A cut-up poem assembled from the scraps of Bartleby, the Scrivener
“Are you looking for the silent man?”
I am one of those touched.
I said something,
something in question.
“What do you think of
uneasiness?”
But he answered not.
He remained as ever,
a fixture in my chamber.
It might be,
I perceive,
his faults in myself;
the poor, pale, passive mortal.
It’s a zine about lots of stuff, including: art, architecture, poetry, photography, the South, Tallahassee, ghosts, and nature.
I made it.
I hope others will help me make the next one.
Edit: this poem was published at The Lake, a fine online journal of poetry and reviews. Please check it out there and read all of the other amazing work!
On General Pershing Street
the crows eat Lo Mein
from styrofoam cartons
while down at the museum
of the Second World War
the Ardennes Offensive
plays on a digital loop.
The projectors over there
decode streams of numbers,
signifying suffering
in the dark forest room where
the sound of Howitzers exploding
among the artificial trees
tends to bore the children
down from the Midwest.
Tonight the Carnival Liberty
will carry those children
down the Mississippi River
churning quietly by
flaming oil derricks and
ghostly lights in the delta.
Roll, Jordan, roll
the old folks used to sing
down on the German Coast
watching dark blades churn
the oilblack current.
Black oil, the wings on the
Pershing Crows.
Rust on the wind.
Each day a new
old thing is peeled away
with a desiccant smile.
Zen, I’m told, is
the photons drying
the molecules to memory.
Tell the truth,
it’s stuff like this
that makes me take the elevator
instead of the stairs,
and stop at every floor.
Anyone here going up?
I ask, peering out into
darkening passages.
Fact is, somewhere up there,
I know not where,
the car will start
to come back down again.
“I’m with you! Here’s to Ourselves!”
Millions of eyes
Cover the ground
Your footsteps follow
You cannot recall where
The routes of the swallows
Who cut the air
Their wings a
wilderness of mystery
Thieves, illicit lovers
Grazing a pinnacle
Guttural howls
From cellars and lofts
Meet me there
Where at the lapis gate
Leaving the city
Riders sing soft
I simply want to be back home
a-eatin' flap-jacks, hash, and ham
With folks who savvy whom I am!
Here is a thing to consider:
if all that exists is in
our own heads
then, when you
lie your head down
next to mine
and wrap me in your
universal outlook
I exist within you,
a data point
among the millions.
And when you
catch me lovestruck
from the corner
of your eye,
there you are
in my universe, too,
orbiting the blazing center.
This thing will shake you
like a cosmic dog bone.
Everything you think
about who you are
is not a thing at all
but a passing phase.
All those true beliefs
like Pullman cars coupled to your ass.
They’ll be just as gone, too,
when this thing grabs you,
as the train at the crossing
when the arms go up.
When that cicada curtain comes down again
like the old shroud,
you will look down at your hands and ask,
Where are those precious things I held for so long?
This thing will make you
mix your metaphors and lose the train.
I’m telling you
it fucked me up.
When I was young and sleepless
I imagined opening the window and
taking flight like one of the Lost Boys
twinkle-dusting into the night chill.
Slowly ascending over the flat roof,
I would embrace the oak outside the window
on its own terms, finally, and turn to face
The great sodium lamp world.
And then southward I would plot a course,
Wind sweeping away my terrestrial cares
As, above the elementary school, rising,
I might rejoice for a moment at the majesty of time.
On a trail once, I saw a tree which
should not have been, a magnolia
in the pine flats, by the influence of
some creature planted out of place.
I gave that tree a name, and when I
can’t sleep the name crosses overhead
like Radio On in the darkness static
a nebula of memory flashing to quicken me still.
Und die blumen von meine Magnolien
sind Weiß in der raum dunkel
like footlights in the gloom
shining daylight past in the room.
Like magnolias, too, we bloom in the dark
putting out flowers brown by morning and
passing ancient signals through the
rhizomous earth from which we came.
It is the same earth to which we return and
what more can we ask of the soil mysterious?
Let it be together, we might ask,
let us glow together like blooms in the hunter’s night.
I. Summer
Somewhere summer is gold, I’ve heard
but here it is gray as tired earth.
Like light mysterious to the prism,
so all it is nothing.
I pity those near the mouth of the den
embroidered with ceaseless energy.
By day by light accosted,
at night by heat exhausted.
To witness is to fall
short of empathy.
Where, then, are the fairy tales of haze gray summer,
Of dog days beneath crackling pines?
C.B. Crenshaw 