Poem

Here is a great poem by Brian Beatty from his collection Duck! (Brouhaha, 2009):

MY BOOK IDEA

Two ghosts fighting
over an oatmeal cookie

for 400 pages of enormous
Times New Roman --

I'm thinking it's a mystery.


***

I would buy such a book, buy it and read it.

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.

OLYMPIC TOOL & DIE CO. BY THE SEA

I didn’t fully understand what I’d been told,
but galloped ahead. The lash I understood
to be the first step, unleashing and re-threading
of a turbo-charged hand-scallop. Next I hauled
the lanyard about two feet. Gave an extra six
inches for safety’s sake. No sweat. I broke for
five the better to appreciate and review what I’d
accomplished so proceeding would be smooth.

Hephaestus gimped by. Bullshit, he spat.
You know it, I echoed. Away he humped as
I renewed my purchase of the task. The pintle
chain was tangled, so I untangled. Applied grease
to the sever horns. Used a winch to tighten the wing
leader up to about the head of the weighted grim.
Nicely done. Then Aphrodite sashayed by,
diaphanous Aphrodite from payroll. I paused
to admire her magnificence. Her liquid rolling hips.
I jerked myself back. Again to my blackened paws

I drifted, gripped the south yaw, wound it once twice
thrice about the stud pin, extracted its center gort,
which I half-noted was missing several punts and
heavily pitted. This is where things began to go south.

I don’t know why I figured a compass trout was plugged or
that I could re-route the trundle-set anyway. I pushed
at it hard, using my hips against its frontal globe.
Across the shop floor, reflected in the walk-in freezer door,
I could see it, the grind prop sheathing in then out,
far into the dock-niche. Suddenly in one long
loud unforgiving crack the whole thing shuddered
to a sickening end-stop. Silence like a flood. My heart
the single pump. Just then Hephaestus leered
around the corner. How he lived for
this kind of shit. Guys blowing it, fucking up.

All I could think to keep myself from losing it
was Aphrodite, transcendent Aphrodite,
acutely sweetly imperiled, while I balanced on a trireme’s
oar-lock tearing my coarse shirt, set to leap overboard
to save her from that vast tumult of wild dark water.

epigram

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronn
tonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohooho
ordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early
in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.

James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake (1939).

of his crown according

Hither the Moon, the Athenians
And their allies had suffered dreadful things
So that when they went out of an evening
The moonlight was beautiful
And the gods they were defrauded
Of their dinner and departed home
According to the number of tortures
For which reason Hyperbolus, having obtained
Hieromnemon, was afterward deprived
Of his crown according to the Moon