Poetics

Death. Crash. Horror.

_grau. By Robert Seidel. 2004.

*

This is what death feels like –
The sudden imposition
Of sharp metal into the warm cocoon,
The music still playing as the tyres howl.

It’s a what-a-pity or a such-a-shame,
Sighed above the roof of the crumpled car;
An exhalation of trivial carnage -
Not a keening lament at a bright battle ending.

Days later most likely the billboards will screech
Louder than the subframe on the oft-repaired tarmac
Of a larger-than-life life lost or a loveable rogue.
Up with the “angles” as the fence-flowers have it

Watching lovingly from the honey pot sky -
Not keening and hair-tearing as he spins in stasis,
Loves lost, words unsaid, never speaking his mind
Nor fearless in the face of the knife-wound words,

Chances untaken as the police swarm like ants
Over and over and over the crash scene;
Chalk lines, photo flashes, witness statements,
Heads down and no word for the passing.

*

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time at the moment either on the road myself, or covering the aftermaths of  deaths on those same roads. “RTC on the A299” comes a police report and we immediately see “death crash horror” on the billboards and know this week’s front page has been written in shattered glass somewhere on a dual carriageway. Sometimes, slipping through traffic on the motorbike or typing up a tribute to another soul lost in a car crash I wonder at the patterns that repeat themselves in our copy as lifelong friends or grieving widows pay tribute to their “always laughing and joking” husbands and mates who have left Terra Firma for the worms of the even firmer firma or the firmament – depending on your metaphysics. Long story, within the confines of my flip front helmet a poem – if you can call it such – started writing itself today as the wind soared round my chilly legs. Memento mori and “do not go gently” and all that. Death shouldn’t be trite. RIP all the death crash horrors.

Doubt thou the stars are fire?

“Doubt thou the stars are fire…”

Last night on the M5 the rockets burst in the rain like jokes that nobody laughed at and the spray kicked up by the trucks was a riddle that had no answer. Last night on the road home the fireworks left thick coils of green smoke in the air, like the skin of a water snake drifting and shed. Last night my volte face at your door surprised my own feet and I lay in bed alone until the fat crackle of the night sky was snuffed out by the dark and the raindrops sank because they had to into the ground. Maybe love is the footprints of a creature we can track but never trap.

“The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief” Othello, Act I; Scene III

 

The Robb’d That Smiles

Last night on the M5 the cars were quicksilver; the buildings steeped in clean purple, with their usually cold windows throwing thick flecks of gold back at the sun. It was beautiful. Later I ran until my chest could contain no more night air and my blood boiled with the pacing. I ran circuits in the dark with my hood up; lay back on the cold ground with my feet on a bench and my eyes tracing the stars’ circuits, the earth breathing autumn chill against my spine. Later I paced back through the night streets before driving to your door. Turned over and over under a thick duvet, traced your neck’s estuary with these fingers; slipped through a tesseract to another time, woke clenched tight against your skin; body warm, head still, heart chanting.

Seoul at night

The Fierce Track 

It’s all about the late night runs under cold city streetlights, kicking back hard
against the asphalt’s cupped hands while the lungs, roaring, share willing air
with the aromas that covet my path; the acrid smoke that segues into the kick
of grilled mackerel or the carcinogenic caugh of a night bus, the asthmatic
wheeze of the homeless bums tipping back booze in the night air; my feet
a’ skitter between bottles dotted as upright as slalom markers on
this sharp descent; the heavy sky, not falling, but ceding
to a silver moon over this cradle of countless tired souls
while just one pair of legs, scissoring, cuts urgent
patterns from these flowing streets, lest this
fierce track fade into drab grey
with the coming morning’s
chill spring
dawn.

“Reads clarity in the red reflecting…”

Auspex/Haruspex

It’s auspicious,
the thick turn of the buzzards
high over the suburban roofs.
My prognostications have
on occasion been amiss;
reading propitious circumstances
in the swarm of starlings over
the bread crusts, stale on
the park bench,
the blackbird’s sideways feint
in front of the cat or
the dipping flight of the magpie:
“two for luck”.

Perhaps the answer’s in the guts,
not the dance of feathers in the sun.
Watch Icarus fall, see the thick
flex of pylorus and colon,
smashed on the estate road;
while the Haruspex, coiled,
reads clarity in the red reflecting -
and Daedalus, weeping,
flies flatly on.
Unyielding to the great
beating hammer
of the sun.

“The road sinuous in the morning slick”

The Shell of Silence 

The Castle: a two-up two-down semi somewhere in the Midlands. The Grounds: a garden fit for growing 100 potatoes, 10 pumpkins or just 1 small trampoline. Clouds: that fritter the days away, spitting down aimlessly in the dusk, largely without anger.

The Moat: three granite steps to the front door. Sharks: bills like paper fins circling the front door, sharp against the fingers. Shouting: water, car insurance, council tax, electricity, extortion, broadband, telephone, TV license, mobile bills, student loan repayments, red ink bluffs, blackmail, bills.

The Battlements: peppered with spears – the angular spines of books, poetry, the occasional song on the guitar; a child’s laughter in the morning, astringent kisses after £5 wine, coffee and the radio hissing. The Pennants:  cerulean, burnt ochre, chrome oxide green, hissing in the wind like a horsehair brush.

The Keep: secret memories, two hours solitude in the gym – the heavy bags swaying to a staccato attack. Songs that set you dancing when no one’s about. The strength of two hands: split knuckles, steel string index figure calluses; palms pale as the shoots that crack the tarmac in the drive.

(Strangers that tousle your toddler’s hair; the secret scent of a lover’s skin that follows you home; the quick chaos of a brawl, fists flailing; fingers that pluck an E minor in the dark evening; the exhilaration of saying what you think. The shock of having it said to you).

Outside as ever, the world, the ages. Dark or light or an ever-shifting tatter of shadows. Sun freckles. The dawn chorus. The cough of the car starting. The familiar roar of traffic. The road ahead dew-dark; sinuous in the morning slick.

“The devil’s toe-jam”

Derequisition 

This poem is a derequisition:
its epithelium thicker than before,
feathers clipped to the calamus
and filoplumes shorn for a discreet flight.

This handle is a manubrium-
though you wouldn’t have thought it:
few such goods now derive from nature,
even the jacket that you thought was leather just

melted when you leant over the candle to kiss:
emitted a nebula of plastic bubbles on your sleeve
far removed from the sweet reek of death;
the acrid reminder that something has given
its life for your convenience.

“Why are you always talking about war?” She asks,
and he has to fumble over fireworks,
or the sense of detachment that grows
even when you’re there with your weapon
if you can’t imagine other worlds;

the ease with which the bricklayer’s work,
each red-baked clay block finely glued
with clay and calcined limestone
crumbles from a house to a cenote.

“Some cultures used to mix blood with cement” he says,
Stalking through his own strange memory palace
As she taps her cigarette and toys with her food.
“The Euphrates carries the bodies like fish.”

“They called the coffee ‘the Devil’s toe-jam’ he says.
“The tents are full of dust.” His sleeve is still smoking
and in the roar of traffic outside the Kentish café he can
hear the rumble of tank tracks and smell the dead burning.

“Feeding the crazed pot into smoking sawdust…”

A Microorganism Walks Into A Bar

Say, for the sake of the joke, it’s Archaea,
elusive prokaryote, now spiraling
(the way a pillar of smoke might) into the bar,
skating across the wide maple flooring,
dodging the flannelled elbows of these two grizzled regulars
who thumb gruntingly through the small dish of nuts.

We never see the bartender’s face in these jokes.
We assume he’s blandly handsome, no scars, never
with tales of his own to tell and nothing better to do
than tend the bar, setting up steins and punch lines
for every rabbi, lawyer, blind man, and pirate
that stumbles into the place.

Perhaps when he’s not bartending
he chatters in Greek to starlings
that roost on his windowsill,
throws Raku pots, journals his dreams,
computes complex motion equations.

We wouldn’t know. We’re not invited there.
We are only invited into this bar, where just now
Archaea is hovering mid-air beside him,
according to the mysterious phenomenology
of this sort of joke, which renders it visible
to the naked eye and capable of flight.

It’s not every day a microorganism walks into your bar,
but this bartender, he’s seen it all. Talking horses.
Lewd displays of irregular anatomy. Royalty.

Archaea gleams in the dim light and he just stands there,
wiping the mouth of a shining glass with a rag. Maybe
he’s dreaming ahead to the end of his shift. He sees himself
hand-feeding figs to the starlings, feeding the crazed pot
into smoking sawdust, not feeding lines to this joker.

He should put down the glass, the rag, let someone else
tend the bar and play the straight man.
He could travel to Belize. Swim with dolphins. Paint.
But instead, he finishes polishing the glass
and slides it across the bar toward shimmering Archaea.

“What’ll it be?” he asks,
and everyone in the joint stops
and leans forward, breathless for the reply.

By Ingrid Steblea

***

By “Silent Shot” at Flickr.

“A Driving Student Takes A Blind Corner” by Arlene Ang

She smells it
even before she downshifts
into second gear: engine oil and vinegar.
She knows rain always
tattoos in riddles. The wipers
squeak like broken antennae. She rolls
down the window, fishing
for other vehicles. A strand of hair pricks
her eye. She catches herself
in the rearview mirror.
She recalls
how she wrote her name
on the bathroom mirror of the first
married man
she coveted heedlessly.
She turns her head. Left, then right.
As the car turns, she imagines it
embroidering a body count
on the asphalt.
She listens. She is burning
two thousand calories
to feed motion sickness.
On her forehead, a bead of sweat
becomes a fossil.

Courtesy of Eclectica.

***

“…water flashing bands of blue”

“Of Dark, Of Light” by Donna Vorreyer.

Dark: a kind you cannot find in cities,
mangroves bowed across the channel,
a cathedral of branches leaping from
the black to tangle your paddle, your hair.

In the lagoon, surface still but for rowing,
each dip flips nature in reverse: sky starless,
smoky with clouds, water flashing bands
of blue as the paddle glides through.

Bioluminescence, they call it, microscopic
colonies exuding light from within. This
is the science, the speech the guide has
memorized to teach and tempt the tourists.

You watch the lightning streaks of ray
and fish glow like comet tails in space
and you must believe in magic or in God
as pinwheels of blue fire explode from

your fist opening and closing beneath the
water. You dip in your arm to the shoulder,
pull it slowly out, watch it gleam, mercury
slick with its own universe, particles

twinkling then dying, and you must resist
the urge to throw yourself from the kayak,
become a moving constellation, washed
clean, a whole being made of light.

Courtesy of Boxcar Poetry Review

***

“… that the pattern is nothing but noise, the beautiful ordered disarray of fractals”

“The Tao of Dow” by Ingrid Steblea

You want to know where to find it,
want to hold it in your hands, this thing.

Want to name it, tack it to a board,
scrutinize it under bright lights. Don’t turn here

for answers; ask the mad friar on the corner
waving his cup of pins. All you’ll get is riddles

and mist, myth and wriggling. Ask the dog
streaming fleas about actual value versus

notional value. Indeed, why not ask the asphalt,
salt cellar, slate pavers, the papers rolled

in a whorl in the bin by the door, growing brittle,
showing yellow, hour by hour. I promise you,

you’ll get no better answer than colorless,
odorless, invisible, intangible, yet strong enough

to hobble nations, topple notions. Break you, even,
if you let it. Watch it soar and crash, Icarus in indices

plummeting from an indigo sky. Think about
that butterfly in Beijing, that hurricane in the Atlantic.

Believe that the pattern is nothing
but noise, the beautiful ordered disarray

of fractals, fern frond, snowflake, river. Hold this.
This round stone, its halves coarse in each palm.

Run your thumb across the brilliant colored bands.
Feel the crystals, rough as a row of teeth.

Imagine that the world is a geode. Imagine
that in cracking open, it reveals its beauty.

Courtesy of Box Car Poetry Review

***

“I respect verifiably the desert night…”

“Scolopamine” by Mark Pallas*

Not yet burnt out? Or
is the spirit locked in the spirit?
Is it watery and made of shadow,
brunt of more cruel demands?
Speak…

Nix that, I was just
remembering the drive-in
round up of pleasant
sounds, the clank of a strongbox.
I respect verifiably
the desert night. Stars
belong to no one here, at least
they speak a dialect
that turns a cold shoulder;
they are not a canopy over
the Mediterranean,
not guiding the Corsican
to his murders.

Overhead a bumpy aircraft —
talking of commerce —
in trouble, he
snivels miserably,
and a modest background
grants us a chill breeze,
ma petite chou, that brushes
the sand, and Madame
ceremoniously adores
the Magnificent Pléiade of
cowboys, the old blackjack
coach halt
poker pullout hereby
wasted.

Load the load of ore,
which rift riff they sing in the
car, going home. Jerks
chatter in tree houses
but the literati stay
deep in coma with their
dial-a-poems, Latin jive: voodoo.
So says the pellet you
wash down with a stiff drink,
taking the night air
in your canvas jacket.

A color assigned to compress
the sky or crush
a gambit.
To really travel without
wondering around.
The way the pressure
quotes the delicate
check fabric
of the patented exposure
device, now Continental folk
arrive, their circulation,
the appropriate color luggage,
always leaving,

a pocket-knife in
worship pierced on scars
or the eyes at dinner-time, gloves
mask the color, always
a message
about the suburbs
of Milwaukee — but if
you weren’t supposed to
compress the skull, you weren’t supposed to
be bold or past tense,
this hard life a test
of your reading
the voice says tenderly,
now everywhere in Old Europe
leaves whisper their
fall calculus.

Courtesy of Jacket Magazine.

*The pseudonym of Marc Perdeau, b.1923 in Montevideo, Uruguay. From his only published volume of poetry, Déshabillé (Dakar, 1968).

***