The Poetry of Allan King
Finalist: 2000 Campbell Corner
Poetry Contest
Quartet in
Significance
Miscellany
of Healing Prescriptives from the Ancient Analphabetic
Thunder
Into Lilies (a Cycle of Six Meditations)
Quartet In Significance
1. More Versions Around Something That Cannot Get Said
At dusk, dogs guard the gates
to each family's hell
and stars waste in the immemorial
fire-grammar overhead
exquisite and glacial
like psalms in a dying tongue.
Inside, people warm themselves,
trying to heal in the yellow chemical of the electric.
A moth begins to end at a window,
out-autumned and unable to recognize
other worlds on either side of this clear prevention.
In the morning, a child will collect it
in her tin band aid can with the remains of a dandelion,
wanting to relish the tantalizing velvet of its recentness.
It is probably her first coffin.
2. The Dead in the January Trees
children looking at our bones could never
tell these were once as quick
In the faintly smoky tang of pines,
rogue jays flash like bits of sky breaking free
and land blue in bare plum trees,
further instances of heavencolored dust.
The spongy earth underfoot absorbs
my sound as well as my weight.
Passengers everywhere, in the oceanic air,
in leaf and root and loam, and underground.
And the dead have remembered me so well, too.
The air from my throat burns into English
so true to their hunger in my mouth.
But I can't see them.
Sometimes I wake in the iron night
to their Ouija grammar:
Sorrowjim, the Ague-slaker --
Sing, lark-carcinoma, the skinmusic
of desire awry . . .
Something too deep to see is phrasing me otherwise
in the infinitesimal hourglassing
of rain and light and dirt
married into bark and sugar pine
as my lives are shed in the winter
of other thoughts, other languages --
future versions of selves surviving
and harvested in old words.
But I still can't see them
unless we ourselves are the visible
mirrors of their invisibility.
Looking down from the bare limbs
of a winter tree in water, who would mistake the branches
in the sky down there for roots?
3. Words
. . . not she whose skin perhaps I, of
all men, loved,
but a grammatical form . . . (Milosz)
Something laboring in words
must be heard
but can't get said.
Sprinklers on the lawn
at the magic hour:
the sideways light lets you see
how water vapor
silvering into its own absence
is light enough
to divulge the unfelt
breeze, signifying,
by this transient unbecoming,
the invisible.
The deficit of visibility
is invisibility.
Like the visible living and the invisible dead.
Yet theory rages.
Is a force to be reckoned
in particles or waves?
Particles and waves
are the residue
of an exorbitance,
an inability.
After a night of inhuman noise
something like a lion
approaches
and silence
spreads like famine
through the camp.
4. Snow Droppings
After snow
the arsenic world looks sleek
nude, muscular,
rational as a cougar.
Some years, in the thaw,
we find what’s left of a carcass,
after winter’s walked off
in its catastrophic velvet,
claws retracted.
How dangerous it must have been
to cross through such a virginal amnesia,
forsaking all hue and definition,
into that prurient hunger
for absence and purity,
wanting to be absolved of bodywanting
and the dark practice of lovely hurtings.
To let the language of footsteps disappear
tracing the other language
mute in the abundant white
amnesty of abstinence
as though edited by the snow’s strict intelligence,
the better not to hear what isn’t there.
Miscellany of Healing Prescriptives
from the Ancient Analphabetic
1. Cure For Burns
Create a mixture of milk and anything, such as a scab, from the woman
who has climbed
with you in the geography of your favorite, your most feared, your impossible
mountains.
While administering this, say, desire is a wilderness. Say, not really
burnt in the
wilderness but right here in the city. Say, cities flee me, yet I am
cities and their flight.
Say, not even in the city, really, but right here at home. Say, okay,
in the city, since even
home is not always home. Say, I have water in my mouth, a Nile of lies,
a soul radar in
my head, an incognito waterfall between my thighs. Say, I was screaming,
but I was
screaming for you, honey. Say, please don’t be mad. Say, I gave even
though I always
knew more would be needed than ever could be given. Say, go ahead, scream.
Say, I
was a map in the language of the withheld, a dyslexic threshold often
too perplexing to
visit, and say, I have come to extinguish the fire but I am the fire.
2. Cure For Lost Codes
Take paper. Burn. Scatter the ashes.
While doing this, say, theology of skindiving, planet of skydiving,
acre of swandiving.
Say, I will decipher this. Say, my body is more and less than the imperative
need for
oxygen, say, I will risk it in the throes of gravity and in your body
despite my better
judgement, say, I know I will fail but am nevertheless not prepared.
Say, you take my
breath away. Say, words shine, are legal tender, but do not break my
fall, do not alleviate
the descent. Say, without even trying my words make you kind, make you
mad, make
you silk. Say, I was on the verge of vanilla, panic my body suit, a
forest fire in my pupils
and ears. Say, I don’t know why I’m overtaken by the glossolalia of
tongue-logic and
godtalk. Say, I say what I say because I don’t know how else to do it.
Say, help. Say, it
as many ways as you can.
3. Cure For Voices
Imagine the brain paste of your rector in the third grade, for it is
he who crippled you
with penance. Mix the memory of it with honey, for it is also he who
made your body a
pod of angels. Place over your eyes so as not to be deceived by the
apparent.
While resting, say, bees are too obvious, their infantile industry,
their utterly incidental
largesse. Say, nevertheless. Say, her body is a pharmacopoeia. Say,
nevertheless. Say,
autumn grapes, say, Sonoma summers sequestered therein, say, mothers
kiss away
bruises blooming like blue delicious plums. Say, clouds floating like
algae, and a world
of traumatic fish below, but truly, nevertheless. Say, splintered glass.
Say, like sugar.
Say, sutures. Say, darling, nevertheless. Say, above all, darling.
4. Cure For Soul Making
Join together your molten pearl and her occult ova. This may be done
in the conventional
manner. Remember there is no conventional manner. Remember also, there
is no cure.
Say, I am so transparent in your inexplicable waters -- a tiny minnow,
viscera on display.
Say, I go forth into you, intending to leave myself, but you give me
back to one of the
future selves I have yet to become. Say, do not fear the dragon. Say,
I fear the dragon.
Say, what is it? Say, what are you? Say, your interrogations are dangerous,
stop calling
me into question. Say, I must stop saying I all the goddamn time. Say,
you. Say, you
repeatedly. Practice. The new soul will require this an infinite number
of times. The
new soul will start where you left off. The new soul, which is not yours,
will appear to
have wings. The new soul will not believe this. It is your soul’s mission
to persuade.
Thunder Into Lilies (a Cycle
of Six Meditations)
1. Out of Body Travel
Under paper lanterns trembling
like ghosts caged in dim, versatile fire,
Rosemarie licks salt
from the silver O of her glass,
her serious look martyred
in the transcendence of tongues.
She's remembering aloud the last days
of her father's dementia.
Crackers on the canal water
disintegrate in spidering fractals,
riddled by the perishing heritage.
Before long, we can hardly see anything.
Other voices around us seem out
of this world. Lamplight spills gold oil
on black water. Down there
in the dark largo of shade
and shapelessness, creatures stir in mud,
encumbered by the buoyant moon's
unearthly purchase. Like them,
the ache of other worlds in our bones.
2. Discipline
That was the summer I was finally convinced
she'd become another. The feather tree broke
out into pink flame, a grounded bird,
and each night indoors levied its starless
heritage of eatenness. I waited
for sleep with the involuntary discipline
of a blue patient hoping to be purified
by the night's dialysis. It was the summer
of honeysuckle, of star jasmine and late
orange blossoms -- sweet, intense, endurable.
It was the summer when I heard, one night,
the hand of Caleb's newly divorced father
needfully insisting on the skin of Caleb's back,
exacting previous ghosts from the future
of boy flesh before him.
I was a long time on the porch, listening
through the rain drops to the sounds of force
behind that door next to the bedraggled
feather tree sodden and bleached in the rain’s
bilingual genius for nascence and disfigurement,
before I began to suspect what might be
happening to us all, far, far, far, far from
the origins of rain in clouds which, after
much electrical complication and disturbance,
unburdened themselves in dark liquefaction.
3. Night Ward
Now that the moon is abandoned
to the metaphysics of frost,
the derelict hour reimagines my window
in a truant, a more transcendant silver,
letting the night blind me in blue coveting.
When you can’t sleep, you can triple
in the solitary arithmetic of absence
where one subtracted from itself
in the equation of anesthesia and surgery
still can’t solve your body, which is first
perjured in pain, then perjured in percodan,
making you an astronaut outside
the mothership of your own carcass,
unmoored and mortally in need
of gravity.
And why do you see the ones you need
so much more acutely in their absence,
remembering them more than they ever were
with you? Yet their manner lessens. I try
to remember Pamela’s face over the piano,
a bituminous continent further away
than Panama. The girl I couldn’t live
without. But what I remember is nothing
I ever saw – the way she was convinced
her mother planted pins in the bedroom carpet
on purpose, or why her shy smile never
got over its habit of hiding her braces
when they’d been gone for years.
I had to drop
her voice to the bottom of the soul pond,
the felled host pulled up barely recognizable now
in successful amnesia, since even the deepest
and hurtingest, the hardest anger,
like the most furious love, is at the mercy
of random weather and the lions of time.
The world is never given to us,
we are given to the world – the sky
lives up to its emaciations in granite, and
the planet’s strict occasions ferment oceans
into thunderheads, thunder into lilies.
After the bandages and tinctures, many talk
to the patient in the mistaken belief that
they are talking to one well known to them,
unaware that the patient has been visited by cryptic
inklings, bright voices misfiring
at the frontiers of syntax, and gorgeous
in their misfire. The patient has no time
now for mere words. The patient must listen,
not just to their cadence and cargo, but to their lapse.
As if a life were at stake. They way
your young grandfather must have looked
when what was left of him
finally emerged from the coalmines,
his basket full of dead canaries.
They were beautiful, but
it was by their quelled outcry
that he survived.
4. Nothing But His Wings
In one part of the city
a man chainsaws another man’s hand off.
This is a form of debt repaid in the drug trade.
In another part of the city, a man walks down
the bright sidewalk past gardenias and feather trees,
with a clear bottle of orange gel shampoo
in one good hand, and a white dinner jacket
wrapped in cellophane on a hanger in the other,
and this, too, is a form of debt
but can never be repaid.
One of my favorite songs is
Happiness Is An Option.
It is not easy, but happiness is an option.
The thing about so many men is
they have mostly everything
but act as if they’re preying mantises
perpetually under threat of the final female.
I have a friend who’s so used up her veins
she’s had to resort to her anus and finally
her neck. How can I describe her
if you saw her tapping her pinkie on the table
you’d think she needed to fix her nail polish
until you realized it wasn’t nail polish
but dried blood. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen
someone stick a needle in the side of their neck.
I’ll tell you something, though.
Sticking a needle in your neck is one argument
you’ll win everytime with me.
Tell me an addict has no choice –
stick a needle in your neck, case closed.
Tell me you fucking need 50 fucking dollars right fucking now!
Hold a needle to your neck, the money’s yours.
When she stabs herself that way
it pretty much looks like she’s trying to kill herself.
Sure, well, maybe not killing herself
so much as the necessary anesthesia before the surgery
of her life, so far not a very successful operation --
spiritectomy, egocision, neurilemma-on-full-grill.
She’s a painter. She’s like the queer ones in the old villages,
the ones singed by the ravening Unheard,
who are talking to someone, only no one can see whom,
and you can’t quite believe them but you can’t just lock them up, either,
because what if it’s true, what if something really is there.
Mighty is the voice of the Lord, his sacred voltage
setting angels on fire, which might explain
the epidemic of muteness and melting flesh,
which is pretty much what she paints
in kiddy colors like lemons and inflammable tangerines
and moo-cow purple, all in the service of adult dreams
about Molotov angels in the ignition of thundershod horses
licking ice cream among the hearses and radars.
She says painting gives her wings.
Anyway, she’s more like a preying mantis
than most men have ever dreamed.
In The Flamingo’s Smile, you can read
L.O. Howard’s description of a male and female in a jar:
after having his front tarsus bitten off, the male
began to make vain endeavors to mate.
The female next ate up his right front leg
and then entirely decapitated him, devouring his head
and gnawing into his thorax . . . All this while
the male had continued his vain attempts
to obtain entrance at the valvules . . . This goes on until
nothing but his wings remained.
Did I tell you one of my favorite songs is
Happiness Is An Option.
Fatima (not her real name) says she’s the male mantis,
fatally mated to the needle.
She’s taken to using a man’s name,
which changes like a chameleon in the foliage
of her current intellectual concerns
King Selassie, Artaud, Divine, David Bowie.
On one side of the city,
fire,
on the other,
fire.
A shark’s as good as an uncle’s worth of lilies.
She says whatever name she dies with,
that’s her real name.
Put it on her headstone
and say of her
nothing but his wings remained.
Flamingoes don’t really smile, of course.
5. Crows and Moon (for two voices)
Crows -- scribbled on the horizon
in a language incidental to the sky --
write their own departure in the iron evening:
dusk and its apricot fumes
could have signified terrorists
torching innocent creatures in the mountains,
because, the tired ones tell us,
the world is afterall an abattoir,
and we all feast
at the same scarlet plot --
In every village
the children are tutored
in numbers and shame,
and are carefully carved
on behalf of the carved elders.
They are taught
that the shorn moon
is not a bald and beautiful nude
riven with berserk incommunicables --
it simply enslaves an earthful of ocean
and is itself a slave to gravity.
Some still learn in this
that the stories science tells
are always changing in the end,
that there is no end to ending,
that the chaste lilies enshrined
in the kitchen window this morning
can still make us happy for no reason. |
which is neither a grammar
nor a rhetoric of birds
but an August vacancy --
more, or less,
than a symptom or a torn piece
of a word left over
by difficult disintegrations
the disease of language has left of us.
I close my eyes
but worlds impose
their ruckus in a fugitive braille.
I feel my fingers mastered by
multiple nights,
the air burdened with jasmine in
excess and charred steaks,
and when I open my eyes
the moon is always
more than the moon.
Up there in its difficult solitude,
she is not my wife burdened with
my misunderstandings
nor her life coupled to mine
nor her body riven with the history
of our children
whom we secretly instruct
in the dark science of loving injuries.
|
6. Insomnia
Little drops of mylar green and smoky violet,
the usual flies team up into brief constellations
in our yard, pioneering Lilies-of-the-Nile, the carcass
of a failed snail, cat shit crusted with dust.
Ferocious sparrows are standing by,
not quite able to solve their appetite
in that fugitive braille the patterns of the flies make
from the codes of a chronic hunger.
Creatures forever pitted
in the pollen and decay over grass green greed.
Disquieting me with their haste and zeal
before the last of the sun takes its western velvet
over the edges of the earth into dark rumors
that wanted to speak strangers to me again.
I was still hoping dusk or sleep would cure
my body of the more unreasonable voices
trying to speak me – so much misremembered,
paraphrased and lost in translation as nightlong stars
enforce the shining trauma of finite light,
a light already ancient and perpetually belated,
that might have started the morning one of
Tutankamen's farmers cut his finger in the corn,
and is now reaching me after the legion harvests
since his unimagined burial.
Instead, I'm obsessed with the irreversible
star-time of my own childhood,
which I so completely mishandled:
my brother, Tom, skipping at the sting
of our father's skinny belt after pulling up
the tulip bulbs, and me paying him a dime
so he wouldn't tell on me;
Vic, the Eagle Scout, trying to talk me
out of my Zorro costume into his sleeping bag;
the rock with the sandrubies I tossed away
as Charles staggered off with his hand to his head
leaking like a broken pomegranate;
Jenny, half naked and aching, but too dangerous to touch;
all of us giggling over the powdered body
of my great-aunt Etta in her black Dracula box;
and the amazing tumble down the mountain side
in an avalanche of body parts
at Rose Canyon Lake, then the narcotic quiet
when I finally landed under shaggy pines
like vague forest sentinels pointing me heavenward.
My open mouth tasted the fog --
cold little crystals twinkling on my tongue
into transient stars of tiny ice.
For a moment I left my body behind,
but my body would have none of it
and called me back with triple the pain.
It needed me for something -- something
was still speaking me, and is still.
It put words in my mouth
that got me to you, for example. Even now,
my blind hands reach out
to read the messages of my own starving
in your inexplicable skin, the fragile and
exquisite down on your flower-petal ear,
the lamplight like lanugo on your forearm,
your pulse as vulnerable as the morning
frost under all the stars in their far fire.
Whoever could have taught me such terror?