THE POETRY CHALLENGE
Who writes THE BEST POETRY
in America today?
(c) copyright 2007, David B. Axelrod
|
THE POETRY CHALLENGE Who writes THE BEST POETRY in America today?
(c) copyright 2007, David B. Axelrod |
|
|
THE CHI OF POETRY The Children of Shen Zhen Who Will Remember? Heroics Mommaholic My Colleagues Don't Come Teaching Techniques The Logic of Assassins The Sentence The Poet as Still-Life Photographer Poem on the Occasion of a Protesting the Persian Gulf War On Reading A Brief History of Time Just as George Bush Experiences Irregular Heartbeats The Upstairs Tenant Someone Explains Plans You Don't Have Single Again Invocation Before Custody The Ex-wife Who Swam I'm Not Ready The Suburbs Classified At Simpson's Reading Diogenes in the Diner Waiting for the Commutation Spring the Age-Old Question Long Island Spring Haikus Canticle Along The Hunger Artist The Man Who Said "Maybe" Young Mothers Changing of the Clocks THE CHILDREN OF SHENZHEN
He sees the children from a distance, playing; no, begging. As he nears, an infant lying asleep-- it looks unconscious-- on newspaper; a cup for coins. The children--toddlers to maybe five--some naked, all blackened by filth, but smiling, noisy, asking for change. So thin, so painfully thin, he must avert his eyes. Turn to look at what? The tourist junk in booths on either side? The border guards, olive uniforms starched stiff, their brass shined bright? He sneaks another look--a girl who could be older, very naked, very dirty. "Don't give her anything" another tourist says. "It just encourages them." He wants to scream. To punch one of the laughing guards who lights a cigarette, oblivious. He wants to take off his own fancy, raw-silk coat and place it over her. And what? Take her home? Feed her? There's no helping it, he thinks, nothing I can do. A dozen more kids calling "Hey, hello," from the other side of a chain-link fence. At least they're clothed. Furtively, he takes a dollar coin and drops it in her cup. The hollow, metal sound embarrassing, as if he's caught. It's an alarm! Hurry, hurry toward the crossing point to another life, where beggars at least are clothed, where social welfare pretends to care. He thinks of The kids there just looked poor. In drug addicts. He woke one once, asleep as the night grew cold, gave him five dollars hoping it would buy a room and not more booze. But here, such little children. Inside, at immigration, the passport line moves slowly and he is glad. For this damn inconvenience, he vows, he'll never bother coming back again. WHO WILL REMEMBER THE SIX MEN? (Killed when the Hong Kong-Canton Ferry ran them down in their small boat, October, 1993.) The overnight ferry to charges the dark waters under a half October moon. Long gone, the tourists snapshotting Well passed the line where New Territories merge with The People's Republic's special economic zone. Now there's an off-key Karaoke, the clatter of Mah Jong tiles in a smoke-filled room, a slouching crew on standby. The murmur of patrons in the top-deck bar can't convince the Captain this is fun. Full speed his diesels spewing fumes, he aims to be on time. Six unseen men are not his business. Six men who fish. Six men who've nothing inside their small sampan just starting out to make their living. Even when seen, it's "Sound the horn but don't slow down." The ferry presses on, draining its kitchen grease and bilge into a warm, black sea. The thud of collision barely rouses passengers asleep in second class. Private cabins unaware. Already four men have disappeared into the wake. A fifth is spotted floating. Pulled aboard, bleeding, he soon dies. A sixth will wash ashore where cranes peck steel boxes from cargo ships down-river. The matter takes two hours. A small news story notes: "Six men were killed, or presumed dead, when they failed to yield the right of way to the Hong Kong-Canton Ferry." The Ferry, undamaged, sails again at Who will remember these six men-- four never found or bodies not reported. Who were the passengers, who the crew, who the Captain so bound from here to there that life was cheap, that life so unimportant? HEROICS (For a 16-year-old amputee) After he’d stolen fire the Gods chained him to a rock, tore him apart. And Roddy, after he’d made his leap toward light, touched the high voltage transformer, his hands, his mother explained “Were like this.” She made two welded fists, “Two chunks of charcoal, and his arms . . . ” They had to cut them off. A month they kept him chained in sleep until, still on a respirator, he awoke. “Why can’t they put them back?” he asked. The day nurse pecked at the charred skin where his coat and shirt burned off inside the fence where no one dared to help him. “At this point,” his mother says, “it hasn’t gotten any easier.” And the Gods-- it’s never mentioned whether once they bound him to the rock, once the bird beak began, they simply left or stayed to watch him.
MOMMAHOLIC (For Aileen) She sleeps with one eye open, her bottle still resting in her lips. A fist clutches her mother's cotton nightgown. Mommaholic! Momma's superglue. How she won't let go of you. And I am disoriented. A wife before, my other three clung to me--after a fall, after the bump in the night, when they were nauseous--so strong a love it was unexpected but always welcome. Now, you hold her all day, won't let her cry herself to sleep, insist on serving fresh not bottled baby food. There's no rule for this, I know. She's eight months, ready to walk, but her grip on you tenacious. Why do I, fifty times as old, feel jealous? MY COLLEAGUES DON’T COME An easy pun. Freudian slip. But they don’t come to readings-- not even meetings with fine writers interest them. A circuit through drab, over-heated halls, reveals doors opened, unabashedly. One at his desk grading, another on the phone: “Yes, it is required reading.” A third stares blankly out a window, while nearby a poet chats enthusiastically with students. Lord, let all writers remain ignorant of the malaise or malice of academics. Once, while hurrying to a I called naively, “See you at the reading,” and good old So-and-So said, “Sorry, I can’t come. I have an academic standards meeting.” TEACHING TECHNIQUES “I love you, “ he tells her right in his class. Her head snaps back. She blushes. Tonight it’s 80 degrees. humid. No one would stay willingly. “It’s just a trick to wake me up,” she figures. “You might say,” he says. The din of crickets outside the window dulls the mind. “But perhaps,” he whispers to himself “we’ll get to know each other. Then it could be love.” Soon enough they’ll worry about icing on the highways, tell each other “Safe home.” If caring is love no one will have lied. THE LOGIC OF ASSASSINS That night he paid them back for all his pain. All the years a peaceful man, patient sufferer, he dreamt and drenched his night clothes. Out of body, he rose to kill: the abusive boss, insulting attorneys, petty clerks, hirelings who took pleasure in the hurting. But not alone. He enlisted other hateful people: the local Goodyear dealer, his ex-wife and Pirate Jenny. One to move his legs. Another to hold his hand. Another to aim the gun until one squeezed his finger on the trigger. If a dream, he prayed not to awaken. If he awoke would he be one of them? THE SENTENCE (“We do what only lovers can-- make a gift of our necessity. Leonard Cohen) Blindfolded by night we discover love. Clothing debrided, we await the shot, the slow release of energy, a gift of our necessity. Mr. President, we beg your pardon. General, grant us amnesty. Honorable Governor, show mercy at this our eleventh hour. Behind the light the source grows dim. Behind the bullet the consequence of the gun. After love, what? THE POET AS STILL PHOTOGRAPHER No long shot needed-- no establishing view-- only a small, black thread forming a perfect G clef on a grout seam of a marble floor so that when one notices so small, so very particular an object, there is nothing more to say. POEM ON THE OCCASION OF A MEMORIAL DAY READING "REMEMBERING WAR" Frightened, we meet to plan a reading, a protest of the war and we are frightened. As if never before, a word could bring broken glass, a storefront vandalism, public condemnation. As if yellow ribbons were tied to stones. Tug one and you're bleeding. Frightened, of this shadow President--"The Perfect Gentleman," they call him-- Who trades in cocaine, backs butchers, Who invokes Hitler to hype his war, Who points with secret police finger. We are in a back room, frightened some red neck, some ordinary citizen, some mother-cousin-friend of someone sent to the Gulf will accuse us of not loving Not loving Bob's Big Boy breakfast 3 eggs, bacon, toast. Not loving Lotto Pick Six, smoke shops. Not loving buck-twenty-five-a-gallon gas. We live American dreams of suburbs where you aren't fright- ened to walk a street but picture the four of us-- 2 poets, an artist, a bookstore owner-- debating how we can protest and pass it off as something else. God, not a peace rally. Lord save us from being labeled antiwar. So frightened! What happened to "group complicity?" What happened to "refusing to take the ticket?"
What happened to the guilt of Nagasaki ? This is what happens when power corrupts, leads us A lie so BIG we're frightened. But wait just a minute! No one was frightened!
Not the airmen ejecting over Not even the one who sold out his country on Iraqi TV. He wasn't frightened. Do you believe it? He beat his own face hoping he wouldn't be used. Sure, he wasn't frightened, after dropping enough bombs on civilians to be a candidate for at least a bullet if not a stick of dynamite stuck up his own ass. He wasn't frightened. We had no cowards, no dissenters, no defectors who, at the risk of being beaten, swollen-faced, misdirected, might have told the truth: men, women, children. That we we're only doing it for money. That we shouldn't be there. That we should not have been there. Yet, we four were so scared of speaking out, so fearful we'd be chased, caught, beaten, made to profess their brand of loyalty, we were too frightened to call even a reading of poems for peace other than "Remembering War," or we'd be called kooks, crazies, cranks, rotten un-Americans. But do you blame us? Who here has the courage to say, plainly, the enemy is us, the Seven Sisters, the Bankers, Oil, their Hierarchy, that Oligarchy that has choked us into silence so frightening, even now we only dare "reminisce about war."
You would both vanish in a great flash of light.") To name the beast is to know it. If you meet a monster, call it by its name. Offer it your hand. Better to create that flash of light than slaughter and decay. 2. Old Time Religion Aquinas asserted there is a god and then said that he'd proved it. Einstein declared light was absolute and no one could destroy it. the vanity of human wishes.
3. Same Story, Different Day (The term "quark" derives from a cryptic passage from James Joyce: "Three quarks for Mr. Marks.) Call heaven "quark," hell "antiquark" their meeting "annihilation." So Armageddon is retold and physics explains creation. 4. A Doppler Love Poem (By the Doppler Effect we can tell the universe is constantly expanding. However, there are "singularities" wherein all logic fails.) As I view you through this telescope of time, your hair becomes more red-- your waves less frequent and as your distance from me grows, I am more blue, as if rushing toward you. Doppler knew that both of these could not at once be true but we all know in love there is no logic. JUST AS THE PRESIDENT EXPERIENCES IRREGULAR HEART BEATS Watching the softball flung at him, his son behind the backstop calling his name, he feels a faint flutter, then adrenalin. A few hundred miles away, the President slows his jog, bends forward to catch his breath. The man with the briefcase holding the launch code smiles. The bat cracks. What startles father and President both-- just those few seconds. The flight of a sphere or missile, the target unimportant. Rather the clarity of the air, and making contact. Later, the President breathes more easily, reassured, and the father is proud of his single.
THE UPSTAIRS TENANT Hans in his stained underwear at the door thanking me for my kindness. His red eyes half closed, no clothes-- just urine stained underwear, a walking suicide. Hans holding forth a hundred dollars for being "such a great guy to me. You're a wonderful fellow." "No, Hans, I don't want your money. No, Hans, I'm not your shrink or mother." Definition of a good tenant: someone you see once a month on the 30th with the exact amount in cash. "Hans, I turned down a 23-year-old waitress so you could have this place."
SOMEONE EXPLAINS Someone explains “psychosomatic” as “the body’s answering the mind.” Gurgling to breath despite his asthma, he wonders why, if ontogeny recapitulates orthogeny, he wasn’t born with gills. Another explains that “healing is the human spirit smiling.”
The doctors once told him he was dying, though their test results were inconclusive. Beyond all modern medicine there is the human will. Then his breathing stops and he drowns, watching his life flash as vivid color pictures. Revived, they ask what he saw. Recalling them he knows. EIGHT DIVORCE POEMS 1. The Guilt Fuck She addresses it with more care than usual, coxing him hard, caressing. Always a pretense of wanting, of it feeling good. Even a surprising wetness. But then, annoying whispers-- “Hurry. Finish.”-- So that his coming, like her fucking becomes an obligation. 2. Plans She makes a net to thread across his bed while he’s away. He’ll raise the covers, creep next to her not knowing. She’s sharpened the words she’ll say, softly, until he comes. She’ll lie there, as always, pretending until the string begins to tighten more than her legs squeeze when he tells her to. How she will squeeze him into darkness as she waits for him. But he sings praises to his empty bed where he levitates above the flowered sheets until a hand reaches for his throat-- hers waiting for his dreams to choke with the weight of two dozen years wrapping his limbs, tugging with a tear that leaves him manless. Awakened, he sings praises to his lonely bed, to a world let loose. No dropping back to earth now, no need for the mattress, the artist’s rendition of flowered prints. The net is cut. He’s diving for the light. 3. You Don’t Have You don't have my long hair anymore, to run nails through, finding the small wounds it hid, soothing my cries for love. I've cut it, razored myself to whitewalls like some punk. And you don't have me to argue with when you overheat your winter rooms where secretly I'd lie awake alone long after you fell asleep (or fell asleep to dream of hell). Nor do you have power to summon me or even call. The courts protect us from each other and ourselves. You haven't a husband called "him" in endless calls to family and friends, nor a husband to call any name at will. You've only you now and I have me. 4. Single Again Late at night he reads the Pennysaver personals, seated cross-legged in pajamas on a newly-purchased queen-sized bed. He could have moved with his old mattress but this was the clean start. Only it never seemed hard to sleep before (it was the days with her that hurt) and he didn't realize how much a new bed cost. 5. Invocation Before Custody Take this child cast in sunlight scintillation of gold rings melted now for amulets. Tend the open hearth, a surgery reducing all to ash.
Take this child, censured for living, saved like embalming salves for the belly that bore him, the loins the bear the blame. Take this child to fire. If cracked in kiln, destroy, as potters dissatisfied with their wares. Take this child. Who wants him? Hair combed by revenge, feet fettered by love, eyes focussed on what is left. 6. The Ex-wife Who Swam If there was water she swam-- an ocean in all but winter a summons to appear in plain tank suit white bathing cap, as if it weren't vacation but a job. A pool meant a sunrise plunge-- one hundred laps or more. I remember the chlorine taste of her muscular, cold shoulder when she returned. Even now, when I see a motel pool I feel unloved. 7. I’m Not Ready I'm not ready for my dreams, shut them out with drugs that lock me in stony sleep. I'm not ready to lie awake conversing in my mind; not ready to answer for my sins, my crimes. That I accuse myself means I'm not ready. Nor do I wish to contemplate or plan for all my plans of comfort, a life-long family man, are gone. I'm not even ready for the half-sleep moments of solitude before one sleeps-- the gratitude we owe for living every day or confidence they'll be another. But most, I am not ready for the truths-- the terrible inventions of my sleep which, listened to, are no more terrible than who I am or want to be. 8. Moving What will you give me for this oak desk, refinished, only slightly ink-stained? This etching by a fellow who may be famous? Why is it when I go to sell it’s 10 cents on the dollar? This fancy stereo? No, not CD. How can I keep up with technology when I can’t even cope with me? “Simplify. Live in the woods!” It’s not as simple as it sounds. Maybe you’d like to buy my car? My bed? Now take my wife . . . What is the net worth of a human life? These days are it’s a psychiatric yard sale. AT SIMPSON’S (In the reference section.) In his poems he says: “There is no such thing as a bad life.” Today he laughs as he read. Over his shoulder on library shelves: Encyclopedia of Social Science. Statistical Sources. Louis, who can be at least two people: writing his marvelous poems or fussing that he isn’t loved: Womanlist. Judaica. For now all’s well the audience adores him. he’s loose, personable, ready to tell the truth: The Complete Astrology. Holy Bible. But who will we meet at the reception, kindly poet or angry kid?
DIOGENES IN THE DINER ( diners, often managed by families of Greek decent.) Beside a plate glass wall, a faint reflection of me for company, I've paid for breakfast, lunch and dinner, been here so long I own this diner, sipping Lipton from a detergent glass. When she appears I'll know her. She'll look through the window, passed my smile, pause a while, come in. Only then will my life begin. Till then I wait, a lantern and a sandwich in my hands. WAITING FOR THE COMMUTATION Winging it over ramps through Queens to Long Island, suddenly all traffic stops. It's four PM.. It's been a warm fall. It's getting dark early. We idle, ignore the endless cemeteries beside the road, creep inches toward someone's bumper. Only, nothing is moving. After an hour, there's no reason to run the engine. Better roll down the window or get out of the car. Somewhere, word passes, the conjugation of two trucks must be cleared. The sun is setting: a child's orange drawing over grey tombstones. Comradery overwhelms us, sitting on hoods, leaning on fenders to confess, commiserating worried wives, fretful husbands, troubled kids at home. The high cost of living. Dark envelopes those who have stopped their labors. As suddenly, traffic moves ahead. Embarrassed we retreat to cars, yearning for a commutation.
SPRING THE AGE-OLD QUESTION (For Adam & Eileen on their 25th) If pine weren't wisp, linden a late spring festival for noses; if oak weren't a graduate complete with tassel, would we have hope? If earth weren't a washer woman with a sponge, the sky a window cleaner, would our lives be bright? If zephyr weren't zither, birds a reedy chorus, the distant din of cars a section of scratching strings, could we know love? Cold spring becomes the sudden heat of summer. Longer days remind us of long nights we touched. LONG ISLAND SPRING HAIKUS
1. Rocky Point How slowly the oaks revive, ignoring April's sudden flashy green. 2. Stony Brook May, and sea breezes hold at sixty. Long Island resists its summer. 3. Port Jefferson Late June, deep breathes can make you high. The Linden tree's in bloom on Main Street. CANTICLE ALONG COUNTY ROAD 58 queen ann's lace queen ann's lace queen ann's lace thistle. goldenrod goldenrod goldenrod thistle. snapdragon heather clover & thistle. milkweed pod milkweed pod milkweed away!
THE HUNGER ARTIST Mistaking his lack of appetite for a statement, people joined his cause: freedom, peace, justice, war-- a menu of intense intents. As he thinned, their numbers swelled, until he became a wisp and they an avalanche careening toward a nation.
THE MAN WHO SAID "MAYBE" Jozo said a trip to the U.S. took less time than returning because the earth was turning favorably. Try to explain the world as a single entity--earth sky and sea--he'd listen patiently. Next time he'd mention travel, his theory of anti-gravity was there again more steadfast than Galileo’s pendulum. "Jozo, if a helicopter hovered over a city, would he next city come along eventually?" "Maybe." YOUNG MOTHERS Young mothers in blue jeans wait by the roadside their kindergartners toeing a b c's in winter sand. Women about 25 (still ID-ed if slightly fatter bellies, thighs) watch their kids board yellow busses; wander back inside their rented houses. THE CHANGING OF THE CLOCKS
You wake up unexpectedly at in the sky, think it's your heart but no tightness in the chest. Anxiety? no cold sweat. Not even a worry what price or can you get it when you want it. Only the birds that woke you-- Blue jays, wise guys and thieves, joking as they steal your sleep. They call each other to remind the changing of the clocks. Sun's up. What about you? Scream at them from the window, "Can't a guy go back to sleep?" They slip to a further branch, start their calls again. At least there's no need to remember what you were trying dying from.
|
