American Poetry Read online

  the teachers had been starved to death

  the road had fallen into decay

  the bridges were gone

  will be eaten

  at a ration of quarters

  will be eaten

  at a ration of fifths

  *

  The point at which something is a ruin

  Perforating scrawl

  55 floods, 25 windstorms, 57 droughts, 37 plagues of locusts

  The work required kneeling

  : The amounts they speak of are in reality quite small and because

  of the missing one hundred dollars

  everything they have could be put up for farm auction

  Rudimentary sinew connecting library, school and public land

  In the eaves under systems of decimation

  *

  chorus

  water supply silted

  children sold for token payment, for the promise that they would be fed

  seasonal hunger

  human cash crop

  if to bend back at stems

  Three Poems

  Brenda Coultas

  AN AMERICAN MOVIE

  SCENE 1

  It’s okay, it’s all light, Jesus told me so.

  —Uncle Bill, from American Movie

  (draw out)

  This eye opens on Houston and Ave. A, on a mural of Princess Di, it reads:

  “We fought for 200 years to throw off the yoke of British oppression. Die Di.”

  The eye moves to Avenue A and 14th, mural of Princess Di and Mother Theresa, side by side.

  Repeat after me:

  “In Memory of royalty and holiness”

  Audience repeats

  “Rest in Peace”

  Audience repeats

  I met a man the week of back to back funerals whom I later married.

  We watched both.

  In the church was a basket full of prayers.

  I read them.

  What were people praying about, and were their prayers any different than mine?

  I visit the stations of the cross

  I have felt the power of prayer before.

  This is written as one who’s gotten good at prayer.

  I put my own in.

  “Signed SWALCAKWS (sealed with a lick cuz a kiss won’t stick),

  Brenda”

  I move my lips, do you?

  I wonder if I’m doing it right?

  I say it in my head. Like this,

  Dear God,

  Please watch over us and please watch over my brother and my sisters and mom and dad

  please watch over those in need

  in Jesus’ name we pray,

  Amen.

  I say this every night.

  Is it too dull to reach the universe?

  Dear Universe,

  Why do you hear Mayor Giuliani’s prayers and not mine?

  Yours, Brenda

  Dear Universe,

  You must be a male

  you are not unisex

  you are just fashionably androgynous.

  Sorry to bug you, Brenda

  I write poems for the public.

  I call myself Brenda Coultas

  I write public poems.

  I write poems for twenty, that’s twenty people to a poem.

  A man sells poems in the subway,

  Published Poet is his name.

  It costs whatever you want to give him.

  I’m the same, its whatever you want to give me only I don’t want anything.

  SCENE 2

  The eye opens on a man who paints portraits of “retired” Beanie Babies:

  Digger the Crab

  Doby the Doberman

  Doodle

  Dotty the Dalmation

  Ears

  Echo

  Fetch the Retriever

  Flash the Dolphin

  Fleece the Lamb

  Flip the Cat

  Floppity

  Freckles the Leopard

  Garcia the Tie-Dyed Bear

  Glory the Bear

  Goldie the Goldfish

  Gracie the Swan

  Grunt the Razorback Pig

  Happy the Lavender Hippo

  Hippity

  Hoot the Owl

  Hoppity

  Inch the Worm

  Inky the Pink Octopus

  SCENE 3

  Hi, I am a word that exists on the soles of your shoes,

  Please stop walking on me.

  Hi, I am a royal Fergie mug

  I was chubby and engaged.

  Now I’m skinny, divorced, chipped and stained.

  Hi, I am a Cabbage Patch doll

  preserved in the attic in my original wrapper.

  I am so ugly I am cute. I look and feel like a fetus with an engorged head.

  Hi, I am an adorable discontinued Beanie Baby.

  I am the rarest Beanie Baby of them all.

  Collectors will commit crimes in order to possess me

  I fit in the hand like a small living dog.

  Hello, I am a Pee Wee Herman doll

  I have a soft body and a hard plastic head.

  I know what I am but what are you?

  A HORSELESS CARRIAGE

  Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet

  Feels shorter than the Day

  I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

  Were toward Eternity—

  —Emily Dickinson, from #712

  We traded some hay and got a pony.

  But we were horseless

  We got a good deal on a horse

  We were full with the horse

  The horse was an asshole

  We sold the horse

  We bought a car

  But we were horseless.

  I remember all the grave mowers. I used to follow Elise and his mules to the cemetery. They were majestic. Mules are pretty, people forget that. When he died I bought the old harnesses at auction. People took horse collars and put mirrors where the heads used to go. That was a fad. Everyone had harness and leather lying around that they needed to put some use to. Old oil lamps, railroad lanterns, these things look good with a plant sticking out of them. I once buried a treasure in Elise’s meadow. I had been reading about pirates. I was obsessed with finding buried treasure, since there was scant chance of finding buried treasure on a landlocked farm. I decided to make a mystery imagining someone finding it and wondering about whoever buried it. I took a cardboard box, put clues in it, a penny minted that year, a picture of me and my brother, a metal picture frame with curlicues that I now realize was Victorian. Once the field grew over, I could never find it again.

  Tom, down the road, sold his horse buggies when I was a kid but I remember everyone talking about the auction. The buggies. Black carriages, stiff. Horseless now. Motorless. The end of buggies except for the Amish’s yellow, black and white tops.

  There was Old man Hinkle who drove his horseless carriage so slowly that I’d pass him on my bike. He was headed down the road to where Herb and Buster held court on the front lawn in shell backed lawn chairs. Mary and Tootsie were in the house, a glass butter churn on the table. I had summer habits that kept me on the road, popping tar bubbles with a stick. (Old asphalt roads had pools of sticky tar, gets on your clothes and ruins them.) Breaking ponies. Fishing (in anyone’s pond). Exploring. The world could be as long as a mile or two. It was the way around, follow the road until you were back to where you began.

  My grandparents were horseless, by the time I knew them. I have a dim photo of my grandpa driving a carriage. My grandma didn’t drive anything as far as I could tell, but she did like to call a bicycle “a wheel.” As in “Where are you going on that wheel?” Or “Put that wheel down and get over here.” Or “Hey, you on the wheel, come back here.” It was a uniquely horseless form of transportation.

  Two farmers in abutting pastures died this fall. Neither of them owned horses. Cody B. in his 60’s died of skin cancer that metastasized into brain cancer. Harold, 8
3 who inherited the job from Elise, and meticulously mowed the cemetery with a tractor, died of stomach cancer this winter one month shy of the end of the century. Last summer, he wanted his usual garden put out. They put out a smaller one, knowing he’d never be able to see it. Now as it snows, I walk toward his grave. I imagine all of us, long horseless, walking.

  INSIDE THE WEATHER

  [16mm educational film titled Inside the Weather

  Dumpster dived on 2nd St. and Ave. A. May 9, 00.

  Note: This poem takes place in the Bowery]

  I don’t have a 16mm projector so I’ll read it this way by hand

  Take it apart put it back together again

  I take it out and I put it back. Forward and reverse

  There’s a thin spot where the real world shines through

  A thin spot in thinning places from going back and forth.

  This is some sort of silent reading

  Weather is sometimes quiet and creepy crawls Manson-family-like

  It’s raining outside, I go back to unreeling: A shot of an airplane.

  Passengers buckle up, the captain greets them. Plane taxis, shots of

  the plane and its belly. Passengers looking out window enjoying

  marvelous weather. A planet appears in center of frame, then a

  thousand frames of a curved cylinder maybe an engine. A strip of

  sound on the side. Can’t hear it through fingers film breaks.

  The weather is a Bowery bum penis tip urinating on a trash can.

  Jars of penis tips like Planter’s roasted nuts

  I enjoy formerly living things in lab jars.

  Mr. Peanut walks down the Bowery, you can smell his roasted nuts

  Touched by tip of Bowery bum penis, tried not to look just felt tip

  touch lightly on neck.

  Touching cocks back and forth on the tips.

  I take them out and put them back

  Holding film up to a 100 watt bulb, burn eyeballs. Looking at the

  plane in the waves of the sky. More earth and now night. Could

  they be circling the globe? Could they no longer be earth citizens,

  rather citizens of the air.

  Unspool reel with pencil in center smell of film chemicals is

  nothing like the smell of clouds or the sun or rain or hail. The

  smell is vinegary like a hundred dirty socks on the feet of fifty

  Bowery bums.

  Once I was in the sky thinking about the people in the film about

  weather. Once I was in an airplane, too, smiling and pointing like

  happy people in a film about the joys of weather.

  Press play, a recording of Hoosier rain sounds.

  My lips crackle.

  Turn on rain cam www.Raincam.com. The voice spoke through

  tiny transistor radio. A blue and silver transistor radio in its

  original box, the top eaten off by rats. It said loudspeakerlike

  “People of the Bowery, take shelter now.”

  A school of blind albino fish swim inside an underground lake in

  Mammoth Cave. They say “It’s all about the weather this season.”

  This is tedious work, and rereeling is tuff

  film twists like a pig’s tail.

  I think the weather was better when I was a child.

  I put the hailstones in the freezer for posterity, take them out when

  company comes. My grandpa’s hailstones made the newspaper,

  with measuring tape for scale. A catheterized penis was the last thing

  I saw of him. And I asked “What’s in the center, a fuzzy

  wuzzy bear, bubble gum, a pearl or a rock-hard cock?”

  A Pile of Conflicting Emotions About Garbage

  [Companion 1 to Inside the Weather]

  Disgust, amusement, joy, curiosity, desire to uncover, pleasure, looking to garbage for clothing and entertainment not food, not yet. Can’t eat from it because I get paranoid that food is tainted or rotted or just gross, can wear the dumpstered clothes after washing with brief moments of paranoia because of their unknown origin. The origins of my phobia is clearly connected to the Tylenol murders, I had to check each food item carefully for taint around that time. And threw much into garbage. Bradley, our squatter hero, knows to comb out the good to eat garbage.

  An Inventory of an Elaborate Pile of Garbage at 2nd Ave. and Second St. June 1, 00

  [Companion 1 to Inside the Weather]

  Blacken tea kettle like one I have at home, couch with living man, eyes closed, his dog and runny dog shit on sidewalk. Cardboard boxes, lamp shade, the filter basket of a Drip-O-Later, a wooden serving tray with loose bottom. A mouse’s body with eyes open and intact. Styrofoam peanuts, 2 balsa wood whiskey bottle boxes, thin wooden fruit basket. Wooden construction walls with Post No Bills painted gray. A piece of paper ordering the closing of the Mars Bar garden. A man setting out 4 candles, and 2 sets of wrapped paper plates. A junkie couple, white, late 30’s, covered in scabs and tattoos with dog, had constructed a lean-to over the couch and slept that day. I thought about what brought them to this moment and thought “Be in the moment,” thought “Be here now,” thought “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Thought “Shit happens.” And began to think “Today is the first day of the rest of …” Thought, this could be the best day of their lives.

  Quipu

  Arthur Sze

  1.

  I try to see a bald eagle nest in a douglas fir

  but catch my sleeve on thorns, notice blackberries,

  hear large wings splashing water in a lagoon.

  I see a heron perched on a post above a tidal flat,

  remember red elderberries arcing along a path

  where you catch and release a newt among ferns.

  And as a doe slips across the road behind us,

  we zigzag when we encounter a point of resistance,

  zigzag as if we describe the edge of an immense leaf,

  as if we plumb a jagged coastline where tides

  wash and renew the mind. I stare at abalone eyes,

  am startled at how soft a sunflower star is to touch,

  how sticky a tentacle of an anemone is to finger.

  When we walk barefoot in sand, my mind sways

  to the motion of waves. I notice bits of crabs

  washed to shore, see—in an instant a dog wrenches

  a leash around the hand of a woman, shatters bones—

  ensuing loss salamanders the body, lagoons the mind.

  2.

  Here a red horse leaned over a barbed wire fence

  and uprooted a row of corn; here chile plants

  rotted after a thunderstorm; here the force of water

  exposed carrot seeds and washed almost all away;

  but here two kinds of eggplants flower in a row;

  here peas, cucumbers, bell peppers, eggplants,

  tomatoes, melons, corn. Is this wave of flowering

  the arc of loss? She closes her eyes and aches:

  in a white room, the ultrasound picks up yolk sac

  and curled embryo; inside the space of a pea,

  a head, mouth, neural tube, brain stem, eyes;

  but it does not pulse or flicker with a heartbeat.

  Across the room they reach out, but to what?

  The room darkens as the screen ionizes, glows.

  He visualizes a series of photographic still lifes:

  polished tin doorknob against a black background,

  whale vertebra seen from afar against a black background,

  nineteen stacked pancakes against a black background,

  cluster of hazelnuts up close against a black background;

  and suddenly when he opens his eyes, he cannot hear.

  3.

  Who touched a quipu and made it explode into dust?

  What blooms as briefly as scarlet gaura in sandy soil?

  How incandescent is a grief?

 
; Did spun wool delineating the corn of the Incas obliterate in a second?

  What incipient white fades into pink?

  Did the knots of her loves jaguar in an instant?

  What is the tensile strength of a joy?

  Who observed a great horned owl regurgitate bones into the arroyo?

  What hides in the wave of a day?

  A single blue unknotted cord—what does it mean?

  How can the mind ply the forms of desire?

  From south to north, east to west: which length is greater?

  When is a koan not a koan?

  Who can unravel the spin of an elegy and counterspin it into an ode?

  Who whispered, “As is”?

  Where is a passion that orchids the body?

  Whose carded cotton fibers are these?

  4.

  7:14: red numbers on the clock incarnadine the time;

  he stares at the maroon jar of a kerosene lamp,

  the carmine batik hanging under a skylight.

  And when he drives home, the red at the stop sign

  is the bright red blood on a sheet;

  yet candles in the living room remind him of bliss.

  He has the urge to walk down to a spring-fed pond

  where he sits on a rusted bench, stares into water;

  tiny fish dart near; a green frog lifts its head;

  then a vermilion dragonfly hovers near irises,

  zigzags back and forth as if it weaves an invisible web.

  He guesses it eats mosquitoes and midges, though

  he can only see sunlight glint off its wings.

  The mind zigzags back—swimming in a tidal pond,

  they brushed jellyfish with their arms and legs—

  loops a red cord that records loss and loss.

  When he trudges back and closes his eyes,

  he is startled to hear a cricket chirp in the fireplace.

  5.

  When he opened the book to the page with quipu,

  he saw, through the underside of the sheet,

  the image of a quince. Sometimes the thing you want

  bleeds in the light. When yellow leaves dropped

  off a cottonwood, he saw, up high, a large nest

  and a magpie hopping from branch to branch.

  When he stubbed his toe in the dark, he flashed

  on how he dug his first matsutake out of the dirt,

  fingered brown scales on the cap and stalk.

  Now, as he looks into her eyes, he hears how

  two men, rescued in the Andes, suffered frostbite:

  one had his arms and legs amputated but is now

  moving with artificial limbs, while the other,