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Leonor Acevedo Suarez: La madre de Borges
The Saint of the Professor Lewis Hyde
The Saint of the College Drive
He knew When He knew What He knew
The dna to preserve proved contrary to capital gains
On public art and the longevity of an idea
from The Wilshire Review (Los Angeles)
Flesh, Pleasure and Paint
In the honeymooning days of the heart,
before the quartering of the eye,
there was the orchestrated simplicity
of fruit; round on a bordering
cloth, loafing and moist
as a new baby. Open fruit
braids like the universe,
in the veins of glucose
there is the architecture of the world,
like Cubist painting, the squares
of impasto, heavy and longing
as a pendulum of grapes;
there is the house, the city,
the metropolis in the ample chamber
of humble plum, the attitude of
revolution in the placement
of nose on waist-coat
like the cychlorrhaphous eyeing hide
of pineapple, the succulent buttocks
of cherries, rubbery and
ripe as Pablo’s wives, sex
marbling in their mouthes
like over peach and wrinkling pit;
the scrape of tongue and fibre,
the lascivious dropping
of fruit on the tongue,
the bitter spasm of plumskin,
the salve of pulp between teeth
a liberal marriage of the senses,
without knives, without words,
only empirical mouthes
and eyes, holding tables
and chairs that line
the great halls, supporting
legs opening to the minaret,
filled with the orchard.
from Flaming Arrows (Ireland)
Bootleg Ways
Logs when burning
are really owly bodies
beneath the bark.
Through the tinkling wood chimes
grey and black, feathers segment away
in slivers and crisps
to orangely pulse this secret
to the hob. Toasting over,
each crackle a flight,
eyes meet memories in the hearth back
through unfocused reverie,
voluble yet steely and lost.
In cool, dark rooms
on Persian rugs so thinned
the pattern blurs,
the old smells rise in my nostrils,
thrilling through hair
like grass liberated in a field.
It is my grandmother
up early to make the coffee
I never drank, but which
the thermos knew so well.
Skyscraping among cardboard
boxes of dusty books and bric-à-brac,
things rap, squeak, whir and lay under
blankets, well-made and thick;
her glass cases and jewelly items
and relics readied,
she is for the swap meet.
Like a character from Steinbeck,
Rupert waits on the pavement
in the darky morning,
his yellow pick-up with wooden roof
open for business, his clumps
of hands muddling in deep pockets.
Close within his sweater,
he stands at attention
while my grandmother’s bandanna
mistrals round the truck bed.
This Okie feel lingers with me still,
and the impression of my droplet
head, awakened in the three a.m.
indigo by her Oregon accent,
old American, real and strident
without ethnicity, without the soot
from the East, unfactoried yet industrial,
gongs and creaks as powerfully
now as when I was nine.
From this woman
and her tinkering folk,
always vending, always uncovering,
I have great stores of wealth
both golden and intangible.
My legacy cuts at me often
and the terms are difficult to blink in;
I am the reduction
of he who was sheriff in Missoula, Montana,
of those who crept from St. Joseph, Missouri
and pressed it to the west, the coast,
through bramble and what was once
the nineteenth century.
I have travelled, but fêted
and in swank proportion
as the last daughter, the last McKee and Everson,
product of the nomad merchant,
rich, bold and apparent
to take what thrift and cunning
has left for me. But there is nothing
to covet and nothing has the salt anymore.
In the Donner Pass I reach
rumbling to find California,
the state, before the 1960’s
let it go, let it blow away.
In the quarry of our age
ideals like rocks broken by a wave
lie in rubble, briny tedium
washing over, unrebuilt,
unrecreated, unreborn.
Grumbling I want for the grime
of a good clean town,
for society without the saps,
for Gloria Swanson to swirl around
and lick these bastards
for what they have done;
for the world in black and white,
ham sandwiches, Henry Miller and some
slab of guts and soap blocks
washing down the hurried slam
of billions of flappy feet.
The plea for evenings spent
spreading thick preserves on hunks of bread
and ruffling toes around socks
is met with then what ?
by those who want for the zip.
Listen and I’ll tell.
Inside the fire
there’s still a kernel
burned and swept back
but lurking and pouting in pinched neglect
like the last blackberry of summer
lost behind a refrigerator
and only baby knows.
from Underground Voices ( Los Angeles )
http://www.undergroundvoices.com
Grandfather swim
The night nurse
came in
even that last time
to wake him.
She came
to push at his
rivers,
to lean on
his warm streams,
to constrict the flow
of his blood,
to chart him.
She came
with her trawler,
dragged a
silver footed
hypodermic
across the stillness
of his arms,
dipped her mercurial stick
into his tired mouth.
She asked
if he needed
anything.
He did not —
except for rest,
the thing that she
would not give him
before his long trip
home.
from Enigma Magazine ( London )
http://enigmamag.wordpress.com
Harold Rallup and Times Rallup, brothers, one dead
one almost dead, wore grey in the 50’s, but most times
black and white. Times, because he’s still a little alive,
lately wears a swatch of colour round his creases.
The Rallups loved to tell the tale in their day
but now they’re one down,
and the one that’s lightly living’s
almost too old to know what to call a story
or why he used to once care.
S’like that gal I dated
and now I can’t remember how that worked
or what her number was,
even if I wanted to call her which I don’t believe me.
Sometimes the crawl gets Times down and he laments for the old ways.
He still bites the pencil in the middle with his fakes in, and breathes
on a wheeze oh, remembering the smell of the news room
and the boys of the press. Where’d all that erudition and guts go to
and another thing, I don’t b’lieve much in generations
because the way I see it they didn’t get much from us
and they don’t even know they’re missing something,
like a granny what’s been robbed
and she never will miss that pocketbook anyway.
Senile they’d call her, but what do you call it
when the pinched ain’t old,
just dumbed of spirit ?
I never did know where it came from, some said the 1960’s
but them kids was still good, and some say foreigners made us numb
or the coloureds but ain’t people just want to be true no matter where they from.
They called me a idealist but that’s just a word for someone
who the ones doing wrong can look to and say he doing right so we don’t have to.
We use a have to, that was our business,
to tell it the way it rightly was and to care.
from Audemus formerly Mount Voices ( Los Angeles )
The Saint of the Pampa
Leonor Acevedo Suárez: La madre de Borges
The Blind Poet from Argentina
They always said the blind poet from Argentina did such and such,
That his mother fed his eyes and wrote his mail
And that his arms were brown and white and blind
As they crept in the house on their typewritten requests for bread
And paper, Mas papel, Mama, Necesito
Papelitos para la ropa de mis hijos. Mama ?
Perhaps the cynic thinks that there were times
When his mother hated him for his eyes
Perhaps the cynic thinks that there were times
When his mother wished that she had only held
Her legs together and refused the seed.
Perhaps the spirit would have come to her again,
But it is an unnecessary train of thought,
She did not stiffen to refuse his father,
She let her legs fall apart like leavening yellow cakes,
Like splitting nut halves, green and awake,
Two pink and sticky fig bodies, her thighs
Ruffled open in brown, luscious skin.
Of the blind poets’ paternity we do not know much else.
Perhaps the cynic thinks that there were times
When the city could have used another worker in the plaza,
Another hearty body to lay the columns in,
A sweaty face and a healthy back
To carry the sacks of cement
Along the treacherous road of the quarry,
A man, with heart and limb
To offer his energies for the land and for the state.
What is this poetry anyway ? Can you eat
These spotted white loaves of words ?
Can the children eat these visions ?
And of his brilliance, his dripping tongue and shocking brain,
His never-was-ing eyes, his so - called gifts,
His naked eyes alone in the stabbing darkness,
His naked eyes alone at the top of the stairs,
His naked eyes encroaching on a vision too terrible to speak,
A vision that groans behind the lids and must be born out,
A monstrous human vision chased by death
And the blinding reality of disconnection from
Every one, every where.
Grey shadows lap and laugh across the rug shirrs,
The little dog licks a new patch of dusty fur,
Silent tea leaves muddy the side of the demitasse,
And soak in their slitherage and in their waiting.
The poets’ room is cool, as time lightly calibrates
In the hollow dancing clocks on an afternoon of old flowers
And the occasional fly. There are no words today.
The metronomic brethren of his mothers’ house,
their polar eyes of tick and tock, regard him always
In the house of glass, his mother feeding and
Wiping him from infancy through his genius,
Her ministering thumbs, her needly golden thumbs
From the caverns of almost too, too much.
In the great white house in the jungle
Where the white hides in the brown, the poets’ eyes
Bead and swell and know a subtle language. They elide,
I will tell of our sweet scented kisses
Of the fallen decades,
From the dusty tens and twenties
Of calendars past
I will tell of your hot blown skirt cuffs,
The blue velveteen purr in the crushing embrace
I will tell of your white smudging eyes
In the blinding sunshine of Buenos Aires,
The women staring us down for our love, our youth
Their tight Modotti hands braiding spells in the husks
Their knowledge of blood and freedom mashed
Between the powdered kernels, the sweet technology
Of time and chlorophyll
I will lay my heart down like the labourer in his cot
I will lay my blind pen before the alter of My Eyes
I will …
The blind poet sits choking in the sunshine on his bright memories.
His old skin hangs like the crepe dangles of Christmases past,
Solemn old paper twists of rainbow DNA,
Strung out like flags of mediocrity, old skin and hair
Hanging like the funereal banners of an ungrateful town,
In an unfinished, mauve appointed Social Hall,
So long, Sorry to see you go, Thanks for the things you did,
What were those things you did ?
The blind poet from Argentina, a good moniker, but only
If you like that sort of thing.
His tears and longings are the same as ours,
He is no bright Moshiach,
Get a hold of yourselves, artists.
He sits with a crooked look on his old face, his mouth aslant and wondering
If all of his letters in ink
Amount to the brief signs of a child
Standing before the morning glass,
Pressing finger messages in melting condensation.
The poets’ eyes are shut so tightly together in his blindest reverie,
Even the closest investigation of breath from his mother,
Coming in with the tray of coffee and pan dulce, will be shut out.
In the room there is a high scent of moss and jasmine and seashells.
Somewhere in his breath there is a little flame of magick.
The Spirit will come back another time, and the children will eat
And thrive on his visions.
The Saint of the Professor Lewis Hyde
So much la-la-la
I have been known as Negro
Sable Mother's genius was on me.
I did not go to banks;
Humans could not budge me,
I was all at once unmanageable.
The word Art, I made that.
I married a mathematical topologist.
( Not much was available.)
He had sixteen sayings and at night
Would pray " O Babylon, Babylon
To translate is to betray " and fall asleep.
I would look at him over the cigarette smoke and scowl in the dark.
The cattle once stolen become domestic beasts.
Hear now, the essentiality of love
In a bed, of sex in a bed, a kind of bed,
Or a ship, a bedship, the arms of lovers enjambed
Unto the dawn, the chests of lovers beheld and spun
Of all the blue darkness that lives behind closed eyes
And of all the red spotted darkness that shakes behind desire there,
And all of this held against the shamed-whispering cries of childhood
In a broken down penny arcade in Visalia,
Or a beat shaft card room of Chiang-Yuan,
Or a miserable sweat box in Chichen Itza, everyone is eleven once,
Every one is blistered of loneliness;
To and fro that longing rests, finally, upon the life of another.
A man, a woman, a scrap of time and try, and Love,
The cosmic linguist, the one who cuts along the joint,
The one born last, Hermes, the forge stone. Love,
That sings the song of open passages, in languages found
In sleeping bibliographies, Love, who cries for the broken lexicon,
And for the alternating seasons of raven;
Papa Legba, open the gate, the barrier of difference, Love
Is dancing in the backlogs, and shouting with tears, Come
And let us run in the dissolving day.
Stolen butter should never be the basis of marriage
Krishna will steal the heart of anyone, then disappear.
Hermeneut, decipher the rags of the belly,
Unplait these dripping brains,
Make me pure again, like I never was.
A man comes and begs admittance.
Long ago I lost a hound he says.
Zeus himself is the uninterpretable speaker
And we stare into the misunderstood,
The world, our beloved illegible codex
While the children of woman and man
Eat the dirt on the outskirts of
Town
And are trapped in history.
from The Poetry Salzburg Review
The Peas
She came from the west
where rain
measures the hours
in drops
against the house,
where land
breaks into great crags
along the coast of water.
Her high, gothic façade
of radio hollowly sings
through the sitting room
where she has been waiting
against the window panes;
it’s raining
down the garden rows,
and the trellis
is beating the overhang
like a metronome.
The apples sweat
in the lane
above the soaking smudge pots;
in the beds
the lettuce leaves
are ripped and drizzling,
and mushrooms bauble
in the mud,
but the peas,
she says, against the panes,
the peas are safe.
In their fibre boats
they are lolling
in the trickle,
their greenness unmuted
by the wash.
In the dawn of that day
she flung some out
of their shells,
sweetly plinking into a bowl,
a ghostly memorandum of spring;
the house was clean and agile then,
the basins white-shining
and the wood well-rubbed.
1930 in the fall
was before money and moving;
her people were plumbers and farmers,
but she married well
and took to tea and touring cars.
I never knew her that way;
as she was aging
she sloughed superfluous finery
and became an Oregonian,
old and mindful in the window.
In the dusk of that day
she was so old
in her bed,
her daughters about her
against the tapestries
like Bayeux matrons.
There, in the spinning,
I saw that even in
death she was more alive
than those stiff keeners,
she was real and oaken
and pirating the bed.
She was tilting
and wet, but she managed to say
her words
put me where the peas are
and she was fast away.
In the years beyond
I pull them
from the bins
in the market,
all green and wonderful.
They are holy, these slim
vegetables, a legacy of will,
a trust of spirit
endowing more than
any stick of Louis
or stretch of oil.
They are of the good
lathery soil, like her—
green and sure,
forward in the window,
watching the garden in the rain,
long ago days when she was living
with her whistle
and her custard
and her canvas shoes.
The Saint of the College Drive
Breakfast Between the Glass
The birds were marginal, hesitant, leaping. They plucked between the pebbles of ruined blue windshield like robotic crumb identifiers, fearless, searching bread. Around the corner at Adams and Fig before the weathered cathedral, the asphalt kernelled with the remnants of the crash. Stan drove alternately calmly, alternately asking directions, alternately petulant, alternately angry about being asked to drive. It’s funny when you don’t want to be someone’s partner anymore, when you’ve seen their sides and the facets just don’t work for you. White horses on the lawn. To want something. To want something else. I think and think again, the devil you know. Student, teacher, mirror, mode. Maybe he’s not that bad. Maybe all men and women feel this way about their partners. There’s the sun again on the buildings downtown. Garfunkel’s singing about the Bridge. A wash of veridian chunks of tempered glass shine on the boulevard.
from Opium Magazine ( US )
if you go down to the mongers,
in the half open market
downtown
before the crowds come -
nested in the brazen ice pack
shoved against the glass -
you will see the sainted remains
of fish.
it will be quiet
before the crowds come,
and under the tin fluorescence
of light bouncing from display windows
and mellowing with the early morning grey
that wraps itself within
the chill stalls of the market,
you will see, with his eyes still in,
the last looks of his fish brain, out
and above his watery world
gone belly up into the air;
of boat, of hand, of the articles
of death unknown to fish mind before
but inextricable of the day.
if you go down before the crowds come
you will be apt to see the project
that fish has become. you will see,
as you stand on the planks, the end
of fish in rows. you will see
the game of solitaire the monger plays
with the bodies
that warp and weft and buckle
between his gloved hands,
a ghastly charade
of their erstwhile vitality.
you will see him
slug the carcasses into view,
scales smoothed and undersides gutted,
planting fish seeds into thumbed ice grooves.
you will linger as long as you will linger.
you will make eye contact
with the vendors,
smiling to say that you are not
controversial,
but a good wage earner just out
for an early
constitutional.
certainly you will say
with your eyes that
though you’re not buying,
you’re no threat.
you don’t want to be known
as the crazy fish staring old maid,
who probably keeps cats
and catches moths in teacups
and walks them out of doors
into the blue moonheaps of the back yard.
but at night, in sleep,
the side lain face
of fish comes to call,
to ask why
you do nothing,
when you know
how much it hurts.
from Read This ( Montana State University )
The ones on four legs
ran away.
Her screams
were a shock
even to her.
Though the mate
had mated
previously,
he too kept in the
outback.
When the little one
fell out
from between her legs,
she had no reason
to smile
and carry on with
all of that laughing
like she did,
but she did it
anyway.
She picked him up
and brought
her mouth
over his nose /
sucked out the clog /
jettisoned red streams
from his nostrils
through the flute of her tongue
onto the earth —
she had no idea why she did it
but she did it anyway.
She rolled over in the leaves
nested her backside in the grass
and cupped him against her.
from The Break the Silence Project ( US )
http://breakthesilenceproject.com/?p=703#more-703
he sat there telling her some of the truth during the self congratulatory part of the constantly running, invisible documentary of his life presumably filmed by the angels and the ghost of ingmar bergman. the continuity was amazing except for those times when the machine was on the fritz. whole sections of the time he’d lived in idaho were missing, and most of his daughter’s pubescence — and there was that one section during his second marriage that had someone’s entire thumb in the lens. he absolutely never thought of those times though, so it was really a blessing in disguise. trouble was one day, one of the lost sections showed up on the front porch, when his girlfriend was home and dressed for company. she said, how the hell are you ? and showed the section around the house. the lost section said it was comfortable waiting for him in the living room, and, drinking tea out of the girlfriend’s china, told her all about the rape and the photos, about the big n slutty porn and something about tax evasion. the section was calm and pulled no punches. after a while though, he said he couldn’t wait any longer and stiffly stood and walked out of the house. when her boyfriend came home, all he said to the news of the return of the lost chapters was that if she’d really loved him, she wouldn’t have brought it up. later that night he shoved her awake in the lamplight and with it tight between his thumb and fore finger, snubbed his cigarette butt out on the pink area between her labia and the close canal. lucky for her, the constantly running, invisible documentary of her life had a finicky record button too. she would hurt for a few days, but pain never killed anyone, like he always said.
http://www.poetrymagazine.com/editors_choice/index.html
The dna to preserve proved contrary to capital gains
No more tears. The place is sold, she told herself.
What had been a ferocious dream from a hundred years away,
outside a Cork tavern a million moonbeams ago, and
night after night walking home, with lads, few bob,
her grandfather sailing away and bringing it with him,
beside his mothers’ folded lace, trailing
reels and jigs and candle light,
had been made in America.
With 40 dollars and his good wife withal,
he came with those dreams and filigree,
ambition lathering the way.
He was young then, younger than the man himself,
who walked the plank in this, his fathers’ bar,
long decades after the ground was split to build the place.
Halloran, McDaid, Daffey, Coons, all had wanted a pub in the new world.
But only Hanlon had done it.
And now it was gone. Useless to even remember the past.
She spent the afternoon insisting that she move on and forget about it.
Just like a new Irish would do. Losing the gene to remember
hurts for while, like a nail being wrenched out
of the body; but in this new century,
it is for the best. In the short time.
from Caterwaul Quarterly ( US )
http://caterwaulquarterly.com/
On public art and the longevity of an idea
If the explanation it requires
is short
or not necessary at all,
an idea can last.
If the explanation it requires
is long, needing students
and postulators to translate
and decipher
an idea can last -
it can endure.
It is the middler that is the concern,
the one without champion
the one with the gaping
hole, and folding hands,
the scrap of music from a reel to reel,
a stone chipped fragment
from a forgotten language,
someone’s cherished thing,
once of the midnight drive
once of the smiling girl by the junction,
once of the moment,
real and crumbling,
he who may not find a friend
in the loping crowd
who inherits ideas from the dead -
who will spark to the great middler
the great I did
who pronounced so beautifully
his causes
into the mirror
Linda Ravenswood BFA, MA