Hello, everyone. When I was an undergrad at Loras College in Iowa, the Canadian poet and critic Carmine Starnino came to my Introduction to Poetry Writing class (taught by the incomparable James Pollock) to talk about poetry writing. My mother Jodi and I also had the pleasure of listening to Starnino read his deeply lyrical work at a public event. To celebrate that time in my life, I have included a batch of his published works below. Enjoy! *** HOMEMADE Not blackberries, cherries. Not picked, packed in sugar. Jam jar wrung tight, left outside forty days. Sugar goes soggy from sunlight’s glassed-in excitation, congugates into something spumescent, weather-churned, barely-seeable-into. And the cherries? Not fresh, but improved into a ruder bloom: blood-bright skin snuffed during the boil of its soakage, flesh an ossified-pale pink. My whow-balls, my tipsycakes, my little amber apples. I spoon up a few. Here, you taste too. * DID YOU SAY YOUR PRAYERS? I did. Hands clamped, kneeling, I radioed my S.O.S. into the coldest reaches of my six-year-old cosmos and waited. They were simple prayers, standard distress calls. Afterwards my bed became a listening post homing in on every sound around me, the night’s ceiling sickle-mooned and starless. If it was a “step” that led me closer to God, there was an evanescence to the feeling prayer left behind: a wet footprint that soon started to fade. Older, I learned to use the rosary, each tiny bead I tweaked between my fingertips a spiritual dollop I could measure. I prayed for friends, for family, my every concern calculable, although miniscule in its unit scale. I stopped that too. Each night I fussed with a metaphysical ledger -- how much I’d asked for versus how much I’d given back. The rosary, an abacus I grew tired of. But I’ve begun to miss it, prayer, or maybe not exactly prayer, mostly just the suspense of an answer. I like to think those childhood signals still travel through deepest space, and if not his absence, God’s silence the reason I now count these syllables. * SONG OF THE HOUSE HUSBAND Cherish it most when it steams-- “steam”, though, fails to praise its seethe of vapour, or, propped upright, the suspirating hush as it catches its breath. Flanks like the shins of a ship or open halves of a mussel, and, on its brow, the spirit-level’s impressionable bubble. Fructifying flatness, it takes my trouser’s frown, gives back pleats. Takes my tired, tucked-in shirt, makes it newly dapper. And really, nothing’s like the hiss of its hull kissing a dampened dent (releasing that rich, road-side scent of rain on dust). Hope for the linens freckled with folds. Hope for the crimped, the crumpled, the crinkled, the crushed. Hope for the rippled, the ruffled, the rumpled, the rucked. O coffer of creaselessness! I do not know how to cut a straight furrow. I do not know how to drive a batch of nails. But grip your handle as I would a spade, your heft the heft of a hammer. * OUR BUTCHER I could bone up, be the right man for that one-man job, hang by its hocks a rabbit shucked from the jacket of its black-bristled fur and still talking in twitches. As well, I might grasp the particular way he swings a cleaver, brings it down on a neck, like a primitive. More to the point, I’d learn to move the beak of my blade into the fragrance of a flank, or browse apart a chest’s cardiac leafage, my white apron a blotchwork of blood. I’d like to pickle ox tongue and pig feet, screw lids on sheep tripe and calf brain, set out jars like indices to carcasses unpacked like suitcases. Striated and plush, crewelworked with fat and grosgrained with gristle, meat is not semblance, meat is baroque. That said, I’d love to break back the pages of a shank and read all day. Tales about the flex and kick, the squawk and gack of things in pens: grass-nipping goats, had-been hens, hogs which nuzzled mud and snorkelled its odors until their plug was pulled and the spinning gears stilled to small organs, organs I’d like to disinter and wrap, risen again inside the pinkness of new paper skin. * PUGNAX GIVES NOTICE He’s done with it, the tridents and tigers, the manager’s greed, the sumptuous beds of noble women who please their own moods. He’s done with dogging it for the crowds, the stabbing, the slashing, the strangling, the poor pay, the chintzy palm branch prizes. Make no mistake. Pugnax is a real fierceosaurus. Winner of 26 matches, a forum favourite. Yet his yob genes have, it seems, gone quiet. Fatigue has called his soul back to his body. Circles under his eyes; he sleeps badly. Late-night cigs lit from the dog-end of the last, cutwork of the clock nibbling him small. In the barracks around him his friends snore, lucky returnees of the last hard hacking, dead to the world, free of a weapon in the fist. Priscus face-down in the crook of his arm. Triumphus flung open, caught on a bad turn. Verus collapsed, whacked, against the cot. Flamma, doomed by down-thumbing shadows, lies in a stain of his final shape and size. Pugnax loves them all, chasers and net-fighters, fish-men and javelin-throwers, carefree despite punishing practices, screaming orders, despite limbs trained to turn lethal for mobs unable to bear the thought of two men clinging to life, but here it’s only the thock of wooden sword against wooden sword, the racket as they fall on each other’s shields in joy. Pugnax’s heart breaks for them. Understand, he has inflicted pain and felt pain, but now wants to go native, move into a flat, experiment with fashionable clothes, dawdle at the baths, tame his nights with tea, be spellbound by the smell of soap, find a wife. Our boy dreams of joining the crowd, shouting himself hoarse as some bonehead gets knocked down and the blade pushed through his chest, stapling him to the ground. At intermission, he’ll watch as the blood is raked over with sand, thinking chore thoughts: yard work, paint jobs, weekend projects.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |