THE POETRY CHALLENGE
Who writes THE BEST POETRY
in America today?
(c) copyright 2007, David B. Axelrod
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THE POETRY CHALLENGE Who writes THE BEST POETRY in America today?
(c) copyright 2007, David B. Axelrod |
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STILLS FROM A CINEMA Subject, Object, Time A Poem for Luli Widows One Day Once Upon Nude Breakfasts Peter Drafts in a Clean, Well-Lighted Place Climbing the Water Gyser You Saw Down Stills from a Cinema A Strange Dream Alone, He Godiva of the Stop-Lights Ho pe Relativity Reflections in the Glass Dreams to Interpret Bei der Zeider See Two Prepubescent Girls Gulls Jumping Nod Squirrels A House on Lothrop Street Girls at a Sidewalk Cafe July in the Hospital '65 The Wedding of Two Greats That Way of Looking Killing Grandma I Want to Be with You Strangers in Ubangi-Land A Few Words for Leroi Putting Out City Lights Notes Toward a Final Lecture Cadences for All Hallows Eve Three Determinations
SUBJECT, OBJECT, TIME Looking at you the sunlight in your hair like past illuminating present. More than in memory, the sun's light is older, Dear, than you by minutes.
Taken now as tokens of a broken love, the photo- graphs and spectrographs of old flames remind me how time and you are one and always changing.
You turn your lowing red hair aside and face my camera. The sun behind my back clicks. You are a new addition to my catalog of days.
light one hundred million years or more old considering the source.
A POEM FOR LULI My writs scarred stitched to crisscross patterns you cut just deep enough to scare life a little blood red-carpets Death he walks the runner toward you only to be closed out again
mad d mad d say the word d word d it loses sense--all lose if repeated what hand hold my pen it loses sense that extension of me
the current snaps your head back like a startle and reality is that the schock to hide they made hurt more than to live shock cuts my flesh
the eyes they say are weapons kill like x-rays peel flesh and sterilize man the looking glass moves me--someone understand that is you dear comb your hair
today he came and brought a cake with blue polished razor blade baked inside he wants me to go home
wrist t wrist t the word say the word d local anesthetic makes stitches feel tingly like electric as the current is increased perceptive they say i like the colors red and blue
today the poplars held their spiney fruits to me and so reality poem m poem m
when will you let me go home to him again the white world all sharp and clean and blue and cold and warm as blood spraying
WIDOWS Widows, left with only tinted portraits of the past and tinted hair combed thin as life to frame their worn complexions keep their homes by taking strangers into memories-of-children- haunted rooms. Left to feign the youth that withered long ago, they wheeze a friend hello while walking to the store or talk on porches to impatient tenants just to hear a human voice. Lonely women cobwebs in their wombs live by taking strangers into their rooms.
ONE DAY ONCE UPON
You said your tooth ached and it was snowing so I made a big white pack from powdered snow and pushed it up against.
Fluff on you!
And then you jumped yourself face patch and cried because you'd disappeared.
Walking in snow was like in sand only it was winter, Silly.
I'll squash my snowball up if you'll squash yours . . . Gotcha!
Once it snowed so hard they called off all the colors except white. NUDE BREAKFASTS There's something to nude breakfasts they agreed other than the fearless attitude they must take when frying bacon-the fat splattered at them. They settled and stuck on pink plastic kitchen chairs and punned on pouring milk; her nipples were cooled by morning air. When they returned, the eggs too, were marvelously cold.
PETER peter dreams of lotus petals opening to release him from their clutch his hair sandy with pollen his breath humid and new
DRAFTS IN A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE Joan, my wife, thinks death and loneliness are one while I fear closets, associate the doors with lids, the clothes inside with shrouds. Joan and I and everyman are told the things that follow you are deeds no matter how you've loved.
Some comfort there, but with the darkness coming earlier in day and longer, sleepless nights, all the deed parading past the mind--some staircase wisdom here, a pang of conscience there, some praise-- it seems too much to bear the ending. The living know death as the closing of a lid packaging the dead, one on top, standing, kneeling, or powdered into urns. We see the bone or bracelet and see all, until the ash is on our brow and all our deed are nothing.
CLIMBING THE WATER GYSER Repressured water bubbling dumped on heads gushed across tight-thighed bathing britches twinkling at their ankles. Sever colors of them toyfully in the fountain one hot day in D. C. they clawed the solid fluid, faces sparkling fingers bobbing trying to climb the water gyser.
YOU SAW DOWN You saw a disk of orange roll over the city horizon from ten floors up and you rolled over after it, hanging for a moment like the sun before it loses itself in darkness--just for a second gasping larger, then pulled down by forces men and women know. You were high and drugged with touch, you gave birth to an ora- nge disk, hot and burning in his arms.
STILLS FROM A CINEMA like a motion picture i watch your image form in strips of light at sunrise in our darkened room 1 your mouth is there for my tongue to touch 2 your are like one i knew once and worshiped at pedestal distance 3 your face is round and undelicate but each feature has its virtues 4 god, let me stop the human voice 5 she was there to some but others knew she was just the caterpillar fluff after the butterfly 6 it is possible to speak illegibly 7 how can a man humble on his knees reach to any height 8 there comes a time the prophet rubbed his beard and dreamed when every word becomes association when reality no longer means and so the prophet rubs his beard and dreams 9 it is very late at night call it early morning that i miss you most and feel the drunkness of sleep sweeping away your image only after many conscious moments torn by you at my side 10 the love within could rend the chest separating bone and flesh and stubborn jellied cartilage erupting scarlet at tube-ends-- sinew and fiber tissue and skin-- tear from body with a dying cry 11 monks, i thought, priests and brother (before i learned the clinical facts) must turn to jelly in their sacs similarly old maids have maidenheads as tough and browned as leather 12 the human animal was not made to be single 13 there is a red bulb in my ceiling light that turns and burns me on 14 your face as i remember is not quite beautiful enough for poetry 15 catatonics lecture me on the virtues of being silent they are maddening their quiet can be interpreted in too many ways 16 several things are on my mind he said: the difference between black and white; how we are alone just as the light goes out although we are together; why talk turns grey when it is being talked by large numbers of people 17 cats sometimes regurgitate a ball of mouse hair and bones poets write 18 the silhouette are smiling but the people framed in light are crying ask me for me sometimes and see who you can get 19 poplar tree let your pangled fruit hang down as final image of a bitter season fall and kiss her feet you climber of the tree and fru9it of they womb jesus 20 love is a pure white maggot 21 she satisfied him he lounged in just dungarees lettin gthe rough cloth run his tired skin when he moved and closed his eyes curled cat-like at her feet and let his head be stroked she satisfied him 22 wide-eyed she wondered if her fingers were his hair or her self and thought of one and tow an done of two 23 the lemon crescent moon sours the crystal sky a ring around the moon-- a rind--a droplet dangling is a cloud yellow with reflection 24 my love her fingers in my hair is tender is she then love yes rubbed hair becomes electric 25 some can only dream of closeness but i am not yet used to life 26 when light clicks dark men at least can see the blackness sometimes i see the flashing after-image of you
A STRANGE DREAM A strange dream: Three nuns walking a main street, followed by groups of parochial girls. Sister Superior asking, "How many men on our walk today?" "None" pious girls in maroon uniforms eyes rolling back; their colors fading, pressed palms parting to smooth long, loose grey smocks. They wear helmets of a sort-- weathered crowns with prongs shaped cone-like upward-- fingering the prongs or pulling taut their gowns, they giggle. An old aunt of mine (Aunt Frumma--alehoshalom) saying sternly, "Shtay mit en unterer," repeating, "Shtay mit en unterer," which I interpret, "Stay with your own kind."
ALONE, HE Alone he clicked his glass with the window pane and drank as he pushed from the ledge. Falling he found Manhattan very sweet.
GODIVA OF THE STOP-LIGHTS Naked on the city street she lay, all hot it was blazing red her hair her flag showing the traffic blowing sensually to get on with it.
HO PE Ho pe rises from dus- ty tin blind- ing the darkness it shrivels fear o- penly splits perfect- ly the past and present bifurcating ho pe you fork ed tongue of my existence your face ops at me cheshirely juxtaposed with the orange and yellow illusion of your skin--no smoke
after nerves colors clocks clot- ting on highest steeple points
the mind goes on forever
dialog with myself monolog for two am i really here with you?
hold my hand i am frightened again
ho pe
RELATIVITY People walking are the people seated on benches: staring I am the person seated staring at me walking.
motion the bodies stay in place the faces move from form to form .
Your face and my mask are not different. My mask and your face. Three of me walking were stripped by my stare, knowing I knew me.
in my eyes and climax when I cry.
REFLECTIONS IN THE GLASS In the aisle a figure walking and my wife beside it talking as she always does and the street heat welled up outside the train reflecting in the window pain.
Soon we are twilighted air conditioned coach car a dimension of bridges in a valley with a river winding beyond the window a face staring translucently over all.
Two empty seats across from me two figures are reflected there in the glass.
motion stationary visionary rolling moton
There! There is Allen Ginsberg standing silently behind me. I turn and see Hart Crane!
DREAMS TO INTERPRET Come to the doorway with me. This is my dream. Do as I say. It is almost dawn. You have washed me. I am walking into a sunrise and you watch my naked form silhouette on a pink horizon. The compulsion fulfilled, you enter the hollow room. I am a silhouette, washed, pink and black, alone at dawn.
BEI DER ZEIDER SEE I will give you my red claw for a tail a fin and gill the sea is blue today and the pickles are quite dill the clam has put his best foot out to trip the ocean floor the cod fish talked for hours and the evening was a bore.
TWO PREPUBESCENT GIRLS Two prepubescent girls wet their boots in surf cold midwinter beach. Out of books I've read the sea gave birth to man. Two pre- pubescent girls seated on wet rocks now cold where motherhood will be laughing we love the sea.
GULLS JUMPING Gulls jumping currents of air three red-clad kids fly after them.
NOD I have seen rivers of quick silver streaming in the street as if a hundred slivered light poles suddenly had melted or the chrome of every passing car went into gutters dripping with the head of speed all only rain reflections across my path the street that flows beneath my feet within the drug of night.
SQUIRRELS That's right, squirrel tails, I mean the way they speak the squirrel's mind. Like the querulous squirrel looking you long and hard and with his fur pointer accusatively cocked; or when you chase one up a tree, he's hanging at you nearly upside-down just looking like you must be some kind of nuts and making a grey question-mark. Squirrels chattering in cold are curled in tail, and squirrels at play have a certain freeness flowing behind them. What do you think? Just answer yes or now, or gesture with your tail.
A HOUSE ON LOTHROP STREET The old man meticulously painted his sea-scapes on the screams of his windows. Then, too old to row, he sat inside to take the pleasure of the passers as a reward.
GIRL AT A SIDEWALK CAFE (A picture that Renoir might paint.) You sit with sunlight through you hair the sailors eat their cockle stew, the sailors sit and look at you, the accent of the light and dark across your legs held just apart, your chest exposed until breasts part, the sunlight streaming through your thighs, the sailors with their fishy sighs, their passion dilating their eyes, they climax as they look at your (schools of fishes cross their thighs) they pay the waitress for the stew. The sunlight playing with your dress accents the contours of your breasts, the sailors eat their mutton pie and wait until the sea is dry, and so you sit and satisfy a hundred tourists passing by, and every sailor seated there, netted by your sunlit hair.
JULY IN THE HOSPITAL, '65 if i could talk to someone roll over look into their eyes saying something
how much alone with yourself can you be, closed in with allyour unsocietal thoughts
what do you do for a week flat on your back in bewd she said not really asking passing time, someone stopping in
sleep i said not caring about her not caring
4 walls a ceiling a floor a cool beige and white and me regruping physical strength weighing mental cases myself and others to see whose balances.
THE WEDDING OF TWO GREATS She is Bernstein, Radcliff, magna cum, and he is Heineman, Harvard's crimson son, flushed with his Great Neck pride. Side by side beneath their velvet sky, who can deny they are bred by the gods to wed?
THAT WAY OF LOOKING The ceiling of The Johns Hopkins University Library is a waffle of concrete.
Any engineer might say, "For strength." I say, "For sandwiches."
KILLING GRANDMA Chasing grandma down' the street she caning frantic we caught her slowing with breath sucking past her gumless mouth fluidy spittle slpped on our hands across her face. She'd shook her hand across the books she'd given leaving leaf tracks on their snow. She had to die to make them mean. We kicked until the cane-end twitched one and twitched no more. Ah, now the shelved vlumes sadly penned some value have with grand ma gone.
I WANT TO BE WITH YOU (For Harold and Dolores, April, 1966.) I want to be with you in all times of day: cool pink milkmanned mornings when streets are disguised by the angle of the sun; and days when the air is sliced by rain we can chase the currents sluicing over streets. And then, I want to walk exactly straight across deserted parks guided by a parallax of lamp poles when the ground is frozen to the vasting sky by absolutes of cold. I'll steal a grocery cart and you climb in. I'll push you to my world and you'll come in. I want to make a list of hours we can share and search for them forever.
THREE DETERMINATIONS There my grandfather ripened in twenty peasant years of fear and death dreamt of strength and land, took his few belongings and crossed over. There my father, taught to kill,. fought for freedom and a Jewish star, shook death from the butcher's hand, and built a monument to replace the twisted cross. There my brother draws up his breath and courage, whips across the street amid a song of bullets, leaps the wall, draws a breath and blows out blood and dies, crossing over.
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