Month: May 2012

Pagan Interlude

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Subliminal messages over the megaphone
There is a Dan handler in aisle ThreeB:
The gay grocer has a hard-on stacking cucumbers
is a cliche’ for the ‘nineties at the end of millennium
and Goddamn him Ginsburg’s still dead
How we could use his immoral word
in this titpasties pastiche of a world
that passes postmodern
in this postmedieval life
I love the cool fresh breath of Spring’s kiss
in the midst of winter’s foul blasts
That was Sarah said that
remember her
she was the woman I might have married
or had married couldn”t remember which
who haunts my daydreams
or the mother who never was
lost mother of a generation.
Ginsburg– described in one obit
as “that small gay jewish poet”–
would not be the kind
to leave his beloved behind.
And, folks, the special today is poets and puns, at sixth sense a pound
Cheaper than pastrami– somewhat Italian, dark eyes, almond skin.

The who-picks-this-shit-linoleum manager
is on the loudspeaker in his gray tweed jacket
and deck-shoe best speaking of his desk job life
unraveling as he speaks
He is reading HOWL
amid the gasps and shrieks
of little suburbanite ladies
pissing their Depends as he reads
He is thinking this his last act before AK
bursts while he rampages through the Saturday
morning Parking Lot where I heft bags into the Volvo
Chips and Dips for Superbowl Sunday
All of us playing that gig
lined up against the others
pushing toward goalposts
pigskins of our sons and our daughters
inflated past recognition

The universe of poetry is a goddamn
wormhole without Ginsburg who’s still
very much dead
Though middleclass kids
and suburban punks
can still read.

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Bio: Chicagoan, educated in the American South (PhD), John Horvath Jr has been a steel mill mechanic, soldier, street poet, and professor of literature and criticism. His most recent books include Illiana Region Poems: Harboring the Enemy (from Zebooks http://www.blquanbeck.com/zebookcompany/) and CONUS: the First Tour Chapbook, new and collected poetry of war . Disabled in a parachute accident, Horvath edits Mississippi”s PoetryRepairShop – Contemporary International Poetry (since 1997) and writes.

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HOOSIER DUCK HUNTING

Green headed beasts have few functions

In society.

The warm autumn

Migrations over the Little Calumet and the Kankakee,

Twenty-four birds flashing victory “V” in the sky,

Hundreds of reed-like barrels pointing heavenward.

The smell of the Little Calumet

With the hapless hungry stuck in slime,

The sewerage, the burnt flesh dried

To the hot, the deceptive slag of steel mills

Smoking, apparently swamp gas, morning haze

To a weary winged duck.

Ducks in the waters of the Kankakee

Visiting briefly where hounds pull apart

Bodies shot by three or more hunters

Who come annually to quarrel over mallards,

Canadians, often even swans, hawks and doves.

(Daddy, can I be a hunter? I asked

Long before the stench of war and empathy

For bewildered ducks bobbing in the waters

Of the Little Calumet and the Kankakee.)

There is a certain time, a certain reward,

A certain mystique in the killing of ducks

Not for food but for pleasure. It is a way

To demonstrate the natural order of freedom or

Captivity. The killing of ducks is allegory,

A lesson: were it not for the hunter, the hunted

Would die in the midst of its living–the weaker,

The slower, the lame and the halt, the sibilant,

The coward, the infamous would survive.

(Daddy, can I be a hunter? I asked

Long before the stench of war and empathy

For bewildered beasts bobbing in the waters

Of the Little Calumet and the Kankakee.)

No, son, my grandfather would say:

Green headed beasts have few functions

In society.

copyright John Horvath Jr

John Horvath Jr.
is a Chicagoan living in Mississippi, a disabled veteran, and a professor in literature and criticism. Since the late 1960s, he has performed his poetry in Munich, London, and across the U.S; his poetry appears in print (e.g. Nimrod and Antigonish Review) and online (e.g. Ariga [Israel] and Isibongo [SA]).
Links: PoetryRepairShop , editor, and his bibliography at [ http://www.horvath.ws ].
On writers: “I’m an eclectic reader: S.T. Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas alongside Akhmatova, Juhasz and Petofi, also Whitman, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti. Favorites change over time.”
On writing: The biographical, not autobiographical, and social narratives are a strong influence. Plato said that poetry endangers the established order of the soul; I write from “inside the sinner” where poetry exercises empathy and sympathy, renders the observed more open to discussion, more human, and perhaps more dignified. My technique is sprung or ‘ruptured’ rhythm: ideas are written in pen, revised into traditional metric/rhyme schemes (not necessarily English), then revised into free verse/lyrical form.”
Recent Poetry: Ygdrasil, Moongate, Lynx, Charlotte’s Web, and Ixion.

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FOR THE LAST WOLVERINE

They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and, from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnawing head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk

Out into the open, in the full

Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying

Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,

As the sky breaks open

Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises

Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World’s last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving

Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

That it will hover, made purely of northern

Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: will perch

On the moose’s horn like a falcon
Riding into battle into holy war against
Screaming railroad crews: will pull
Whole traplines like fibers from the snow

In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching

Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton’s internal fire the elk’s
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the “blind swallowing
Thing,” with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

Lord, let me die but not die
Out.

Copyright © 1966 by James Dickey

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Design
Robert Frost

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I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth–
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth–
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.

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