CAUTION: Violence at Play

I'm issuing another warning, this poem is pretty horrific but also worth the long and strange ride. It features profanity, violence and disturbing situations, but I was completely hooked from the first four lines. It's beautiful and mysterious and weird in the Southern Gothic tradition. Some have described it as Quentin Tarantino meets William Faulkner, which sounds about right to me: "A Reservoir for Emily."


But I'll let you be the judge.

Even Be It Built of Boards Planed by Hand and Joined Without Nails, Yet May a Barn Burn

H.L. Hix

The three men now stood satisfied, arms crossed,
joking among themselves, but only moments before
they hadn’t been laughing. It had taken all three
to bind the struggling man. First, to limit his movement,
they had duct-taped his wrists together behind his back:
for that, one man had held his legs and another had pinned him,
one hand on each shoulderblade and one knee on his head,
at his left temple, grinding his right cheek and eye into
the dust and straw and dried shit that formed the floor of the barn.
First they bound his wrists, then his ankles. Then it got easier.
More tape over his mouth, wound all the way around his head,
three full loops, much more than was necessary, which was one thing
they were laughing about, the two bigger men making fun
of the smaller one, who had done that part of the binding.
Then they’d bound him down on the mattress, again with the tape.


The bound man continued to struggle, but once the tape
denied him movement he felt as if he were thinking clearly,
as if his panic had lifted, resistance become
mere obligation. He thought surely the tape would run out,
but they had another roll, just in case. He noticed
the new order—head first this round—when it came to the mattress.
One man would lift one end just off the dirt, enough
for another to wrap the tape, which cursed coming off the roll
in what the man construed as sympathy, all the way
around the mattress in loops that included his head and neck,
then the same process at the other end,
all the way around the mattress and his ankles.


They couldn’t figure how to get the tape around his torso
because it was so near the middle of the mattress.
The bound man found himself wanting to help, but of course
he couldn’t speak, and anyway they didn’t need his advice.
His hands bound behind his back and against the mattress meant
his feet and head, and most of all his neck, were plenty
to keep him from getting loose and grabbing one of their guns.


The bound man’s life didn’t pass before him in summary,
exactly, but he did see things now that in all these years
he hadn’t noticed. The wiring, for instance.
He thought it must have been his own father who’d wired the barn
with that odd blend of pride and makeshift half-competence
that showed up in all his father’d made, himself not least.
One bare bulb bragging from the highest joist
about its white porcelain fixture, but better, really,
at casting long shadows than at lighting the place,
though if the three men would just leave him alone, he thought,
he’d be able to count up all the birds’ nests and speculate
on where swallows had built before there were barns.
The wire ran from switchbox to fixture in straight lines
and right angles, through half-inch galvanized surely intended
for plumbing but good, too, for frustrating the rats.


It was the short man, the one who’d done all the taping, who then
poured kerosene across the mattress and over the man,
soaking his clothes, making sure to splash some into his eyes.
No one else noticed, but he spelled out FUCK with the kerosene.
Or anyway swung his arms in that pattern. That was when
they could relax a little, the three men, and start their joking,
once the kerosene was poured. One tall man slapped his forehead:
“You brought matches, right?” “Matches?” the other replied,
furrowing his brow and patting his pockets,
and both laughed out loud. Even the short man smiled.


Barns burn, it turns out, just the way you’d think
if you thought about it, hay fast and hot,
siding lighting the roof and the flooring of the loft,
all the slender strips of wood, with the few parts not tinder—
the frame, the beams and joists—starting last and lasting longest.
But that’s not what the mattress-bound man’s great-great-grandfather
had thought about, its someday burning, as he built the barn.
He had a daughter to worry about, and a wife
big with what he thought might be a boy. And weather,
and a dozen cows. Plenty to fret more immediate
than which fuck-up would later taint his bloodline
and preside over the decay, finally
inviting the sacrifice, of what he had built to last.


Barns burn like bonfires built for the burning,
stacked just so by one mortal for the next.
They burn best at night, whether or not communicants
travel up and down billows lit silver from above,
red from below. And whether or not three men
have stopped among sycamores on the rise just opposite
and turned for a moment to admire their handiwork.




One of the best things about this is how your mind tries to fill in the holes of the plot: why is this happening to the bound man? Has he done something to deserve this or are the three men just psychopaths? Why is the short one the leader? Why go to such extravagant lengths to burn him in the barn if they could just shoot him and burn the barn around him?


I think that's the thing that makes you acknowledge this is a poem. There's no real meter to speak of, no rhyme, it's essentially prose with funny spacing. But there's a poem-ness to it you can't deny, with the jumps and flights, the descriptiveness, the sudden flashback to generations ago - its purpose isn't to tell a story. That's fiction's job, among other things. When the purpose is to make sense of things, create some order out of events or objects... I think that's when you know there's a poem in there.

The Home Stretch and "Community"

I've got 31 entries to go until this crazy spur-of-the-moment experiment is done. I can't wait for it to be over, but I also feel like I have so much to add before it ends. I'll try not to spin my wheels or waste too much of your (and my) time.


This is a poem I used to teach English as a second language. I've probably mentioned my problematic relationship with Frost, but I can't deny he had talent and vision. Who else could do this much with a couplet?

The Span of Life

Robert Frost

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.




I've always loved using poetry to teach a language. This could be because my Russian teacher (hi, Larissa Petrovna!) would use literature as the bait to make me learn things like the locative case or verb declensions. She knew she could always reel me back in with, "Have you read Bella Akhmadulina? Have you read Griboedov's 'Woe from Wit'?"


But there's something to be said for letting forceful, powerful language drive your comprehension and acquisition instead of, "Donde esta la biblioteca?"


Although that can be hella sweet, too:



(And if you're not watching "Community" on NBC Thursday nights, you're missing out like all those people just now discovering "Arrested Development" or "Firefly.")


T.S. Eliot spoke of how poetry could be understood before it could be comprehended. Even if there are holes in your vocabulary or you can't make all the connections between clauses, the essential literature-ness shines through. Even in a language you don't quite speak, poems work. More on this later when I wax even droller and more dull on yet more Russian poetry.

Look Homeward, Elvis

One of the coolest things about Graceland is not the famous Jungle Room with leopard- and tiger- and zebra- and marmoset-skin print furniture and rugs and such. It's not the admittedly impressive Hall of Records with every #1, silver, gold and platinum record Elvis ever made. It's not the swimming pool or the man's grave or the awesome tacky Americana uber-kitsch.

It's his garage.

There's an engine from a motorboat, propeller and all, hanging from the ceiling. Elvis and his buddies would set up a shooting range out there and just go buck-wild taking out paper targets. It's the most white trash Tupelo throwback you could think of, sandwiched between a few Cadillacs.

And you thought I was kidding.

It's nice to know you can't go home again, but you can't really leave, either.

Graceland

Carl Sandburg

Tomb of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
For upkeep and flowers
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
The merchant prince gone to dust
Commanded in his written will
Over the signed name of his last testament
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,
For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance
Around his last long home.

(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables
Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets.
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for
six dollars a week wages
And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the
newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)

CAUTION: Biology at Work

If you're squeamish about anatomy and the human reproductive system, read no further. I'm serious: there's some weird, rough, beautiful stuff in here. 


You can't say I didn't warn you.

When It Comes

Sharon Olds

Even when you’re not afraid you might be pregnant,
it’s lovely when it comes, and it’s a sexual loveliness,
right along that radiant throat
and lips, the first hem of it,
and at times, the last steps across the bathroom,
you make a dazzling trail, the petals
the flower-girl scatters under the feet of the bride. And then the colours of it,
sometimes an almost golden red,
or a black vermilion, the drop that leaps
and opens slowly in the water, gel
sac of a galaxy,
the black-violet, lobed pool, calm
as a lake on the back of the moon, it is all
woundless, even the little spot
in jet and crimson spangled tights who
flings her fine tightrope out
to the left and to the right in that luminous arena,
green upper air of the toilet bowl,
she cannot die. There will be an egg in there,
somewhere, minute, winged with massive
uneven pennons of serum, cell that up
close is a huge, sodden, pocked planet,
but it was not anyone yet. Sometimes,
when I watch the delicate show,
like watching snow, or falling stars,
I think of men, what could it seem to them
that we see the blood pour slowly fom our sex,
as if the earth sighed, slightly,
and we felt it, and saw it,
as if life moaned a little, in wonder, and we were it.




There's a lot of griping and sniping about Sharon Olds online. She is famous enough that she made a recent Most Overrated Writers List, which makes a lot of bellyaching only to be expected. I don't want to go into that.

She's been accused of being lazy, derivative, boring, shrill, repetitive, facile, pointless. This poem is none of those things. It's such a gorgeous piece, amazing images spilling out in waves of... well, you know. 


It's almost like a late Romantic ode, but the object of nature which drives the poet to frenzied heights is menstruation. It's exhilarating and dangerous and somehow has the ring of truth to me, even though I wouldn't - indeed, by definition, cannot - know the first thing about it. 


This is what contemporary American poetry is always promising to give us: no taboos, no subject off-limits, no codified tradition or rules from on high telling you what or how to write. 


Mostly, this antinomianism degenerates into navel-gazing and pointlessness, as good anarchists tend to. But sometimes it makes good. I'm simultaneously disgusted, amazed, appalled and exultant. I don't read enough that makes me feel this way, and I'm none the better for it.

Where There Is Nothing Left to Hunt

In Chandler Country

Dana Gioia

California night. The Devil’s wind,   
the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,   
raging through the canyon like a drunk   
screaming in a bar.
                            The air tastes like
a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?   
The weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe.   
Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,   
lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,   
and count your blessings.
                                     Another sleepless night,
when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches   
like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,   
when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,   
and quiet women in the kitchen run   
their fingers on the edges of a knife
and eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck.


Tonight it seems that if I took the coins
out of my pocket and tossed them in the air   
they’d stay a moment glistening like a net   
slowly falling through dark water.
                                                   I remember
the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,   
the narrow beams dissolving on the dark   
surface of the lake, voices arguing
about the forms, the crackling radio,   
the sheeted body lying on the sand,
the trawling net still damp beside it. No,
she wasn’t beautiful—but at that age
when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty—
“Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?”


Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door   
catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.   
Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,   
packs of coyotes come down from the hills   
where there is nothing left to hunt.






The title seems to refer to Raymond Chandler, author and screenwriter of hard-boiled works like Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep featuring private detective Philip Marlowe, as well as one of my favorite noir films ever - Double Indemnity. "Chandler country" is probably around La Jolla, CA, near San Diego where Chandler lived for significant portions of his life. 


Short of Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, I can think of few descriptions of place as evocative and immediate.

The Unturning Wheel

Another from A.E. Stallings, one of the lions of New Formalism, and a poet I can't get enough of. I have to admire anybody sticking up for rhyme and meter, allusion and classicism in contemporary American poetry. Mostly because it tends to invite harsh polemics from undergrads who think the world outgrew those tools in the late Victorian era. (As though the wheel never comes around again, the pendulum won't swing back.)


This one is very subtle, doesn't hit the meter particularly hard, very subtle slant rhymes. I think that's a sign of mastery, when you can make art that embodies your ideals without needing a sledgehammer to get your point across.

Implements from the “Tomb of the Poet”

A.E. Stallings

Piraeus Archeological Museum

On the journey to the mundane afterlife,
You travel equipped to carry on your trade:
A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs,
The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper,
Wax tablets bound into a little book.


Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara,
Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box.
Here is the harp's wood triangle, all empty—
The sheep-gut having long since decomposed
Into a pure Pythagorean music.


The beeswax, frangible with centuries,
Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence.
I think you were a poet of perfection
Who fled still weighing one word with another,
Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision.

To Whom Can I Speak Today?

I found this back in high school when I got interested in Egyptology, probably due to rewatching "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Here's the end section:

Debate Between a Man Tired of Life and His Soul (Excerpt)

Anonymous, trans. John L. Foster 

 I opened my mouth to my soul that I might answer what it had said:
 "Behold, my name is detested,
 Behold, more than the smell of vultures
 On a summer's day when the sky is hot.
 Behold, my name is detested,
 Behold, [more than the smell of] a catch of fish
 On a day of catching when the sky is hot.
 Behold, my name is detested,
 Behold, more than the smell of ducks,
 More than a covert of reeds full of waterfowl.
 Behold, my name is detested,
 Behold, more than the smell of fishermen,
 More than the creeks of the marshes where they have fished.
 Behold, my name is detested,
 Behold, more than the smell of crocodiles,
 More than sitting by sandbanks full of crocodiles.
 Behold, my name is detested,
 Behold, more than a woman
 About whom lies are told to a man.
 Behold, my name is detested,
 Behold, more than a sturdy child
 Of whom it is said: "he belongs to his rival."
 Behold, my name is detested,
 Behold, [more than] a town belonging to the monarch
 Which mutters sedition when his back is turned.
 To whom can I speak today?
 Brothers are evil
 And the friends of today unlovable.
 To whom can I speak today?
 Hearts are rapacious
 And everyone takes his neighbour's goods.
 [To whom can I speak today?]
 Gentleness has perished
 And the violent man has come down on everyone.
 To whom can I speak today?
 Men are contented with evil
 And goodness is neglected everywhere.
 To whom can I speak today?
 He who should enrage a man by his ill deeds,
 he makes everyone laugh (by) his wicked wrongdoing.
 To whom can I speak today?
 Men plunder
 And every man robs his neighbour.
 To whom can I speak today?
 The wrongdoer is an intimate friend
 And the brother with whom one used to act is become an enemy.
 To whom can I speak today?
 None remember the past,
 And no one now helps him who used to do (good).
 To whom can I speak today?
 Brothers are evil,
 And men have recourse to strangers for affection.
 To whom can I speak today?
 Faces are averted,
 And every man looks askance at his brethren.
 To whom can I speak today?
 Hearts are rapacious
 And there is no man's heart in which one can trust.
 To whom can I speak today?
 There are no just persons
 And the land is left over to the doers of wrong.
 To whom can I speak today?
 There is a lack of an intimate friend
 And men have recourse to someone unknown in order to complain to him.
 To whom can I speak today?
 There is no contented man,
 And that person who once walked with him no longer exists.
 To whom can I speak today?
 I am heavy-laden with trouble
 Through lack of an intimate friend.
 To whom can I speak today?
 The wrong which roams the earth,
 There is no end to it.


 Death is in my sight today
 [As when] a sick man becomes well,
 Like going out-of-doors after detention.
 Death is in my sight today
 Like the smell of myrrh,
 Like sitting under an awning on a windy day.
 Death is in my sight today
 Like the perfume of lotuses,
 Like sitting on the shore of the Land of Drunkenness.
 Death is in my sight today
 Like a trodden way,
 As when a man returns home from an expedition.
 Death is in my sight today
 Like the clearing of the sky,
 Like a man who ...... for something which he does not know.
 Death is in my sight today.
 As when a man desires to see home
 When he has spent many years in captivity.


Verily, he who is yonder will be a living god,
Averting the ill of him who does it.
Verily, he who is yonder will be one who stands in the Bark of the Sun,
Causing choice things to be given therefrom for the temples.
Verily, he who is yonder will be a sage
Who will not be prevented from appealing to Re when he speaks."

What my soul said to me: "Cast complaint upon the peg, my comrade and brother;
make offering on the brazier and cleave to life, according as I have said.
Desire me here, thrust the West aside, but desire that you may attain the West
when your body goes to earth, that I may alight after you are weary;
then will we make an abode together."

It is finished from its beginning to its end, just as it was found in writing.




I didn't know it was well-known enough to inspire other creative types.











And a David Byrne cover:

The Man Who Loved Beer

Lambchop

to whom can i speak today
the brothers they are evil
and the old friends of today
they have become unlovable
to whom can i speak today
the gentleness has perished
and the violent man has come down on everyone


to whom can i speak today
the wrong which roams the earth
there can be no end to it
it is just unstoppable
death is in my sights today
and when a man desires
to see home after many years in jail


february through december
we have such a tragic hue
as separate as the fingers
or suddenly as one as the hand
and the violent man comes down on everyone