Anthony Watkins's Blog, page 42

From Some Tree this Hidden Calf (trying to escape Poe’s Raven)

 

Waits and bleats

and shadows brown

dappled in darkness

I hear it call

 

a cry, but a cry

without hope

in the tradition

of a beast, whose ancestors

know only slaughter.

 

There is surely a rope

or a pen to hold

until death is called

for veal and leather

these are your name

 

like a nightingale

I do not hear your song

of ultimate sadness

of the empty beauty

of pointless death.

 

Stay hidden

and frightened

and hunger I sure

for the mother’s milk

and kindness licks

 

in the dappled

blackness

that is the lot

of all your kind.

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Something There Is (or The Mending Wall)

After Frost, the poet, not weather, I


built a circle wall, or rather spiral


all to come to mend, wall, themselves to walk


both sides and agree it makes good neighbors.


 


Something there is that loves a wall to mend,


repair the mind and soul gentle grayworn


farm field stone plucked to define god for


us all as ‘mine.’


 


Come take down and build up: stone, man, this wall


to mend- not broken, but not at all.


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Seven-Thirty Sunset

As grandmother and toddler turn to home,


the Hispanic boy with gold necklace


runs through a back yard


and the Haitian girl tosses


a worn brown basketball to her nephews


 


life flows out onto the narrow


streets of Lake Worth


in the hot yellow air


turns colors


black in silhouette.


 


An almost chill rustles uncut palms


and thrusts paper wrappers


against sagging chain-link fences


nine o’clock sunset


is still two months away


 


but the thin old man


steps into the street and closes


the door on his Chevy


glad to be home


before dark.

This looks like a poem, more or less, but….

How Modern a Creek, Then?

The boy, careful to lay the rifle down,

pointing away

looking in the bed of copper leaves, layered upon layer, for signs of a snake for which the rifle was carried, then leaning in, belly on the leaves, as the creek, here only a foot wide, cuts deep between roots of an unseen tree, the water, clear and icy, even summer, for water insects, for gold, for the magical cases built by Caddisflies. Satisfied in searching, he eases his boots off, and stuffs a sock in top of each.

Stepping in, ever looking for snakes almost never there, wades down root steps to a sandy basin. The creek divides around a soggy sand bar. The sand is pebbles, not sand. he sits, soaking his pants, and watches, scanning to the end where the creek runs together again. Boots and rifle, ten yards up. He dries his feet on leaves, not looking for snakes, buffs his dry-ish, sandy-ish feet top and bottom with his sock, then shakes and puts on the sock, and boot.

cheap boot, damp sock and bits of pebble irritate his feet. He stands, picks up the rifle, keeping the barrel pointed away, and down. Home. This is where and how he goes to the creek. Almost every day, alone. Sometimes with his cousins, who build and break dams. He never builds dams.

The why he comes, not even he,

not even now, knows that.

 

A fellow student in ModPo’s summer courses that we collectively call SloPo, wondered if certain poets from Frost to Ashbery used the pastoral scene as a device t deal with the problems of modern life. So I wrote the above piece to explore my own motivations. This is what I consider a typical piece for me. A snapshot of a world gone by, specifically, my world gone by. I did not write it with any particular clever intent.

Another student pointed out the boy’s preoccupation with the POSSIBILITY of a snake, though one is never found. Is the snake old, like in the garden of Eden, or is it modern? is the serpent always both the ancient and the modern, the fear, the irrational fear of things which rarely or never happen, shark attacks, terror attacks, death (which only happens once, yet some of us build our lives in response to it!

I hope you enjoyed reading this poem. I hope you enjoy, even more, thinking about these things. and most of all, I hope you respond here and share your thoughts. You do not have to have an advanced degree in a liberal arts area of specialization. if you dropped out of third grade or if you are an ivy league professor, your thoughts are equally welcome.

Red Eye Open

I would like to say no words were harmed in the making of the poem.

You see, I like words as much as some people puppies and small children

As a grandfather, and something of a pushover

I love babies, and puppies, and old sad saggy red eyed dogs

I also love sad saggy old words. The ones that can barely move their rheumatoid consonants along.

Long time ago, in a different universe

I was a truck driver for Pepsi, and in East Stuart, Florida, there was a place called Bessie and Ma’s.

I don’t really know what it was, but it didn’t open until late, like at dark.

By dark I had to be back in Rivera Beach, so I would rattle my long straight-body rollup truck alongside of the store, bouncing over mudholes and gravely bits of grass and I would dodge the old hound.

He wouldn’t move.

There is a special sound a rollup door makes, you probably know it.

I hear it in my heart, not my ears nor my mind, even.

I roll up the door in the slow late afternoon, last stop. 4 cases of non-returnable 10 ounce bottles. Tossed on my shoulder. Even though three was the limit. Safety man says.

But It was a dollar’s worth of commission. I wasn’t going to unhitch the dolly for a quarter extra and I had to take them all in. Hell, I was young. Thirty Years Ago. The old storefront windows are filled with signs. You can’t see inside. I bang on the wood framed glass door. I wait. I bang, again. In a little while a very old very dark lady let me in. I shift the cases off my shoulder and onto the cooler box. I ask if she wants me to fill the box. No. she gives me the $36.00, I sign the yellow copy and give it to her. Thank you, she says. Thank you I say. Out of the very dark place. The hound is still laying on the edge of a mudhole. Now he opens one red eye. I don’t touch him, but I lean down close and say, “hey old guy, way to watch!” then I rattle off to Palm Beach County.

No dog was harmed in this poem. I am sure of that.

I read as much as I can that Al writes. I have befriended, or at least attached myself like a groupie to some real LANGUAGE poets. I try to protect the words.

I try to make sure my poem

knows it’s a poem

and that it writes about itself,

but maybe I am the dog in the mudhole,

just one red eye open.

I look in the mirror now,

“way to watch!”

The Poverty of Myth

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Somehow, long before Campbell

I knew a truth though without a way of knowing it.

The power of a myth is its very poverty

to takeaway what is and replace it with a lie.

A myth is the lie that tells the lie

America is great: myth

America is Rich: lie

America is free: lie

America is brave: myth

America is a raping genocidal stepchild of all the bastard king and queen murderers of Europe:

Not a myth, not a lie

Myth: Native Americans lived in gentle peace before first contact

Africa was never exploited by people of color: lie

Asia is all beauty and tigers: myth

All the sins of the world do not forgive mine: not a lie

Joseph, the poverty overwhelms us, we starve and starving we kill and in killing we become rich, and being rich we become greedy, and greed is hunger, and in palaces we starve for riches, for rich myths of our beauty and glory and power and yet we die like ants to be swept away from the mound. In a few days our souls that do not exist decay like the rotting dead bodies we do not leave behind, but become. Our myth dies with our soul, our myth rots on the dung heap as hungry as the first day we knew we were starving.

 

-an open letter to Joseph Campbell

Devices

Can openers

P-thirty-Eights

and otherwise,

radios

left to,

bastard files

left to me,

 

an adz and a broken

straight razor

of undetermined

destination.

 

Green ammo boxes

with eighty years

of non-weaponry,

six broken watches,

a small reel to reel,

 

the kodak,

with the bellows,

grandpas GI photo,

or an uncle.

He wasn’t in the war,

any of them.

 

Eighteen-eighty-six

I guess he missed the big one.

Nineteen-two, the other

grandpa missed, too.

We all missed the wars, my dad,

my brother, me

not one damn bit, either,

left to.

The Red Chair

So much undone,

always,

I settle into

my wingback.

 

I try not to recall

the tax bill, dishes,

inspections,

editing, and still I

think of

responsibility for

dead parents.

 

I tire trying

not to think,

knowing I will

not succeed, organizing,

doing, nor not thinking

forty-two things

I should do.

 

Sick, I settle,

she finds something

easy to watch

I find relief in

parents passing

what doesn’t get

done remains.

 

I am

not dying

today.

On a Table

Fish head, well body minus the meat, filleted, with the guts hanging about

scales, scraped and piled on the old boards, in the wet sand

where the ever slightly running, spigot drips.

And flies, sitting quietly on the intestines

buzzing up at a nearby motion

only to settle back again

to what I can guess,

eating remains

today the fish,

one of god’s

creatures

swam with

all the grace

and speed of nature,

rippling and sparkling

against, above, beneath,

and through the clear green-blue

intra-coastal waters just south of the

bridge built by Civilian Conservation Corps

at the beginning of the war that ended most

of all the wars of Europe, at least, as they struggled

to end the Great Depression, and yet, those men are

as dead as the glorious fish, and they were glorious, too.

He is surely supper, and a good one, too, if I were eating him.

They are only dead, with their wives and half their kids, not heroes,

only trying to keep from dying too soon, and maybe they did, but died

anyway, and the flies eat the entrails and the old men’s bones rot beneath.

Sometimes California

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I was disappointed to find out while the characters more or less came over intact, the formatting did not. So I am posting these poems as pictures. I started to say I hope you can read them.

I would be surprised if there is a person on the planet who could actually read them. Not only because there is such a wide variety of languages and characters, but because by the time i finished, the words are no longer intact. if does say something, it is certainly not what i originally wrote in English and plugged into poor Google Translate.

Google is a pretty sad excuse for translation and sometimes it creates amusing mis-translates, but for my purposes, it worked perfectly!

This work, such as it is, was inspired by a Facebook post by my Bangladeshi friend Kazi Rahat. I hope he doesnt mind.

The Leftovers are literally the characters I have left over when i finished Sometimes California (due to the final shape, not particularly the content.)

 

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