher’s Stone”

which we then took
to mean the thinking

man moves unanchored—lithe,
having excised the dead-

weight stowed in the thorax.
The body believed

in the heart enough to cup
it with hollow slabs of blood

and air. The futility of feeling
fools to the thinking man—the blind

one who casts decisions by listening
to his stone or others with gravel,

too many small hearts chattering
and confusing the body.

The primacy—pulse and heat—all stones long
for. A heart is too stubborn

to be a stone—without desire, just
a throbbing that knows to throb in time

with bioelectric ticks: each a mere encore
of the sourceless first. Heart—its failure

so precious, the things we set
between lungs’ approximate

embrace, even thoughts of them,
tend to yield some sallow gold.

—Kyle G. Dargan, from Bouquet of Hungers 

The Reproach

You have betrayed me, Eros.
You have sent me
my true love.

On a high hill you made
his clear gaze;
my heart was not
so hard as your arrow.

What is a poet
without dreams?
I lie awake; I feel
actual flesh upon me,
meaning to silence me—
Outside, in the blackness
over the olive trees,
a few stars.

I think this is a bitter insult:
that I prefer to walk
the coiled paths of the garden,
to walk beside the river
glittering with drops
of mercury. I like to lie
in the wet grass beside the river,
running away, Eros,
not openly, with other men,
but discreetly, coldly—

All my life
I have worshiped the wrong gods.
When I watch the trees
on the other side,
the arrow in my heart
is like one of them,
swaying and quivering.

—Louise Gluck, from The Triumph of Achilles (the last of the first four books, and in my opinion the best by far)

Rally Rally Rally

When I tried to say goodnight they came carving
with Bowie knives. When I tried to brawl they cut
off my eyelids, they took my sight. So the nightlife
goes sometimes. & sometimes, no matter how
you might try it still goes gorgeous—everything gagged
& stuffed scarlet with peeled pomelos, wrapped
in leaves of the evergreen. We were orange
with the ghosts of good things last night. You
should have seen the sweat of still-being-alive.
Everyone believed in healing through fire,
the polished-sheen of a rainbow trout held out
of a car window to dry in a summer wind.
Marshmallows torched too long, then lifted
blaze-topped to a blackberry sky. So lets elasticate!
Ask to take me home where I’ll bite your earlobe
up & down before you make me stand all night
in the sparkling light of your kitchen dropping mugs
into the lukewarm sink water while you take
pictures of my bare backside. Butt. Spine. Butt.
Flash. Flash. Flash. But I know even before
your keys touch the lock you’ll change
your mind & force me out of the hatchback
by the park where the moon moving
like a terrific skipping stone across
the river is orange, beautiful orange. I’ll swear
I saw someone drowning, singing the same song
you hummed when your finger first touched
my thigh. So before it all happens, let me
tell you what you’re getting us into. Let me look
you in the eye & tell you what I believe now
that I’ve fallen down the stairs dozens of times.
Count my fingers! Dozens of times!
Hurrah for how I wake up crumpled & alone
with a torn-up pack of smokes stuffed
in my mouth. The gauzy light of marionettes
everywhere when I blink my eyes.
Even I’d laugh if I now said something
about the sweet hereafter, so open up, put this
on your tongue—& now that you have
one more tooth, think about vapors—
funnel clouds. High & tights as fastballs.
How easy evolution is—the gorillas, standing
with their fists on their hips watching you eat.
Sex symbols dangling from cracked rearview
mirrors. Like handcuffs. Like atomic numbers
holding their thumbs out in the rain. Arms
waving big X’s in the thirtieth story window
of a high rise fire. A downpour that lets you see
through all the gristle to our real faces.
Howdy, please. Howdy. Now tell me you’ve lost
your legs so I know you’ll really stay.

—Alex Lemon, from Hallelujah Blackout 

Good luck is a locked door,
                                                but the key’s around somewhere.
Meanwhile, half-hidden under the thick staircase of memory,
One hears the footsteps go up and the footsteps go down.

As water mirrors the moon, the earth mirrors heaven,
Where things without shadows have shadows.
A lifetime isn’t too much to pay
                                                     for such a reflection.

—Charles Wright, from Littlefoot 

Across a Great Wilderness without You

The deer come out in the evening. 
God bless them for not judging me, 
I’m drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe 
and make strange noises at them—
                                                  language, 
if language can be a kind of crying. 
The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow, 
each bullet hole suffused with moon, 
like the platinum thread beyond them 
where the river runs the length of the valley. 
That’s where the fish are. 
                                    Tomorrow 
I’ll scoop them from the pockets of graveled 
stone beneath the bank, their bodies 
desperately alive when I hold them in my hands, 
the way prayers become more hopeless 
when uttered aloud. 
                            The phone’s disconnected. 
Just as well, I’ve got nothing to tell you: 
I won’t go inside where the bats dip and swarm 
over my bed. It’s the sound of them 
shouldering against each other that terrifies me, 
as if it might hurt to brush across another being’s 
living flesh. 
                But I carry a gun now. I’ve cut down 
a tree. You wouldn’t recognize me in town— 
my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools 
I’ve retired from their life of touching you.

—Keetje Kuipers

Uses of the Imagination

After the poem, residue of the poem.

I blow it off my hands—

prop / strut / bracket / stay.

(Fragile has been a concern.)

Like two large windows
framing nothing, they lean.

Like desire.

So that when I begin again,
there is so far to go—

—Mary Ann Samyn, from Purr 

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

—Robert Creely