remnant memory

This remnant ark, this hollowed horse
where you hid to hear the owls and
squander blood in the begging bowl
of your hands, it is here you curse
with lightest breath, drift as eye-flicker
in tall grass by the creek with its moving shells,
it is here. Each torn day it is here,
you tick at it with fingers first dabbed
in stiff ink made by what you hold
in your palm, stain-wise. Ten thousand
light-years from now your mother scuttles
on her back to see what you saw:
a man in animal head, shaken, raw.

***

This is a revision of a poem that remains elusive. I doubt it is finished, or even barely begun. Something about an ancient rite is felt here. More than that I am unable to offer specifics. This will probably never appear in any collection, so I give it here a kind of burial.

excerpt from The Epics

Temming a winter mornin.
The collie coat upon my back.
Ice on pond. Mill still as stone.
The children teeming forth like froth.
Me and my gang. The steely sea. Forbidding
Spume skin on us all.
Boats moored and gently rocking by the dock.
Elsewhere were we.
On ice, on mill pond. The mill still as stone.
Saturday morn gathered near the ice.
Lacing skate and wrapping stick.
The preamble for the riot.
Sport and shoot, and sorry ankle.
For keeping on the goal.
Our shouts and thrusts.
Our hitting of the ice.
The light upon our heads.
The slip and fall, the crash and rise.
The puck like fish beneath our eye.
Go youngsters in delight.

They shoot, they score.
They sweat and swear like fathers on the shore.
Old drunken pukes appraising in the skein.
Sorry old fucks can never stand on ice again.
And maters come by with oranges and thermos.
Stop! Time!
We eat, we drink, we steam.

Once upon a time.
And hey did you lose a tooth?
Yeah. Fucking brother
punched it from my face when he played one
Saturday morn still pissed from night before.
I took him down, so he took me down,
in a rage him so much bigger and a fuck.

Ah, home, where family reigns your map.
Ice. On mill pond. A winter morn.
The sea in distance grey.
The ships all tied and true.
All go to watch the water rise, the water fall.

fragments in search of a lecture

Memory colludes. It poses mysteries in the wake of time passing. How do I remember what propelled me to this place, this hill, this place of starch and stagger, this College of Doubt? What encounters might lead anyone to pick up a pencil and decide to imagine a world bordered on all sides by the rib of language? I have no answers to offer, only discrete engagements with a list that includes shadow, a transistor radio, a little known Canadian writer, theft, a sump pump, windows at University Hall, a literary journal and similar nodes. I make no claims in this lecture, argue no position, reveal in the end nothing that is new or revelation, though some shimmering literary facts will be presented: 'In 1651 John Milton went blind.' If you know me, if you have read my poems, minimal and inclined to fragment and iteration, then this lecture will seem a simple and consistent exploration of what I have expressed in the past. I am trying to find my way to Vermont, all over again. I might play harmonica, I might not. Come, share my discomfort in public speaking.

***
In the summer of 2009 I will present a lecture that will, in its lineaments, engage what is hereby proposed.