Blindfolded so
you won’t look at
the frets,
you practice
hour on hour,
four fingers,
stretched
to aching
on four strings
stretched
to unravelling,
knees akimbo,
like quarrelling
lovers
in self-imposed
quarantine,
bow hoisted,
an Iwo Jima flag
in grainy
start and stop
motion.
Lubing my own
instrument,
I put the grease
to dried-out cork
and kiss the
brittle reed
with my spit
to limber it
to a supple
spring.
How much of all
this impulse
is nested out of
thought?
A harmony of
cerebrum and
cerebellum
in chord and note,
the warehouse
where memory
awaits
a fleet of sturdy
vans
of sinew and brawn
to make their
serviceable rounds
in synchronized
time.
We know what
every runner
knows:
the body
does the legwork
for the mind.
Beach Read
The Egyptians knew
hot sand’s the thing for softening heads.
They pulled out the brain through the
nostrils,
one jellied nugget at a time and tossed it,
trash on the Nile.
The mind, they knew, was elsewhere,
I forget where they put it.
Not in this book that soaks up
the sea water from my suit on its cowering
edges
like the pink, wavy lips on a conch shell.
Here, we choose our books by what doesn’t
last,
never pick one up we can’t make jetsam of.
In this shell you can hear the ocean,
but it has so little to say.
Sand’s the thing for ploughing an idle toe,
its furrows deeper than a heel.
Seeds don’t flower in sand.
Castles and mermaids. Faces of Christ.
Frozen custard.
Number one on the best seller list.
This keeping, it’s not for us.
Muscatel
I. A little bit of History
After Prohibition
the demand for wine
is astronomical.
Table and raisin grapes,
cheap and plentiful,
fill the bill when fortified,
and spur a taste for “wino wines”
like Mad Dog and Thunderbird,
since spurned by every sommelier.
II. Preparations
It sits in crystal decanters
on a sacristy windowsill,
attracts a thirsty swarm of fruit flies,
who drown in agony or ecstasy;
it’s impossible to tell.
their faces being infinitesimal,
The priest suits up for Sunday mass,
alb, stole, and chasuble.
We light the altar candles and wait,
while he disappears
into a cloud of prayers.
We twist the doorknob tops
off the crystal decanters,
each with a paper cup,
take no more than a nip,
and turn the doorknob shut.
It has the flavour of raisins
and what I have been told
the taste of myrrh,
“bitter perfume”.
Parousia
One
day you discover
that
that hard, white spot
on
your wrist
has
disappeared.
How
you’d scratched it
and
pulled at it
and
nagged it
to
inaction.
But
it went on
tactfully
insisting
it
was going to
kill
you in the end.
Instead,
like a god
who’s
quietly
ascended
into the blue,
it
gently went away.
Yet
on occasion,
an
itch in the tomb
recalls
the menace
of
a self-assured promise
to
return.
Mountain Retreat
After love,
a not quite dead Pieta,
he tries to recall
an order of battles—
Manassas, Antietam,
Gettysburg, Wilderness?
hoping
she doesn’t offer a penny
for his thoughts.
The place is deserted,
a season of no skiers,
no golfers, no winners,
no losers.
He thinks, Maybe
I have enough left
to fire off
another round.
After all these little deaths,
There is still that other.
Appomattox.
William Derge’s
poems have appeared in Negative Capability, The Bridge, Artful
Dodge, Bellingham Review, and many other publications. He is the winner of the $1000 2010
Knightsbridge Prize judged by Donald Hall and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
He is a winner of the Rainmaker Award judged by Marge Piercy. He has received honourable mentions in
contests sponsored by The Bridge, Sow’s Ear, and New
Millennium, among others. He has
been awarded a grant by the Maryland State Arts Council. His work has appeared
in several anthologies of Washington poets:
Hungry as We Are and Winners.
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