Exequy
This dissembling body (not, after all,
as advertised; not in the least as promised,
not of spirit partially comprised, some stuff
angelical intermixed with the mud,
the sludge, some substance incorruptible)
begins its disassembly; or suffers
itself to be disassembled, conspires
with its break-up into parts, junked debris,
the oxidized, the worn-to-a-transparency
components, the never-to-be-salvaged
orts and lumps.
Only so many strokes
allotted,
only so many piston pumps, their finicky
limits surpassed of gasps and grunts, strangled
evacuations; only so many
cell-replications to go gentle into.
Some
tropism
toward todestrieb must have been
factored-in
at the point of manufacturing.
Exhaustion, indifference,-- to let happen,
without complaint or remediation,
whatever happens next to happen;
not thanatos so much as tedium,
all the adventure leached from everything,
some reek exhaled from every molecule
a cloud of weltschmerz,-- evidence of so
much
shearing of all those cells’ telomeric tails.
Drowning
not waving. A suspired
slipping-under the breathtaking water,
a final yawning mutter no mas, no mas,
flesh’s thanatopsis, not so much as even
a show made of resistance, of struggle,
the vaunted rage against the light’s surcease
gone missing, more a sighing subsidence
to the empirical, more a sinking
into the hyle, matter’s quicksand, formless,
agglutinate, stockpot waiting on new
information, ready for reassignment
your flesh (though you remain indifferent).
Here watch the being-integral becoming
one with its parts, each one distinct, separable,
dissocketed. See them catalogued and shelved,
all the parts, the parts -- the once-elegant makeshifts,
virtuoso bricolage, harbouring
such skills, such enterprise,-- abruptly
become loathly, half-rotted peripherals
preserved within oblongs of glass as once
were hand-meals in old-timey automats.
Made available for wonderment perhaps;
relics in some macabre ritual.
Down on your plastic
patellas go,
onto your knees, your knees,
pain-pricked mechanicals,
down on the stones go,
the obdurate stones,
and say your orisons, your psalms,
your home-made koans,--
then to bye-bye on the bones.
Fissiparity
Gloom as deep as combe or dingle;
clouds touch down, ashen, pewter,
disperse across ground that seems to waver,
presumed solidity abruptly
unsound. Trees in a huddled copse
are blackly wet, scarred by winter;
faces stare out from them, woven
of branch and bark. They grimace,
fleer at us, glare, seem to shake
their (what else) hoary locks.
The
path we were on
has wandered out too far, has gotten
itself, and us, lost.
Alterity
has misconceived; its finale
is smithereens; a fissiparity
party.
In
stars’ fusion hearts,
pilot-lights snuff out. Dark matter’s
disaffections Atropos beckons,
sur-named the Cutter. She string-theory’s
us along.
Famine,
and drought, and quantum
doubt, snick through her shears harmless,--
lethal to everything else.
The
illuminati of agapé
pretend
to Love’s visionary company.
Eden
farmers they, prophets of infinite
Earths,
flaring off and out in all directions.
Stochastic
multiples, as if mirrors
had
echoes,-- of themselves, of you.
And all
is
not only
possible, but overdo.
Thus is
fended the abyss (briefly)
that
wished so deeply
to share
its looks
with
you,
O my
heart,--
vain,
careless, untrue.
Undistinguished Aridity
Undistinguished aridity.
A
slough,
a rift, you may find you’ve fallen into
(despondently, forsooth), when first you tried
to outsmart creativity, sandbag the muse
whose largess, withheld, you sought to replace
with thesaurus trickery, rhetoric’s
weeds, tinsel’s potted poesy.
Oh
that’s rich!
Look ye, fallen into the prepared pit
of it! Lime-lined crevasse, with pitch defileth,
already half-replete with offal’s awful
oozing, the broken-lipped mouth of the fountain
dribbling liquids, gutterals, fricatives,--
and what’s this writ-on-water epitaph,
to wit?
For inspiration hard-won (genuine
as a crucifixion) you substitute
(or try to) a sleight-of-hand miscellany:
Clank of temple bells, clash of calabashes;
pentameters mis-aligned like louvers
in a window blind. Enjambments snapped off
like the closures of a trap.
Your
verse is rank;
the dashing waves are dashed, their foamy
contours fibrillate; the words are floaters
at the forefronts of eyes, the lines bedraggle
themselves, couplets and stanzas and quatrains,
dust-dry, drag their mismatched feet, straggle
like soldiers
do, weary after battle.
Your
villainous
villanelles loll in azure-rifted cells,
fathomed chasms where your argosies ply,
or lie astraddle your red-ink Red Sea
caesurae.
Your poem of magical thinking,
thoughtlessly tossed off; your gift from the magi
a sawed-off quadratic equation;
your Bluebeard cloud-castle, how tiresome,
poetry as dreary epistle;
your winter prayer to the goddess of ice
yielding precisely that: the rattle
of sucked cubes in a cocktail glass.
An undistinguished aridity, yours;
the muse the face on the barroom floor.
Words skulk about you, shuffle here stumble there;
nothing coheres anymore. Strophes meander,
like Melmoth they wander, your antistrophes,
too, banished to the antipodes, or to
darkened rooms where your syncopations
knocks knees with your still-born conceits.
Your
little
sack of rhymes it’s like the piper’s windy bag,
hear it skirl and squeal, a gull’s high, thin keeeel,
bleeding out the last of your blagues.
Trees in
rows in winter rain.
A
palisade, a wailing-wall
smudged
with birds’ nest remains, caught up
in
twiggy mazes that crosshatch
the sky,
etch glyphic staves, cuneiform
conservations.
Symbols in the wind
shapeshift;
branch and tree-limb bend, dip,
skywrite
black sagas in runes
of bird
flights, indite heartsick
entreaties
(orisons, prayers
of
special pleading), to the goddess
desolation
that is this world
in winter
held, locked in cold’s thrall
and
spell.
With
brevity and concision
O
blandish her, and flatter, else will
never
from this sublunary
vault,
this place replaced by ice,
be ever
anything else.
Robert McCarthy is a writer living in New York City. He prefers to use
formal means to achieve lyric ends. Robert has published poetry in Orbis,
The Alchemy Spoon and Dreich Magazine. His work has also appeared
in Yours, Poetically and Neologism Poetry Journal; as well as in Words
& Whispers, Celestite Poetry, Fahmidan Journal, Version(9), Madrigal,
Ice Floe Press, PaddlerPress, Nymphs, Spare Parts, Halfway Down the
Stairs, The Storms, Euphony Journal, and others. One of Robert’s
poems, Wind From Nowhere, has been nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize.
No comments:
Post a Comment