Five Poems by Robert McCarthy

 

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.

                                                            

Many Loves, None of Them True

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. 

 

 

Prayer in Winter

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.