How We Got Here and Then
Comrade, why are you lingering in a churchyard
with hopes for castles written on a nightingale’s sigh?
What would Kafka protest then?
Your will to inspire resistance or your claim to country
via the complaints of God’s first garden?
Aren’t we to serve in that capacity, keep these apostrophes
at least lush with life and filled on pills
that freshen the view mellow?
Listen to those wings pine for heaven, the eyes aglow.
The state of your empire lingers
with shouldered clouds, eavesdropping by
the bouncer checking names, hoping our false pretentions
will sell us downriver, give him reason
to flex his master-slave sword and yank out our credit scores.
If you find yourself shoeless, buy shoelaces. Without light?
Strike the homemade wax candle the bees betrothed.
Talk to the cloud; the rest will follow. Like the time I got lost
in a literary history that held none of me,
my body to earth, no complaints but hard asphalt.
I hope you find the reach
then is nearly enough to say I first met Gertrude Stein
when I was traveling back through time, alone
on my narrow-eyed pony, brief
in that weight when I found my own tunnels.
I became mole hereafter. She sat drinking tea with
Napoleon’s need to meet Apollinaire.
If by mole I mean I learned
to travel by the seat of my own pen,
then yes, open the tunnels, Alice, dismiss the laws
that would have you math your way out. Cable the rabbit
and root the cellars to ceilings, right the lost tablets sideways
before the weaving bible, touch up the wounds,
for we were around during that scene, too.
We were fabulous whether lingering or helping
the other weeds fall on love like
fallow ground meets seeds of voice.
Something takes hold of us all, cold swords and a warm fringe.
Come Comrade, grasp hands, whisper bookends
of this souls’ time machine, help shine the blazing circle anew.
The Last of the Cigar Makers
I long for the ivory teeth of a leeching phosphorous,
how you bleach the day with smiles at bedtime
preceding a life worth living.
Remember the way the hammock sways alone,
even beneath the weight of occupation.
Dear America, how many times
do you suicide this heaven into the marble ocean
from the tree we lean on,
adrift in a panicky handstand of lefty exaltation?
Preserve thy first witness as if nothing leaves;
even the emptiness alights. The shadowbox inhabitants
that bore us report, “Your men were very strange.
They cried for more formaldehyde.”
That is, they longed for additional romance or
reports-in-stasis, but in what format?
We were only solid, not smoke. We stayed
casual at the bars of our cages.
After that, mother’s headstone recalled
us less with each visit to the bodega.
Our shelters diminished. We bought soaps
and candles for the Virgin but got pregnant
through the garden of osmosis. The cleanliness
loomed and taunted our feet towards
Canadian borders and daytime television.
We felt the pressures of opposite marriage
and welfare queens inside the screen’s four corners.
The flag’s toy seams began to fray
and all salutes were held at bay, our spider’s pet pigs,
now glowing with names, determined to be
a government of the last remaining cigar makers.
That I Will Listen to Until
I’m doing it again, conceiving my own grammar, avoiding
the hardboiled heads of law-masters. Every time my own
turns to thought, I make mono-matter for the masses
I imagine will break the Shakespeare of just another day.
This isn’t to say I’ve got anything more than what’s going
for me. But let’s not praise too soon the mighty men
women aspire to—I take on my hunchback pack
the menial jobs in a recession where others fear to kneel.
Not to say those who hold back with macaroni and cheap nuts
aren’t inventing the new star splatter in the gaps
of how this economy will go local post belly-up soon though.
We may even go a-bartering again. Some do something ancient then.
Remember the time you told me color comes alive
at Carlsbad Flower Fields in a sea of stinking crisp flower blankets
when the coastal hill becomes a handcrafted quilt? I had never
been to California before. I didn’t believe you
until I read Larry Levis threw the editorial page in the street,
watched him pull up Reverdy to see his knees and pissed
on the bed of green hay stitched around the hill’s swollen ankles.
This kind of working farm subsists because someone has refused
to give up the practice of peyote and painting in New Mexico
when New York City was supposed to be her only meal ticket, at least,
according to Steiglitz. She left there forever and found loneliness
in the ancient wisdom called hope. Both remain pivotal arts to date.
But back to how words go together. We met over
the new tsunamis when people became
much like the Black Plague numbers. Except there were more
expendables to date, so no need to call up the old country poor
to burn and lime the body count. We began discussing how
to rid the hillsides of ash and bone fragments
as they were soon weighing the colors down and counting out
Hollywood’s insignia. Even the presidents’ faces fell off.
The Americans stood alone then on the global market,
fishing for ways to get back the hatchets they once used at root.
They, as in we, were considered contagions until
the world wide web was torn asunder and barriers against
nanobots improved. Our children’s children echoed a nostalgia
for concepts waning: half-drunk wine, smoky meats
and the symbolic gesture of touch. A place where men wear
lime-green pants, brimmed hats, and candy-striped pullovers.
They protested, but God does exist as much as angels
and plans patterned by the local neighborhood board
to live the two-kids-house-dog-college dream or
any other golden fragment enlisted
as the future Who We Will Be Then.
We will be then, but before it happens, we keep happening now
in the limoncellos we sip, the late-night gut aches,
the false handshakes over business economies, the difference
between pianos played, apples eaten and profits on paper.
But we go better for the yellow fields rife with daisies that still exist,
jeans that hint at splendor, the swell of an unplanned smile
across a train platform, how the herbs and grains still feel as ancient
and right as when we on afternoons go down to meet the sun
at just the right angle, that space where we lose track
of grammar and the cost of what it is to have
not as much as the next town over, to bend closer and take in
the way your bent arm smells in the long hot sun,
opened by how the tiny soul fills out your skeleton
with the warming sounds of blanket words that I will listen to until.
Art Information
Amy King's most recent books are Slaves to Do These Things and the forthcoming I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). Amy teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett.
She also co-edits Poets for Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples and Esque magazine with Ana Bozicevic. Visit her current website @Amy King. You can find out more about Amy at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.
