Monday, September 10, 2018

At the Executed Murderer's Grave

for J. L. D.

Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done?

—Freud

My name is James A. Wright, and I was born

Twenty-five miles from this infected grave,

In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave

To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.

He tried to teach me kindness. I return

Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried,

To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,

Had I not run away before my time.

Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime,

His skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best

Of all the arts men learn in a dead place.

I walked here once. I made my loud display,

Leaning for language on a dead man’s voice.

Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past.

I add my easy grievance to the rest:

Doty, if I confess I do not love you,

Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies.

The nights electrocute my fugitive,

My mind. I run like the bewildered mad

At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk,

Arch and cunning, under the maple trees,

Pleased to be playing guilty after dark.

Staring to bed, they croon self-lullabies.

Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead.

I croon my tears at fifty cents per line.

Idiot, he demanded love from girls,

And murdered one. Also, he was a thief.

He left two women, and a ghost with child.

The hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head,

Made such revolting Ohio animals

Fitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief.

I waste no pity on the dead that stink,

And no love’s lost between me and the crying

Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police

Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink.

Christ may restore them whole, for all of me.

Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who

Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago

Can do without my widely printed sighing

Over their pains with paid sincerity.

I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying.

I pity myself, because a man is dead.

If Belmont County killed him, what of me?

His victims never loved him. Why should we?

And yet, nobody had to kill him either.

It does no good to woo the grass, to veil

The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame.

Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them.

I kick the clods away, and speak my name.

This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal,

When all are caught with what they had to do

In fear of love, when every man stands still

By the last sea,

And the princes of the sea come down

To lay away their robes, to judge the earth

And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere,

And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal—

Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars,

My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars.

Staring politely, they will not mark my face

From any murderer’s, buried in this place.

Why should they? We are nothing but a man.

Doty, the rapist and the murderer,

Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear;

And where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace,

Men’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I.

Angels and pebbles mock me under trees.

Earth is a door I cannot even face.

Order be damned, I do not want to die,

Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe.

The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief.

(Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!)

I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass,

Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness.

Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face

Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief:

Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

The Applicant

(For Annie)

First, are you our sort of a person?

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,

Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then

How can we give you a thing?

Stop crying.

Open your hand.

Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing

To bring teacups and roll away headaches

And do whatever you tell it.

Will you marry it?

It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end

And dissolve of sorrow.

We make new stock from the salt.

I notice you are stark naked.

How about this suit——

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

Against fire and bombs through the roof.

Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have the ticket for that.

Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

Well, what do you think of that?

Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,

In fifty, gold.

A living doll, everywhere you look.

It can sew, it can cook,

It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it's a poultice.

You have an eye, it's an image.

My boy, it's your last resort.

Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

-Sylvia Plath

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive...

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

I laid bare my chest, said do your best

Destroy me.

I've been to hell and back so many times, I must admit it kind of bores me

-Ray Lamontagne

Will wrench you by its ravings, discompose you

Boris Pasternak, best known for his penning of the epic Russian novel, "Doctor Zhivago", is also one of my favorite poets. He didn't write a lot (comparatively), but what he did write will dissolve you into one million particles of light.

The shiv'ring piano, foaming at the mouth,
Will wrench you by its ravings, discompose you.
"My darling," you will murmur. "No!" I'll shout.
"To music?!" Yet can two be ever closer

Than in the dusk, while tossing vibrant chords
Into the fireplace, like journals, tome by tome?
Oh, understanding wonderful, just nod,
And you will know I do not claim to own

Your soul and body. You may go where'er
You want. To others. Wether has been written
Already. Death these days is in the air.
One opens up one's veins much like a window.

"February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.

Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,
Race through the noice of bells and wheels
To where the ink and all you grieving
Are muffled when the rainshower falls.

To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,
A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,
Fall down into the puddles, hurl
Dry sadness deep into the eyes.

Below, the wet black earth shows through,
With sudden cries the wind is pitted,
The more haphazard, the more true
The poetry that sobs its heart out. "

"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle,
cracked ice crunching in pails,
the night that numbs the leaf,
the duel of two nightingales,
the sweet pea that has run wild,
Creation's tears in shoulder blades."

Immovable titans will choke in the black vaults of day. Are these poems fermented enough to stun the thunder? It must have been delirious, to consent to be earth.

X as a Function of Distance from Ignatz

MONICA YOUN

(she opens the door)

(he is twelve inches

away) her fingers

still splayed across the

battened-down brass latch

of his sternum (she

closes the door) (he

is eight feet away)

her palm skids down the

banister clings to

the fluted globe of

the finial (he

is twenty-eight feet

away) (she opens

the door) the black air

is fast flowing and

cold (she closes the

door) she clutches her

thin intimacy

tight under her chin

and trips down the steps

(he is forty feet

away) the stiff wind

palpably stripping

his scent from her hair

from the numb fingers

she raises to her

mouth a cab pulls up

(she opens the door)

she bends the body

hitherto upright

(she closes the door)

the cracked brown vinyl

(he is ninety feet

away) biting the

backs of her thighs red

blotches suffusing

her cheeks I’m sorry

please stop she says (he

is four hundred feet

away) please stop the

cab (she opens the

door) the cab stops she

pushes a twenty

through the slot (he is

seven hundred feet

away) (she closes

the door) the husk of

something dry and light

falls to the sidewalk

crumbles away (she

opens the door) (he

is two feet away)

(she closes the door)

DISRESPECTFUL THRILLS

Lord Birthday, Instagram

To siphon light

14. wait

Monica Youn

To stand and wait is a task far weightier than simply to wait. It is to permit the distractible body neither ease nor action, nor food nor drink nor any such reprieve; it is to pit the body in enmity against its own heaviness.

To abide in readiness as in a winter orchard, the lacerated land bandaged in snow. To exist inert as if limbless, skin seamless as if reknit over what had been pruned away, knotted rootstock fit for no other service: no branch, no leaf, no fruit. To persist as a stripped stick persists in a white field, bark peeled back from one exposed split, uptilted as if eager for the grafted slip.

To stand and wait for the one who reaps where he has not sown.

Mercy sugars the starving soil with nitrogen, potassium, phosphate. Mercy captures rain in silver beads and stitches them through the threadbare weave of cloud. Mercy wields a scalpel cutting a cleft in the lopped-off stump, mercy forces home the rootless wand, mercy seals the join with tar and tape.

To foster the raw scion as if it were a son, to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own.

Blindness

2. wide

Monica Youn

The “wide” is always haunted by surprise. In a dark world, the “wide” is the sudden door that opens on unfurling blackness, the void pooling at the bottom of the unlit stairs. To be bounded is our usual condition; to be open is anomalous, even excessive.

A wide-eyed girl is extreme in her unliddedness, her bare membranes flinching at any contact, vulnerable to motes, to smuts, to dryness. A wide-hipped girl extends the splayed arches of her body to bridge the generational divide. A wide-legged girl unseals a portal between persons; she is disturbing to the extent that she is open to all comers, a trapdoor that must be shut for safety’s sake. A wide-eyed girl is often thought desirable; a wide-hipped girl is often thought eligible; a wide-legged girl is often thought deplorable. A wide-legged girl is rarely wide-eyed, though she may have started out that way.

We can understand why Milton, in the narrowing orbit of his blindness, would have considered wideness, unboundedness to be threatening. What’s less clear is why the wideness of the wide-legged girl is also considered threatening. Does the wideness of the wide-legged girl evoke a kind of blindness, a dark room where one might blunder into strangers, the way two men once met each other in me?