saunter right up like they’re going to speak
before shearing away, cut against my edge
I’m a mite shorter now
‘fore I started whittlin’
still it can’t be found
what the hell
kiss me sweets
I’m a man
no more
let’s follow this one down, let’s sneak out
in a dawn of smoke and mist
hold my hand
my eyes are closing
obviously are best, but a bit clean for my pride in
recoveries from serious twistings. Barely bruised, I ain’t
showing nothing, life goes on. Just the other day I was saying to
my mate, cher, my love--best o' my hopes o' being good—-lead on,
sugar. I’m right on your tail. So to speak. But,
now you mention it, we’re a pair for drowning, hey,
or dragging through centuries of rot and ruin to get
up here in each other’s arms on such a morning.
the standard line about the fish being shot; it seemed even
if all hope was silly, it didn’t matter. How could anything be,
except: just as it all is? One way, Jose. That said, wrap me up,
baby, take me up in your chariot, let’s head to light.
I was out the other day, a bit keen inside, eating away at
what ain’t much left; at the wind rising I still thrill,
tip to toe; it’s about as good as can be. Well,
we’ll see.
So long, Howling Wolf; goodbye to all that
was the only word. I felt it when you popped
back to the surface like an eardrum going out
into air. The way when we gathered
at night, the stars would sneak right up
behind us. What’s passed can’t come any
closer. At least we’ve got this.
was pouring me over. Languorously, it filled my passages,
making spillways of memories, all the while pulling me down
onto something like you. Something like me
can’t be sure of an awful lot. Little stands long.
A few of the citizenry came out for my extolling.
No one I knew or recognized showed, but it was nice to
give them somewhere to go. I certainly had nothing
pressing now. I should do something about that drip.
Christ, could I get some slack? On my right
my noble friend writhes for no more than
insurance—should I not last the price of
a ticket. Representing the left-hand path
and similarly strung here at Eve’s rib’s side,
and symbolically offered in payment for my
own murder, a mere hapless and utterly
claimless passerby. Black Maggie labored
into full dark of a second day to tattoo
across my smashed insteps a number
where she could be reached, were it to
come soon. And that gal’s got prospects.
how just when you get traction, you slip
and go down hard, wincing mostly at
the stab of being old; what’d happened?
This epic tale has nothing to offer me, I
died being born and I've been trying to
come back ever since; I don’t see a choice.
Nevertheless, now and then, you get a moment.
Often enough to keep you panting for it.
Any of it;
what could be said was beautiful and had
great heart for having nerve to try.
different suns. Last night Andromeda was splayed
pole to pole. I’d taken a bottle on deck, and somewhere
around Antares, I sunk deep inside and lost all sense of
having been committed. I could barely remember
what was important. What was? I’d been asking since.
Bit and pieces, mostly, here and there
you break a tooth on bone. But it's
never soft enough from here for me,
tonight or any.
but not doomed. That fate lies in our laps.
What fresh wind seeks to scour us of our sins,
this time for the ages, which, depending on who’s talking
may have been some considerable time. Minions,
age and death, and the whole round of holy gods
cavorting like fauns, bold before our witherings.
A few score among us were rife with it.
You could spit on the rest.
The peasants are hungry
for inspiration.
Last night we crossed Van Diemen’s;
tonight we take Berlin.
The world today is not new.
O, stale sky, pearl!
The Man turned out to be so much
less than his mate.
Balkan countries and Russia
have awesome new energy. Goodbye,
west imperialists, swine,
pederasts, thieves;
we all lined up for Lenten.
Jesus didn’t die
for Patti Smith’s sins,
but for mine. Which
I didn’t mind
in the least, by the way.
I’d had a gut full o’ both o’
them sissies.
unfurled; He reached for her. It didn’t matter.
Nothing could die. They’d just keep going.
Forward. In a word. The problem actually
is in finding a word to suit the situation.
Some problem. O well, it has been suggested
in some quarters that even this
is not enough! Baby!
were less sure of themselves each time challenged to
produce their bona fides; a body needed more than those
fakers to face front. O well, keeping score wasn’t Kool.
They’d be excused.
this morning; after noon hour, a sestina. By dinner, I was deep
into a French villanelle I’d come up against at the slam.
I felt more like corrugated cardboard than ever before,
soggy as well, I don't want to die by burning.
I don’t think I’ll get a choice.
The landfill for this kid.
He’d seen it coming since the beginning. He had to go
all the way down. He knew that. Not why, though.
It hardly mattered, certainly wouldn’t change
a single thing. And still the devil to pay.
Let him take it from the bone.
is more trustworthy than Glad, that gone-in-a-minute fuck. Give me
strength against shade, I ain’t no frolicking puppy, I’m no wet-nosed
youth, nor ordinary dipshit. They say watch out, pride coming before
a fall and all, but where’s the strategy in sucking hind tit. So, I’m going
long. I’m going where the fear is, where you cry for your mama
and nobody answers. I don't want to be a hardass but I’ve got to
cut my own furrow, one that turns up the snake before it gets up
your leg, one that speaks my crooked mind true. I’m a fallen
angel, and that’s a fact. I went where no one ever goes. Christ,
you should have seen their shit-eating faces. Even a fallen angel
kicks ass among a bunch of skull-fucking demons.
it was as if always they’d known how it would go on;
the grand nieces and nephews were long dead. How
they’d hung on to life no one could imagine. Anyway, they did,
year after fucking year till everyone else was gone.
That’s when he looked at her; she was right beside him.
Gray, sucked in a little—not much—a bit, enough to register
the passage as a weight pulling at the face’s lift towards
something that would make it all worthwhile.
Baby, give me a leg up, show me the wool. A faint scent
of what we’re about has been barely perceived by the
mass of men, you can hear them below, gathering with
their axes and ladders. Tell me true, darlin’ is it love for me
that turns your clock, that digs into you and stays forever.
for vegetables
that’s for sure
but I’m good at
brushing my teeth.
I never clean my room!
I do bathe frequently
and I value authenticity,
not its imprimatur.
I’m a drug addict
a pervert and a wino
but that’s my doing,
not my mother’s
love like a truck. Lick the loadstone with regularity
at first, then speed up. I got wisdom’s never been written
nor even repeated, I know how to write a score. I know
the last thing ever will be you gasping your love.
And I know how to load the implement, hand her over, there,
shorty. I went down early in a dirty fight, liked it there, thought
I’d avoid a passle of mischief staying out of the way like that. Then
she come along with her needs and issues and cunt and all.
from all persons
I’m not exaggerating
it’s a secret martial arts technique
it’s the space in matter is
what it’s made of
it’s what runs the stars
it’s what gathers our thoughts like silver arrows
and nestles them gleaming among
the plush roses of the heart
as if
they could at last
be birds
Bowed across a bridge about to go was a man, one man,
one woman beside him, one child lithe of limb; in back
the death procession barely moved, moted eyes cast down,
but I watched as they slid somehow brisk across the field where
were strewn the enemy dead of both sides. All were handsome,
all were young. All were dead, as I said. I didn’t say how the woman
had a faraway look about her as her skirts brushed the grit
from the already heedless faces. The kid was down the road.
The glistening silvery tang broke like icicles all over our laps,
what could you say? Hit me again with the medicine, medic,
I knew your shortfall before I asked, so don’t give me your
fucking mercy. Give me a reason not to wring your scrawny neck
with one good arm. If there is one. The smoke from their foundering fires
bit at the eyes so fair strong, you could barely make out their broken line
where they’d stood till they’d fallen, rags blown off a line, tumbled
into a tale writ mainly in horned callus and sweat.
he could stay for a drink,
he couldn’t tarry. Then,
one more, then he’d go.
Well, another for the road
was all it took to take
Harry beyond any of our
poor helpless hearts’ ways
to help him. So he died.
they came by with gruel which I disdained having been raised on meat
starch and vegetable. I grew exceedingly thin before fall reached winter,
I fell in a faint before my girlfriend when I was released. She generously
brought me to her sumptuous home which you see before you here. I wasn’t
long for this world when she saved me, I was off the fucking track and
headed straight down, as in smelling the smudge. Heat rises sure enough and
it was up my nose into my brain before I could get the cloven hooves tied off.
Later, I was waiting for a grape being peeled for me by this same gal,
the one from the movies, the brunette with love on her breath and
my finger digging in her for pearl. She’s a honey.
through where we’d already been enabled us to get a reading
on where we were headed, I didn’t need no psychic to tell me
we’d been here before, it wasn’t willing then either,
this smacks of suffering, that incessant gnawing
by the living of its own internal parts, the disappearing into
what had been, but now just wasn’t. There was only this
one shining thing, with my name on it, and yours.
had been discovered deep within 1.06 x 10 to the
twenty-third billion tons of exploding hydrogen.
No one else had thought to look in the nuclear core of
the Sun. The only One.
What could be more obvious?
Possessing a mind every bit as devious in upending order
as a craps-shooting Creator, betting it all, because he can,
I simply interpolated his original extrapolation of our basic
need, minus the obfuscation.
I get that it burns.
I knew would come. Another lift up over the twisted beeches
on the far side of the hill. The dark side where the sun only
slants in a parody of generosity even a flatlander like me could see
through. I’m ankle deep in a deer pond with a mission on my mind.
The first time I went up the hill the old ones marked me for
their own. Roses it was, now only thorns, and those gnarly
silver knots that they use like arms, if not legs. I was halted
in my progress by a gentleman cloaked in gray. I couldn’t see
no face, a stingy sun was sucking up to the town folk, it felt like
sleet slashing my face, but that was just them fucking beeches
feeling feisty. I had my bags, my seeds, I’ll grow in woods where
no sun is welcome, I’ll let the dark close in around me.
could be easily overlooked. It has been before, which was a good
thing when I couldn’t hit the near side of right with a pool cue.
I did try exactly that stunt one time. Fortunately I missed. And
I swear it won’t happen again.
Where was I before I was so fucking wise? Down every shit-sluicing
opportunity I’ve found a new low. So far, I can’t break from what’s been.
Why does everyone know my name? And, tell me, sister-never-to-be,
where’s your filial piety if you’re with this outfit?
I’ve seen latrines with more decorum and august majesty. Still,
I’d go for you even beneath a shitter. I ought to know, having
been there. That’s literally, ma’am, I’m not proud to admit.
It was that old dirty job that somebody had to do. Like the rest of
this that’s marked me so vilely.
catch hold, somewhere, trying to grab that golden rail which might
put me on top of my game again. Busted out instead and meager leavings
are all that remains of the winged chariot I was driving last week.
That motherfucker was a ride!, I’m saying. I nearly couldn’t buck its
current like it wanted. I nearly caved.
But like a champ I stepped up. For a while I was sustained
by its arc, for a while I was somebody, now I’ve got to have it.
Give it to me, let me be the one to say it in sky—or blood, dirt,
or stone. I’m truly worthy now. I admit, before I was not what I should
have been. It’s not my fault, though, you know. People have gone
to great lengths to subvert me. You know only my assaults, my bendings
of the tired into tricks that won’t pay up front, that want
on their own to know their name is written along your arm,
or under your lip. Well, the wine-dark sea still rolls. The cerulean
comes to my call. I’ve bare begun my mark across these centuries but
were I to die this very day, I’d go well.
are always a surprise
like the clap
less so herpes
which may be
a life sentence
but hey, it beats AIDS
yeah man
feel my muscle
see me bleed
it was hot
bad
dangerous
funny
stupid
or anything
else you can think of
I just want to
be where you breathe
of being incapable
of beginning a sestina
without saying fuck
which is so ridiculously untrue
I can hardly mount a defense
in fact I can’t
so believe what you want
history will bear me out
and out of Babylon
spitting fire
we came
with our ears open
and eyes
fresh as a babe’s
to see if it was true
God had come down
and he was in the park
illuminating people
left, right and center
which I didn’t want to miss
give me the shortcut anytime
I don’t care if it works
just give it to me
well. it didn’t work
until the next time; I tripped.
it worked then
were legion
everyone had
spirit guides
up the wazoo
what made her ass special
was her
that’s all
pass the peas
if they had,
you wouldn’t be reading this;
woman, did you weep
when you thought I was gone?
maybe I don’t look like so much
on the outside,
and it’s probably true
that I’m a cruel and lying coward;
I happen to be working on just that little thing
at exactly this moment;
what’s my deadline?
kill yourself to write a poem
fuck what could be easier
repeat after me
my mind is a musical instrument
it thinks mainly in rhyme but
strictly in rhythm
however you spell it
it drives
the smoke from their fires rose and
twisted across the sky,
in the distance, you could feel
thunder. We fed the horses and
clawed down some jerky and laid down
to rest our bodies if not our souls;
we were all dead by morning.
I mean, I guess we were; the new morning
never came, I mean, it didn’t seem to,
at least not for me, so I
naturally assumed that
we’d been murdered in our sleep
by wild Indians;
is that wrong?
My faithful fans once again get to sink their hungering into our unknown scribe (if you misssed Ch. 1, see September posts), again from these lost pages spilling around my feet
by
that’s where I’ll be, where the breath is drawn in through the heart, and seated
deep in a disappearing dot that never goes away. Where our names are all vowels
ending in glottal stop, surprise, or dismay; where not even the red fern can root,
there will be I, along by my cuse, a more low-down wench I’d never find
and I knew it.
Still, I’d been asked to provide suitable sport for one going grayer now
than the lowering sky over Akron, and there, my friend, is the pits. There,
not far out of town, ancient smelters go green and phosphor white in the
dusk of another man’s day. Not mine. Here, with you knelt between my knees,
smiling shyly, I begin to know
the true meaning of avocation versus work, it’s a calling, no argument. And no interruptions. Later, your cheeks looked rouged, eyes bright as two crystals
bigger than the whole damn world. Would we ever come up
for air? Or, break stride to say piss to whatever, whatever?
I don’t know about you, honey, but I’m hungry.
Woman say never meet a feller so down at the ground. Well,
I’m doing my best, chicken, I am.
--R Skogsberg
The Gallery at Mt. Ida College – Newton MA
Show: 10/23 – 12/9
Reception: Wed.,10/31, 5:00 – 7:00
Gallery talk with David Torcoletti and Denise Healy at 6:00
The extraordinary provenance of the photographs of Viet Nam War-era American servicemen in David Torcoletti’s show at The Gallery at Mt. Ida College, in Newton, confers an unassailable authenticity on their composite of image and effect. But though their visceral interface with the viewer emerges dynamically from an interaction and catalysis among the elements—context, effects, events—which, taken together, constitute their unique coalescence of complexity—each photograph has a stand-alone integrity from which no contextual element nor effect may be split off.
My first look had me reeling. The confluence of time and fate, the sweep of event smeared, as if randomly, across these young faces is quite too sad for words, if still no less than astonishing.
Make no mistake. These are not combat shots. These photographs have their origin in the hundreds of 2 x 3 inch b&w snapshots and 3 x 5 inch color Polaroids sent by American soldiers in Viet Nam to a South Vietnamese radio and television personality known professionally as “Mai Lan.”
Broadcasting to them for hours each night, visiting bedside in hospitals by day, she encouraged her listeners to send her photographs of themselves—and they did, by the hundreds, often signed, or with small notes of appreciation addressed to her; to one so endeared to them; one who, herself, would soon be forced to flee the geopolitical vise that was the unification of North and South Viet Nam.
Mai Lan escaped with only what she could carry, including a mere few of those hundreds of photos, and it was that passage from her war-torn country itself that marked them—and that brought forth this needful record.
Hastily stored, damaged by the elements in travel, in the effect of deterioration here’s a soldier whose face has been swept away—the crisp tunic, sparking insignia, and erect posture remain, as if he might return—here’s a group shot, eight or nine men, mostly smiling, young, insouciant, untroubled, one could believe. But fate has cut away its requisite percentage from their brotherhood, its vicious warping reclaiming any hope of recognizing who this one was here, or that one—someone once stood here.
The photographer makes no special claim of artistry for these photographs, attributing the power and complexity of the images to the effects of chemical disintegration and the passage of time. To that modest assertion, I would add the indelible imprint of the present moment accumulating context as it becomes history; that, and the keen eye and strong heart of David Torcoletti.
Mr. Torcoletti has said that in reproducing and enlarging these photographs (avg. 20” x 30”) he avoided creating any special effects—and that only to emphasize certain aspects of the image would he raise the contrast to spotlight a certain area of the degradation, or increase the color saturation to highlight an evocative stain or streak.
I’m thankful that Mai Lan, the donor of these images, and Mr. Torcoletti, by mere happenstance it seems, became acquainted, and that the artist had the remarkable eye to take in, as if in wide view, in those 2 x 3s, the symmetries translating these lives into the events they passed through; here is that record, one that in my view needs to be seen.
(http://www.davidtorc.com)
--R Skogsberg, 2007
Dang, I never thought you'd go so willingly, I thought you had to have a tougher hide than that. Just a word from me, and you're gone. Within two weeks of my nasty letter about that shit you published of Joni Mitchell, you really did step down (see ALICE QUINN and JONI MITCHELL right here in this blog). Well, it's for the best. You had a decent run. And I noticed a good pick once in a while, and it was always fun to lambast your hallowed name, along with that hopeless wanker Ashbery. Too much unearned praise and offered way too soon.
Muldoon's an excellent choice for your successor. Hey, I practically know the guy. I wrote him twice before, he wrote me back once. Just this morning when I dropped a little congratulations in his lap for taking over as new poetry editor of The New Yorker, in your stead, he wrote me back again. He's sure going to know my name, Alice; when you see it up there in lights, remember, I'm the one that brought you down.
--R Skogsberg
of the flame that scorched our leavings, we weren’t twenty
seconds gone. And in that small interval, it loomed before us like
a monument to love gone down and under; to where no man can say
whether when we began, we knew, or didn’t, what we’d come up with.
Reach around my neck, darlin’, I can kick enough for two. Lay your
soft neck over my shoulder and remember how it was, the way we
etched it into our skin, so we’d find it again when we’d lost it.
That ink is fading, instinct’s taking over. The new rule is
nothing, that’s all.
See my fingers twitching toward you? That's the best of my repose.
Which sounds good, but I need to move off these crooked stumps and
into your healing hands. May they guide us to safe harbor, or
at least to sand. I can crawl out. I done it before. So did you.
--R Skogsberg
is required of adventurers, lest their minds be lost in that dark
dot at the edge of the soundless scream, or taken by the heavy clatter
of the falling blade. Each of us is into it up to our elbows and knees.
Shame hot on our faces, we grasp the somehow still warm tatters of a self
no one could want, least of all anyone of this crew, which I can tell
has standards. I’m walking away from that cheap suit like class always does,
with ceremony.
--R Skogsberg
Lacking such specs and technical diagrams the best I can make out
is you begin here. I’m spread way across your future but here
we’ve not even met; we should probably make our way to a help center
as quickly as possible if you see one that isn’t abandoned. I don’t think
anyone is coming to straighten this out. We’ll just have to make the most
of the last few minutes. Stay alert and remember your training.
Look, already the stain begins to move. See its tendrils reaching to you
for a cure; we’re about to either disappear in a confluence of matter and
anti-matter or we’re off the charts and into completely new territory.
Either way I would pretend to be oblivious to their desperation. Otherwise,
they’ll get all worked up and getting them back into the jar in time will be
practically impossible. Better they sleep and dream and never wake
until next cycle. Look, just take the jar. I’m off until the end-days.
--R Skogsberg
Fans, I've got a real treat for you tonight. Every once in a while you run across a writer who's expression is transparent and egoless as water. I've found only four or five in a life long already, and the only one I can think of right now is William Maxwell, longtime fiction editor of the New Yorker. Anyway, the prose of these few is honest and flat as a damn day can stretch.
We become by our own natures, and theirs, their acolytes, urging them to speak for us in a way that we can't, at least out loud. Well, friends, I've found another. All I know about this piece is that it's one chapter of seven I have curled here at my feet, and it takes place sometime in the 80's on the streets of Burlington, VT, which, if you don't know it, is a sweet place. Six or seven colleges abounding, downtown a 6-block, no-cars strip with street performers packed end-to-end, live music from the clubs blasting from every window, and with plenty of ramshackle barely outlying ghettos to house its itinerant children. It can be a real groove in the summer.
And who is our unassuming scribe?
I have a name (a pseudonym?) on these crumpled, coffee(beer?)-stained pages. All I know from asking around is: he's supposed to be somewhere in his thirties by now, perennial vocalist in a thousand hardcore bands, an old-school romantic for all his fast-fleeted youth, I hear, who died again and again, like no quits, over every righteous woman he ever encountered. I've consumed this eventually truncated diary end-to-end, and every chapter gets better, that is, less nasty. Ain't that where we want our lives to head?
Enough from me, chickens, dig this:
by a wide ambling brook strewn with armful-size
stone dry as cactus and as dusty upside, but halfway
down, in deep shade, the watery underworld mirrored
multitudes of inverted blue mornings to us, trees spiking down,
as if to say, here you’ve been; what is it saying now but
into that disappearing will our individual selves chase the very
idea of it, which was revolutionary, forget a work of genius,
albeit unfulfilled? Until his death, then; and then did he reign?
Christ, they put his likeness on the penny of the realm.
Every time you made change you could see him there
like a heart out of its hole—in the night only may the
beast be slain, he could have told them any time
if they’d asked.
--R Skogsberg
Come now, into my vast store of worth, never spent nor even
seen around here. They take you for show, for spectacle, from
my strong arms going weak in a red dusk that flaunts my signature
move in its slow darkening, its inevitable
end. Here, darlin’ do you remember how we ended on a note so shrill
and cutting, for years after our tongues had sores? Those were the years
of undoing. These are the pay-out. The last time we walk these
sharp stones of what we’ve done to come clear to this breath.
Take my hand,
walk with me now where the stories mount to myth, where our stone
faces in the mountain find their tongues and shatter to gravel trying to
speak it true. Let us end in dust, who cares most and only for
another breath? We’re beyond that plain of tears.
--R Skogsberg
The Clash fucking kick. I haven't even
mentioned these boys yet.
When I do--get back!
he weren’t much. Still, we’d been through a lot.
I didn’t care. I was contemplating the death of kings.
You don’t want to be interrupted at a time like that, but
hell, I’m as accessible as the next man.
of creating relationships with authority figures in order to then
fail to honor their requirements is clearly one of my issues, plainly
a thing which I’ve been working on religiously through a number of
avenues. On the train, I felt sick. It’s not so bad now. Let’s get a cab.
Some handsome cart from among these will secretly pedal us in.
Once absorbed we won’t be detectable on the blood screen, nor in
the urine or the hair. We are the future. One should
stop at nothing in grasping it. The gloves are off.
My family against yours.
--R Skogsberg
