Check out what our old pal Joseph O’Brien’s been up to!
“Quel Giorno Più Non Vi Leggemmo Avante.”
March 5, 2019 by at 1:39 pm
—Inferno V.138
We lean above the book and fateful page
And lean into its words. You speak. I hear
The husked seeds split, and they bleed down the page:
You tuck a strand of hair behind your ear
And strings that knit the constellations twinge
Like mandolins beneath the earth —so near
Commingled shade and soil to unhinge
The grave; yet far as moonlight in a pond
That blinks with nightjars rippled on the wing.
Though grassy spring now shimmers green with frond
And shoot within your eyes, your beauty stares
From violet shadow, Cimmerian, beyond
The swallowed source of bowered light that flares
Within your eyes. They tear my heart away
With a single glance. Eurydice wears
Your smile — anticipating hope, yet fey
As autumn apples dropping from their limbs
Will roll, gather into gullies, and lay
In wait: a sudden winter rain floods and brims
The world in multiples of fallen time,
The same that fuel in sullen throb the hymns
Of Orpheus, hemorrhaging grief in rhyme.
But different tunes ignite our desire’s root –
Their trace, emerging vines that merge and climb
The walls within the halls of Hades. Mute
And vanished as night, yet here you remain
A muse that breathes her fire upon a flute:
The pomegranate and its crimson stain
Upon your lips, at dawn, upon my lips —
Yet I am sure of nothing but the train
Of Venus, gown of ebony which strips
This morning’s meaning, held out as a gift.
My tongue takes these words as one, but trips
Upon your name. I hear each quench and sift
It murmurs, blown upon the wind, and us
With it, now bound by cords, now set adrift,
Regret our only landfall, tremulous
Desire our only compass – this final page,
The desperate map that charts us in our loss.
You arch your back and lean into the page
Again, again I dare to lean as near —
And further — but no farther than this page,
The compass needle driving through the air.
Second Time Around
October 6, 2018 by at 10:54 pm
Ignoring an alarm
leads only to more alarm.
I cannot learn
what I am unable to learn.
Answering the question
“Do you believe?”
ends in questioning the answer,
since to simply believe
is never enough …
may it be enough.
Google Alert: Catholic Arts Today
January 26, 2018 by at 12:35 pm
The good people at the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship could not help but cast a curious eye on the strange and shadowy world of Catholic art, and for whatever reason, they saw fit to take note of my little poem “Leaving.” I’m tickled pink.
Fathers and Sons
January 21, 2018 by at 9:00 pm
ADDED: A primer for those who don’t know why NYFG fans hate the PEs (and, yes, of course, the NEPs too.
ADDED: Exhibit A & B.
How I Feel Now that Philadelphia (“Ptui!”) Is Going to the Super Bowl
There is the boy and there are the certain facts of boyhood
(Though nothing autobiographical
Is ever really deduced, is ever really reducible).
Yet the boy’s whole story is as any boy’s life, full
Of moment and followed by others, messily progressing
Along in the plain old myth-telling style.
There was the boy and his father — a fact which must go
Unverified as a creature’s cause. That which didn’t
Make self, though, inherited at least this knowledge:
There is the father and the son – met in boisterous love of sport
Which welded the lessons of thunderous anger
And the sadness hidden in laughter’s cloudbanks.
The boy’s hand consumed in his father’s, they would walk
The yard, policing November’s washout of light;
Spring would arrive only later in the Sun’s cult.
But now was the time to take all of creation into account,
To find the faults in the earth where hide the virtues
Of fathers, to corral the sins of the sons with a hard stewardship.
In these wintry days, the son played Icarus with his father’s
Crafted matchstick ships, motorized by cleverness;
Or played Phaeton pilfering matchbooks and cigars; or Ganymede
Holding the cold brown bottle of Olympia beer for
Father Zeus watching Sunday football, weighing and sighing
In the gridded and hashed balance of his favor-fought heroes.
Thus, Zeus’s gaze fell shadow-like on the U.S.S. Missouri’s
Jacked keel, but withheld just punishments for playing
Fire’s innocence, and hounded the N.Y. Giants weekly battles
Against his patience – all things that youth reaches for
In the hardened hands of time, the works and ways
Of which the golden scales tip in a boy’s growing favor.
Elsewhere
December 26, 2017 by at 10:55 am
Korrektiv is gearing up for a great and productive 2018. (It’s good to let publishing start-ups lie fallow every few years, planting only word-fixing crops like JOB’s poetry to replenish the creative urge.) In the meantime, Friend of Korrektiv and Wiseblood wizard Joshua “Word Bird” Hren has a new poem up over at First Things. Read it, and then raise your hand if you had to look up “numinous” to make sure you had it right. Now raise your hand if you had to look up “logikēn latreian.” Søren says, Raise your hand.
“One of Those”
September 19, 2017 by at 11:07 am
FOR JOHN LYON, ON HIS 85TH BIRTHDAY
Some say the cocktail’s genesis
Was — fiat decoctae — New Orleans:
The Sazarac, wry antithesis
Of Northernmost mixorians.
Some say it claims Midwestern root
In sipping supper clubs that branded
The Brandy Old Fashioned—and put
As paid the spirit tongues demanded.
Some say the how and when of it
Was sourced more cosmopolitan—
A toast to Peter Minuit
Who drank the first Manhattan in.
But whiskey, bitters, wine and fruit
(As democracy often shows)
Will always win the local vote
Decocting taste with “one of those.”
Grace of God and raise your arms…Flood!
July 22, 2017 by at 9:59 pm
So we had a flood – and thought it was a good time to have a craw boil, Nawlins style….
Potatoes, 10 minutes; Chicken thighs, 5 minutes; Corn 3 minutes (after return to rolling boil); crawdads, 3 minutes; Shrimp 3 minutes; sausage (what the hell!). And finished off with Peychaud-laden (five dashes!) Manhattans (actually, at that point, frick! – might as well call them Birminghams!). Then cigars and port wine and conversation. Not a bad way to face the flood.
Four-olive Martini: A Minor Drama, Last Call
June 17, 2017 by at 6:48 am
Your eyes are drained as sapphires lost in blue
And ice. The frown your face is wearing tells
An adequate counterpoint to the tap
Of painted nails now playing up and down
A crystal stem. What is holding me from you
Maintains for us our several separate hells.
Our share in the punishment—your sullen lip
Against the rim, my olive quarto on
A cocktail spike—each rings as clear and true
As Gordon’s and diamonds (or Seagram’s and pearls).
Delivering the sudden burning sip—
The winter sting that splits us skin from bone—
“To each our own!” I say, and know it’s false
But wish to cut the crap with a little gin.
To Arena
May 29, 2017 by at 1:24 am
Corpus mortale tumultus
Non tulit aetherios donisque iugalibus arsit.
– Ovid
That day the beach crept up on us,
The tide a sideshow of seashells,
We began our sunburn early,
Soaked in warm beer against curly
Sails, a regatta of tassels
Thrown to a chalky blue chalice
Of sky. We drank and drank it in,
Your eyes going crazy with thirst
And whispering about your art.
I sought to touch your skin to sort
Out my feelings. Worse came to worst
And you dozed off mid-sentence, slain
By cervezas, college finals
And sand-strewn immortality:
So California left its mark—
White underbelly of a shark.
The running surf made us dizzy
As it swirled beneath us, runnels
That heralded a tidal wave.
Except it never came. Instead
Your white one-piece provoked a flush
Desire upon your slumber. The flash
Of flesh, your tapering thighs, fed
My eyes, a hurt longing that drove
Me out well past the surf. Earth’s curve
Swallowed up a ship to its mast,
And swam me to shore to search for
More than Crusoe’s evidence, more
Than Friday’s footprints…. I lost
You in the crowd—and lost my nerve
When I found the beach blanket bare—
As if you’d been absorbed and left
No farewell, except sun and shade
That marked your place. With sunset tide
As my witness, the shifting sift
Of sand had scattered you anywhere.
Na Muintir: Three Fragments
March 17, 2017 by at 10:17 am
(The Coming of the Gaels)
Let us sing of the coming of the Gaels,
Three tribes like three streams, wandering
Across the wide lands of the East and South,
Across the roaring body of seas, land
Of foreign powers and ways weird to Eire.
From there came the Milesians though last
In order, first in war and rule.
These were met
By bristling Firbolg and mighty Tuatha Da Danaan,
When to these the Milesians beat their path.
All three were kin of Celt’s blood, who before
The singing of songs separated to become
One tribe, they of whom we now sing our tune,
The triple-headed river of wandering men,
Come from the East, the Gaels, warring down
To the peace of a single river’s flow: the Gaels.
First the Firbolg came, and they from Hellas,
Long enslaved but cunning in their escape,
Capturing the ships of their veteran masters,
Outrunning the curses of Manannan MacLir,
They managed a beach head, and thereby good fortune
Until the Fomorians, tribe of rovers,
With a stronghold on Tory Island, waged big war
Coming down like birds of prey, across
The cold grey seas, white-tipped with chill wind,
Come down from the Island of Tory, northwest.
Because of the Firbolgs, the Fomorians would work
A petty worry in the wake of the Tuatha De Danann.
So came next these clever and skillful folk.
Awed by the finery and execution of artful works,
[Read more…]
Gerasene Farm
February 12, 2017 by at 2:24 pm
– for D.F.
“What do you want with me…?”
“We pigs are brainworkers.” – Napoleon
“Who is going to save me?” – Wilbur
Sundays during slaughter time, when work and days
Are a matter of acres and seasons, pink flesh
And exposed blue-white bone
Are surely signs of progress—satisfaction—fertility.
And when autumn begins to spit snow from its mouth
We’ll fire up the fifty-gallon drums for boiling skin
From the herd. With our blue knuckles now scalded red
We’re allowed to pretend we know Odysseus’s swineherd.
He’s a neighbor, say, who might need to borrow a pritch,
Lend his spare block-and-tackle or resharpen a bell scraper
On our millstone.
And that’s when Monsignor comes by to bless it all
One bullet at a time. It doesn’t take long after we call
And he’s there almost immediately.
There’s no dying soul,
No family grief; it’s all just business. “Tail
To snout” he likes to say, quoting from some other good book.
So Monsignor takes off the blacks and Roman collar
This Sunday, leaves them back at the rectory
And dons red buffalo plaid and tattered bibs.
“Scares the devil out of the herd,” I once heard him explain
“Don’t like black or maybe they just know.”
Flexibility
Is one of his strong points.
This day is full of a sky
Afflicted with a tin-foil glare from broken clouds—
It’s the day he’s chosen to come help because
He generally likes the business
And specifically on a Sunday. “Not unnecessary work.
A form of relaxation, I would call it.”
He grew up downwind of a giant swine operation
And of course raised his own and has some opinions on swine.
He knows his pig flesh, alright, the way
A horse trader knows teeth and hoofs.
Monsignor lowers the blue-barreled gun,
A pistol without history – it knows neither wars nor duels
But only a resting place between hunting seasons.
He stares the hogs down, and anoints
Their lives with purpose, cruel
For business, and kind but for no kind of fun.
Afterwards, he walks back to his car
To clean the muzzle and chamber.
Throats cut, they wait
With us for his return.
We don’t let him near the boiling pot.
He’s no good at that part.
But he has a great eye
For parting flesh with a .45.
And maybe for that reason he was made a Monsignor,
But when he scalds the flesh he scrapes too much flesh with the hair
And very little hair with the flesh.
We politely
Put him off to visit with the children
Or maybe put a beer in his hand and tell him to rest a bit,
Though rest isn’t in his nature anymore than
It is in the clouds that scud like corpuscles across the sky.
He was born on a farm and to hear him tell it he fought
Half the day with earth and flesh, the other half,
All blood work.
If given half a chance he could shine
Like the best of rural vicars and squires.
At any rate, his place in literature
May one day be secure—
Interpolating experience and innocence
With marksmanship and common sense:
“Pigs are a good investment—nothing wasted if you do it right.
Efficiency is in the nature of swine.”
“Why else,” Monsignor would add, “would the desperate demons
Of Gerasene plead with our Lord. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’
You can almost hear them say. It must have been a favor,
Well, maybe not a favor; more a false mercy, for our Lord
To provide that herd, that cliff, the sea beneath.
But there’s no mercy for demons, of course. That’s a figure
Of speech is all. Literature is full of them. But Scripture
Only uses it on purpose. No levity with that sort of business.”
Literature, indeed, I nod. Napoleon and Wilbur
Might talk past each other among the cold clouds
That gather and disperse in winter configurations above our heads.
But also in the sense that fictional pigs make of life and death.
It’s all fantastic friendships for nostalgia’s sake
Or a drudging work detail
To serve as footstool for naked power—
Pink flesh and blue-white bone for them—and sometimes for us.
But Monsignor? He doesn’t even bother to say–
And he gives it no more thought
Than a man of the cloth ought to be
Expected to do:
We watch him hold the pistol like an aspergillum.
And he anoints them both—Wilbur and Napoleon—
With one shot.
We were poets once and young…
February 8, 2017 by at 12:20 pm
…or younger, anyway.
So JOB was visiting the Dappled Things website, as one does, and he stumbled across this in the “featured poem of the day” department: a little ditty he composed a while back for some M.L. character…
I do so love “ogling theologians.”
[Image: Gargoyles at Notre Dame, and the Café Grotesque mascots they inspired.]
Hey, look at that—AP says I’m Trump Country!
February 7, 2017 by at 8:28 am
See me up there in the upper right-hand corner?
As Percy would say, I’m “validated” like the young man who sees his own town in a film or lights up William Holden’s cigarette without acknowledging that he knows Holden knows he knows who Holden is, etc.
(p.s. This is not meant as a provocation, so please if you have anything bad to say about the current president, I would refer you to previous dust-ups at this blog on that issue, which I won’t even link to because I don’t think it bears any relevance to this post. Here, it’s all peace and joy and I don’t really care what you think about the current president – I’m making a Percian point here, which is much more important.
As a smoking/meat-smoking friend of mine in California might say, “Oh, you don’t like my politics? That’s nice. Did I mention that I bake bread?”
Except in my case I would say, “Did I mention I make a helluva good Chicken Cacciatore and that I can make you a martini that you will never forget? Sit down right there at my kitchen table and I’ll stir us a couple, and then let’s light up a smoke—cigar for you? Perfect!—and cigarettes (unfiltered) for me. Let’s talk then about the beauties of poems that completely nail the execution of a perfect enjambment of lines, of women who wear their hair down, of early R.E.M. albums and whether they were meant to be concept albums in the tradition of Pink Floyd and Yes but tinctured with a Southern Gothic ethos, of love in a time near the end of the world, and of children and how, one way or another, the little dears are going to get you out of bed in the morning. Yes—oh, and how’s your drink? See? I told you so….Cacciatore will be ready in about 20 minutes. How ‘bout another round?” )
What Came in the Mail
February 7, 2017 by at 2:38 am
From JOB, for Christmas … with a note that perhaps I have an affinity for Eastern Europeans, to which I can say, Yes, I certainly do. I hadn’t read much of M. Codrescu. Know of him primarily because of his NPR gig, of course, and something he’d written in connection with New Orleans. Leafing through the table of contents, the title “dream dogs” caught my eye, which turned out to be a good choice because it is (a) short, and (b) consists of lines that are entirely left-justified, which is makes reproducing it in this post much easier.
dream dogs
years ago it was easy to dream of wolves
and wake up your lover
to show him the blood on your hip.
the wolves had ties
and followed after every sentence
rather polite.
now there are police dogs
using tear gas and the lover next to you
doesn’t wake up.
ME: I like it. Thinking that it must have been written with a woman in mind, I flip back a few pages and learn that it’s from a section named for a former wife, Alice Henderson-Codrescu. Naturally, this interests me, and so I read a few more.
reverse
the storm outside
must be the kind you read about in the newspapers,
killer of babies and bums.
the kind of rain that goes in the subway
when i hold on to the coat of a fat man
whose disastrous life
makes me happy.
ME: Not much to do with the wife, as far as I can tell, but the alliteration in “babies and bums” catches my ear, and the schadenfreude my heart … although I’ve put on a few pounds this last year, so …
zzzzzzzzzzzz
i want to touch something sensational
like the mind of a shark. the white
electric bulbs of hunger moving
straight to the teeth.
and let there be rain that day over new york.
there is no other way
i can break away from bad news
and cheap merchandise.
(the black woman with a macy’s shopping bag
just killed me
from across the street.)
it is comfortable to want
peace from the mind of a shark.
ME: I like this one, too, although I don’t have much of an idea about what it means. The title leads me to suspect it is perhaps a version of a dream he’s had, and now I wonder whether all of the poems in this section are based on dreams, since we have it in the title of the first poem above, and the imagery in each of the poems has sort of chaos we often experience in dreams. The lower case letters bring to mind W.S. Merwin, but Codrescu’s poems contain a great deal more of life as most of us find it. He isn’t trying for the sublime in every line, and in fact seems to be trying to avoid anything that might signify portentousness. So yes, I like it. Not as much as JOB’s own poetry, but I’ll be dipping back into this volume until I see more from him.
Thanks JOB!
These Guys Want to Have a Few Words with You
Did you hear? Next Sunday, you ought to get drunk at Mass.
But in a sober way, of course.
That’s what the Liturgy Guys were saying during one of their recent podcasts.
But what do they know?