pith…

BEFORE THE GAME

Shut one eye then the other
Peek into every corner of yourself
See that there are no nails no thieves
See that there are cuckoo’s eggs

Shut then the other eye
Squat and jump
Jump jump high high
On top of yourself

Fall then with all your weight
Fall for days on end deep deep deep
To the bottom of your abyss
Who doesn’t break into pieces
Who remains whole who gets up whole
Plays

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Vasko Popa, translated by Charles Simic. From Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems, Oberlin College Press; Revised and Expanded Ed edition (December 1987).

“Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up. . . he nevertheless overcomes the obstructions. . . and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.”
- Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage

/
My baby rolled over and squirmed back into the mirror from where he came. I would get at him with my every quivered tissue. I can hardly trust that he sucks the slow ooze from his mercury teether or explores the ear holes of his innumerable others. If there is but one lone baby, he is not me. But if there are cramped cities of babies enraptured by a skirted magus in his floppy winged hat, then I am far too many. In the meeting of mirrors on either side of the nerves I house, in both bends of planar sheen, a familiar procession, not a baby among the disseminate hoards, approaches. I turn away, pick at my cuticles, and leave them to themselves.

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A wave of dismissal, like I’m some blood-hungry gnat. My projection flatly indicates he is less than pleased with the 34 X 30 image I have selected for us from the rack. He yawns, unsnaps, reminds me that the personal pronoun is a foolish ideal, and removes himself to the recesses of his silence. I’m beginning to think that my baby is a fraud.

\
I have seen him at seventy. He keeps his clothes and mothballs zipped tightly, hangs them from a furnace pipe in their naugahyde coffin of tasteful maroon, is not impressed by babies. He speaks over their crying of his sixty-three bombings, his voice folding Dresden in half at its syllables, trailing off into the thin bang of his red pocket stapler attaching the sheets from the outside in. He was shown the films later. He loathes the word homeless, is prim in his brown fragrant suit, picks litter from sidewalks, naps daily in the temperate wood, feeds deer granola from his shaken palms, disappears for the winter, maybe longer.

– joesmith

Early morning. Trash day. Haul cart to street.
Boxers. Button fly. Neighbor smiles, then eyes
grow wide. Noticing then, a new day’s breeze.

Dear Big Jesus,

Please don’t bleed tears tomorrow.
I’m just helping St Jenny w/the girls.
We’re cool. You’re a hero
who didn’t get back up.

Regards,
Some man’s son

Lucia, my distant love

You predict me, as ever. Yes, the woods again were where I found myself, wolves singing their hungry sleep songs, but returned to our home, a half empty shell of what we haven’t built, but abide there on our finest days. Fuel for my fires was depleted in days and another week of the dark, damp chill drove me back despite the loss of open cover. Happy to hear your Italian love swells still. You were right to seep away again to Venetian canals. Water becomes you. Flow as you must. If suave exotic love comes gliding in, don’t send it away. But, please, beware the sea. And fear the oarsmen, no more than failed sailors, who would lead you too near. Venice, you remember, was too sodden for me. Too much history, too much dream. Our own ride so clumsy. You, as ever, enduring disappointment, while I, half in, half, feared the swimmers and the moment. I miss you. And mean it. You’re a courtesan above me. I proffer the pedestrian. Release your corset. Return when you’re ready.

Your Jack

A piece of a man had broken off in a road. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

As he stooped to pick up another piece he came apart at the waist.

His bottom half was still standing. He walked over on his elbows and grabbed the seat of his pants and said, legs go home.

But as they were going along his head fell off. His head yelled, legs stop.

And then one of his knees came apart. But meanwhile his heart had dropped out of his trunk.

As his head screamed, legs turn around, his tongue fell out.

Oh my God, he thought, I’ll never get home.

From The Tunnel: Selected Poems

© Russell Edson, 1973. From The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson, Oberlin College Press, 1994.

There are no camels in this combo crèche,
assembled in Malaysia, cooked in Singapore.
Pieces of play, each in place, dominate the living

room, diverting our path to where we cleanse
and empty and brush the store-bought teeth,
neither sneer nor smile from their snap-tight hold.

The lone cow’s head is broken, decapitated
last season, lost in the vacuum or the latest
attempt to gather what mattered yesterday.

The wise men slipped off with the Barbies
on stolen pretty ponies. Mother Mary buries
her myrrh in the ass turd under the straw.

Cuckold Joe measures the price of shame
by the size of his deduction. The Messiah,
in steep need of Miralax, is inconsolable

in his ceramic straw suit. He’s a baby, after all,
a baby gone angry with action-grip hands.
Any question that crawls across the gray terrain

is split at the jointed hip, fractured before seizing
the headless torso of the sole man doll, broken
before hopping the burro, loaded down as beasts will be.

Nobody is born here, really, nor gifts given wholly,
attached to hands as they are in the factory plastic mold.

Neither sheep nor shepherd will be the same tomorrow,
rearranged as they must be. Straight out of the box.

Hell

“If you want to understand the social and political history of modern man, study hell.” – Thomas Merton

It’s probably like the excitement of your first cigarette, but it lasts forever, that dizzying nausea — the Unknown: with imitation human heads on their buttocks, bats leaping from black books, dragon tails waving, monkey glands everywhere, hope dying slowly like a bad marriage, “I am nobody” the only conversation.

But then again the damned might be as unrecognizable and stupid as the living: men who use the same condom twice, women who let them, the degenerate who molested Spider-Man — everyone perpetually suing each other, holding hands in a circle whose rim clangs like a counterfeit coin.

But more likely it’s the general humiliation of being dead, realizing your own personal Beelzebub might be the least weird guy you know.

.
© 1997 by Peter Johnson.
from Pretty Happy! White Pine Press, New York, 1997.

Ape

You haven’t finished your ape, said mother to father, who had monkey hair and blood on his whiskers.

I’ve had enough monkey, cried father.

You didn’t eat the hands, and I went to all the trouble to make onion rings for its fingers, said mother.

I’ll just nibble on its forehead, and then I’ve had enough, said father.

I stuffed its nose with garlic, just like you like it, said mother.

Why don’t you have the butcher cut these apes up? You lay the whole thing on the table every night; the same fractured skull, the same singed fur; like someone who died horribly. These aren’t dinners, these are postmortem dissections.

Try a piece of its gum, I’ve stuffed its mouth with bread, said mother.

Ugh, it looks like a mouth full of vomit. How can I bite into its cheek with bread spilling out of its mouth? cried father.

Break one of the ears off, they’re so crispy, said mother.

I wish to hell you’d put underpants on these apes; even a jockstrap, screamed father.

Father, how dare you insinuate that I see the ape as anything more than simple meat, screamed mother.

Well, what’s with this ribbon tied in a bow on its privates? screamed father.

Are you saying that I am in love with this vicious creature? That I would submit my female opening to this brute? That after we had love on the kitchen floor I would put him in the oven, after breaking his head with a frying pan; and then serve him to my husband, that my husband might eat the evidence of my infidelity … ?

From The Tunnel: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by Russell Edson. Reproduced by permission of Oberlin College Press. May not be reproduced without express permission of Oberlin College Press.

The Man Rock

A man is a rock in a garden of chairs and waits a longtime to be over.

It is easier for a rock in a garden than a man inside his mother. He decided to be a rock when he got outside.

A rock asks only what is a rock.

A rock waits to be a rock.

A rock is a longtime waiting for a longtime to be over so that it may turn and go the other way.

A rock awakens into a man. A man looks. A man sleeps back into a rock as it is better for a rock in a garden than a man inside himself trembling in red darkness.


From The Tunnel: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by Russell Edson. Reproduced by permission of Oberlin College Press. May not be reproduced without express permission of Oberlin College Press.

The Absent One

This brutal brother but whose word was true, steadfast in the face of sacrifice, diamond and wild boar, ingenious and helpful, held himself in the center of all misunderstandings like a resinous tree in the cold admitting of no alloy. Against the bestiary of lies tormenting him with its goblins and its whirlwinds, he set his back, lost in time. He came to you by invisible paths, preferred a scarlet forwardness, did not thwart you, knew how to smile. As the bee leaves the orchard for the fruit already black, women withstood without betraying it the paradox of this face which had none of the lineaments of a hostage. I have tried to describe for you this indelible companion whose friendship some of us have kept. We shall sleep in hope, we shall sleep in his absence, reason not suspecting that what it names, thoughtlessly, absence, dwells within the crucible of unity.

translation © 1992 by Mary Ann Caws, from
Selected Poems of René Char ed. Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas. © New Directions, 1992.

:

The Fired Schoolteacher

Three characters of proven banality accost each other with diverse poetical phrases (got a match, I beg of you, what time is it, how many leagues to the next town?), in an indifferent countryside and engage in a conversation whose echoes will never reach us. Before you is the twenty-acre field: I am its worker, its secret blood, its catastrophic stone. I leave you nothing to think.

translation © 1992 by Paul Auster, from Selected Poems of René Char ed. Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas. © New Directions, 1992.

:

“Man Flees Suffocation”

Three characters of proven banality accost each other with diverse poetical phrases (got a match, I beg of you, what time is it, how many leagues to the next town?), in an indifferent countryside and engage in a conversation whose echoes will never reach us. Before you is the twenty-acre field: I am its worker, its secret blood, its catastrophic stone. I leave you nothing to think.

translation © 1992 by Mary Ann Caws Selected Poems of René Char ed. Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas. © New Directions, 1992.

:

Penumbra

I was in one of those forests where the sun has no access, but where stars penetrate by night. This place could exist only because the inquisition of the State had overlooked it. Forsaken easements showed me their scorn. The obsession to chastise was taken from me. Here and there, the memory of a strength caressed the peasant flights of the grass. I ruled myself without doctrine, in serene vehemence. I was the equal of things whose secret fitted under the beam of a wing. For most, the essential is never born, and its possessors cannot exchange it without harm to themselves. None consents to lose what was conquered by dint of pain! Otherwise, it would be youth and grace, spring and delta would be equally pure.

I was in one of those forests where the sun has no access, but where stars penetrate by night for a relentless warring.

translation © 1992 by Mary Ann Caws, from Selected Poems of René Char ed. Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas. © New Directions, 1992.

The Family Monkey

We bought an electric monkey, experimenting rather recklessly with funds carefully gathered since grandfather’s time for the purchase of a steam monkey.

We had either, by this time, the choice of an electric or gas monkey.

The steam monkey is no longer being made, said the monkey merchant.

But the family always planned on a steam monkey.

Well, said the monkey merchant, just as the wind-up monkey gave way to the steam monkey, the steam monkey has given way to the gas and electric monkeys.

Is that like the grandfather clock being replaced by the grandchild clock?

Sort of, said the monkey merchant.

So we bought the electric monkey, and plugged its umbilical cord into the wall.

The smoke coming out of its fur told us something was wrong.

We had electrocuted the family monkey.

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Copyright © 1994 by Russell Edson. Reproduced by permission of Oberlin College Press. May not be reproduced without express permission of Oberlin College Press.