3.10.16

There are a lot of themes cropping up lately that I want to share, and this doesn't fit in with any of them, but its a beautiful elegy. I will share some more by this author, here is his page. I often come to poets via their works, and usually come at them totally blind. So when I look the author up, sometimes I am surprised to find a face that looks different than the voice, or than what I expected. I was quite surprised to see that the author, Malachi Black is a fairly young man, considering his accolades and poetic cv. 

From Bildungsroman

  i.m. Scott David Campbell (1982-2012)

Streetlights were our stars,
hanging from the midnight   
                                       in a planetary arc
above each empty ShopRite   
parking lot—spreading    
                                       steam-bright
through the neon dark—
buzzing like ghost locusts,
                                       trembling in the chrome
trance of an electrical charge
nested in each exoskeleton—
                                        pulling, pooling
a single syllable of light
from the long braid     
                                        of the powerlines
sighing above us as we climbed   
through bedroom windows
                                       with our hair combed
and our high-tops carefully untied—
as we clung to vinyl siding,
                                       as we crawled
crablike across rooftops, edging
toe-first toward the gutters
                                       so as not to rouse
the dogs—as we crept down   
onto cold drainpipes    
                                       through the lightning
in our lungs, leaping at last
into our shadows and at last
                                       onto the lawn,
landing as if in genuflection
to the afterhours fog—
                                       fluorescent
as the breath we left
beside us on the train tracks
                                       as we walked
each toward the others,
toward the barebulb
                                       glow of stardust
on the dumpsters
in the vacant late-night, lost

From Quarantine

  LAUDS

Somehow I am sturdier, more shore

than sea-spray as I thicken through

the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness.

You give me morning, Lord, as you

give earthquake to all architecture.

I can forget.

                           You put that sugar

in the melon’s breath, and it is wet

with what you are. (I, too, ferment.)

You rub the hum and simple warmth

of summer from afar into the hips

of insects and of everything.

I can forget.

                           And like the sea,

one more machine without a memory,

I don’t believe that you made me.

                          PRIME

I don’t believe that you made me

into this tremolo of hands,

this fever, this flat-footed dance

of tendons and the drapery

of skin along a skeleton.

I am that I am: a brittle

rib cage and the hummingbird

of breath that flickers in it.

Incrementally, I stand:

in me are eons and the cramp

of endless ancestry.

Sun is in the leaves again.

I think I see you in the wind

but then I think I see the wind.

There is an interview with Black in this issue of Lightbox, I'd recommend you read it. He discusses some perennial issues, such as a poem's form, perspective audience, inspiration, etc. Here are my favorite excerpts:

As with the most engaged philosophy, the most compelling poems typically emerge from inquiry and examination, even if only of the most oblique, reflexive sort, i.e., “Why?”

It’s no small irony that, because both poetry and prayer are directionally unilateral, each medium necessitates some projection or implied construction of an audience. In effect, both poetry and prayer entail three simultaneous varieties of invention: the construction of a (speaking) self, the composition of expressive matter (the self’s communique), and the imagination of a recipient adequately equipped to receive, comprehend, or internalize that matter.