The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sat 5/12/2007)

[RetroLounge]

Zombie Sunday (a short poetical history of Spring)

Gentle handed holy father, or whomever,
I mentioned daffodils, and the crowd went wild.
I had them, briefly, nibbling from my blistered hand.
Then I called attention to the dandelions,
popping forth like sunny, tethered corks
from the busy lawn, and the crowd went
home. Lucky for me they left. Mine
was a short list of flowers beginning
with "d," and too late, skulking through the park,
did I recall the daisy, the dahlia,
too late did I invent the dog-wort
and the dwarf poppy. Modern ways.
April. Motorcycles have begun thundering
down the wet avenues like armored bees
slick with the shattered, puddled blooms
of fragrant gasoline and oil, and I've noticed,
from a distance, that in early Spring
the trees don't, all at once, jump to life
like you've read about, but gather to them
a smoky cloud of blue, like tall children
puffing on cigarettes, until, late April, they cough up
a few green leaves. That was my mistake.
Chaucer couldn't name his flowers, either,
or he could name them, but couldn't tell
them apart, or I missed it if he did. It was
Spring. I was involved, moaning in the hedge
and watching college kids whack golf balls
into the drive-in movie screen, which seems,
at night, across the field, like the forehead
of a giant, worried monk, bent over and tending
to his proliferating, moonlit vegetables.
Speaking of monks, I need to read
more Chaucer. Then T.S. Eliot, about
a hundred years later, wasn't he clever?
Bravo, Tom. I can barely look a lilac
directly in the "stamen," a word that never seems right,
no matter how I spell it, a word little more
than a word, if that. I think we thought
T.S. Eliot would ruin sex for the common
fornicator, Our Father, like you and me. I think we
guessed him sort of mortuary in the sack.
That, or (your theory) he was frightened
of the shadow of his penis, rolling unbidden,
like a scuttled go-cart, across the grooved sheets.
And the hyacinths, oh the hyacinths, a flower
I'd like to take by the pistil and fling, if only I could tell one
from a hydrangea, my second flower
beginning with "h." But about old master Eliot
we both were wrong. How like me he is.
I imagine him now, sucking flowers into the tunneled earth
where he riots like a cartoon gopher,
he was a petal hoarder. I much rather
would have slept with Williams, though he did
nothing for Spring, at least in the anthologies,
our able doctor, tapping out his poems
while a lithe America undressed in the little
examination room across the hall.
Read Williams in a paper gown, you tell me,
and all your dreams will come to pass.
But I forgot Emily Dickinson. We all
wanted to sleep with her. She was right
about Spring, if she wrote about it, and she
had those tendencies. My new neighbor,
homeless Jack, greets Spring with a holler.
Emily would have hated him. Me, too,
though she had a thing for abomination.
But what's Emily Dickinson got to do
with the price of methedrine, Jack might
ask. Bravo, Jack. And Rilke, Jack, Rilke was an "autumn."
The tree-line overtaking the movie screen
warbles. The aforementioned flowers,
all varieties, rise like European soccer fans,
and charge the field. Spring, you sent the rain
down this rented stretch of gutter-pipe
on the retched corner of Thomas and Lafayette.
The college kids whack arc after arc
into the monk's forehead, into the tree-line,
into the onanistic wave of oncoming
flowers. I wish I could welcome these days
when the blood begins its rolling boil,
and like a chef, in my palpitating white hat,
I could use the blood to cook a meal
that would finally please you. Daylily,
digitalis, delphinium, dianthus.

Josh Bell

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“Bell delivers on his promise to ‘burn the very Latin from the world,’ insisting on grief-stricken gutturals often undercut by wry or Dadaist humor that prove him to be one of the most tonally versatile young poets working today.”--Tanya Larkin, Boston Book Review

No Planets Strike, the debut collection by Josh Bell, reads as a playfully serious record of modernity. Subversive in their treatment of the contemporary voice, broad in their subject matter, and often delightfully funny, the poems in this collection have a brilliant ear language.

Josh Bell received his MA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and Paul Engle Fellow. He is currently the Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. His poems have appeared in such magazines as Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Hotel Amerika, Verse, and Volt.


****************

RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[xchrom]

1. i used to get good qualudes from siu-carbondale.

good poem too.

[RetroLounge]

2. I bought the book on the suggestion of a bookseller

at the local indy book store. I was totally blown away by it.

Then I saw him read his poetry at the same store and became a fan.

:hi:

RL

[xchrom]

3. he's really good retro.

i can see the dada stuff.