Demo Read online

  DEMO

  POEMS

  Charlie Smith

  To Arlo Haskell

  CONTENTS

  NIGHT ALL DAY

  Here, Dog

  This Water Tastes of Iron

  Why Harp on It

  Crostatas

  This Right Here

  Samsara

  AUGUST RAIN

  Lacquered Dead

  (Adirondack)

  Sob Story

  INVENTED DESTINIES

  Volto

  Cash Flow

  Wilderness

  WHAT I DON’T KNOW

  From Heine

  One Spell

  The Casing

  No Nonsense

  RAW EARTH

  The Layout

  Ithika

  Stuff Your Cries into the Hamper and Hitch Up

  ASSISTED LIVING

  September Flowers

  Permission to Emigrate

  On the Whole

  Slumberland

  TRAMWAY

  Genuine Risk

  Backseat in Kinshasa

  No Claim

  FLEURETTE AMÉRICAINE

  Issues with a Right-Hand Turn

  This Far’ll Do

  Official Document

  SHORE LEAVE

  Rush Shoes and Escapes

  Still, Life

  Stroke

  Wyoming

  Shop Blues

  RAISE THE DEAD

  Bolt Upright

  Belfast

  Counting on My Fingers

  Minor Fabrications

  THE OTHER LIFE

  Close Work

  Unattainable Goodness

  Animal Life

  Clarinet, Sax

  PORTABLE BOATS

  One

  Country Churches in Summer

  The Players

  Get Along, Get Along

  Buying the Fava Beans

  After the Wind Died Down

  Picture of the Situation

  By Mechanical Means

  Acknowledgments

  DEMO

  NIGHT ALL DAY

  Here, Dog

  You say dogs

  prefer the smell of the people they love

  and say everyone, even whole groups, according

  to what they eat

  and how they are arranged, emit a typical smell

  their dogs can recognize, and the way they look contributes to this

  and how they move like ponies

  crashing through bamboo

  or crushed souls fleeing midnight rooms, and rarely do dogs

  if ever get mixed up

  about this,

  they’re always on the lookout as night

  enters the ancient streets

  without signs or balustrades wound

  with roses, and you say the dogs are here, standing stiff-legged

  by the hedge or writhing in happiness,

  and you, sweating,

  or stinking of an angry lover’s perfume, are recognizable

  and taken in, a wanderer

  troubled or excised from the rolls,

  resentful, or nervous about money, the dog has put you

  under his wing

  and hurries you into the familiar estancia

  with a love that can’t be lost

  or beaten out of him as it has been lost and beaten out of you.

  This Water Tastes of Iron

  My tattoos tell love’s story in miniature, which I prefer.

  My dips in style, the picture I painted on a pool cover,

  express a reckless calm, unsubstantiated but plush.

  I pray to the ticking sound I hear at night. Breezes,

  shaped in Africa, remind me of friends

  buried in the sea. For years I lived in a home for the blind,

  working the semaphore. My over-obvious

  rectitude bought only time. Let’s drain

  the dark, she said, from every room. The mottos

  on the radio scratch lately at my door, unverifiable

  and hilarious. The past sinks like a body in a well.

  I read the Bible for the stakeouts and descriptions of terrain.

  Why Harp on It

  In the stillness of dawn when the air hangs back and you plunge your hand

  into the bottomless dark of a jasmine

  bush when roosters crack the day open under a slurry sky and you’ve

  forgotten why you’re awake

  and don’t know why you’re thinking of the time you gave the go ahead

  for your mother’s shock treatments and she came out

  blank and ironical unable to squeeze orange juice and you poured her a drink

  and she said Thank you I am very tired

  and you were moving to Sioux City and didn’t have time to say good-bye

  and for a couple of years lived in a motel

  and ate Chinese-Mex and supported a young car hop who needed

  the money for her rattled

  child and you’d wake at dawn with your deepest bones

  aching like you’d gotten old before your time and there was no way

  to be sure of anything and red gazelles

  atlas bears heath hens blue walleyes thicktail chubs

  sea minks dire wolves catahoula

  salamanders and xerces blue butterflies were already gone from the earth.

  Crostatas

  in rome I got down among the weeds and tiny perfumed

  flowers like eyeballs dabbed in blood and the big ruins

  said do it my way pal while starlings

  kept offering show biz solutions and well the vatican

  pursued its interests the palm trees like singular affidavits

  the wind succinct and the mountains painted blue

  just before dawn accelerated at the last point

  of departure before the big illuminated structures

  dug up from the basement got going and I ate crostatas

  for breakfast and on the terrace chatted

  with the clay-faced old man next door and said I was

  after a woman who’d left me years ago and he said lord aren’t we all.

  This Right Here

  In restricted access, in lockdowns,

  with a price on the goods, the particulars

  shrouded, wearing trash cans for boots, the spring,

  that won’t testify, the cunning

  like a worm in the guts of its own stupidity, braced against the seawall,

  the spring, and why would I say this, or better,

  let me tell you about the wildwood, that slumped masterpiece

  tick infested teeming with bugs,

  the stinking ocean sloshing onto the rusticated shore,

  you notice this in springtime like a calculation

  continually misfiring, like a scrap of paper left on the table

  explaining the shootout, the dishonor at dawn,

  and something bangs against me, I am overmatched

  by a morning with rain, by the compressors

  the catafalques groaning, you say it’s springtime

  and the birds, troubled with psychosis,

  their wings stained with creosote, press northward,

  compelled by a remarkable idiocy, uninvented,

  hauling their bodies through the standard acidity

  and friendlessness into dune shadows

  like the breath of satire, it’s springtime

  and runners are expected from the gravediggers

  with an appeal for more shovels, and the vines

  crawl like murdered drunks

  crawling in the dreams of their children, fiddling with the locks.

  Samsara

  The ocean, uncomfortable with itself, bangs and slurs,

  mi
xing flavors, holding its own against infinity, scarred with ice. I rummage

  in the window planter, arrange purslane and sundew to catch

  the fairskinned day’s best looks; the sun, winter’s ear bob, hangs in a blue left to fade.

  I’m going home, sings the celebrated pianist downstairs, a man of Africa,

  traveled ages to sit before the #2 Concerto in A Minor. In my dream, cabbage roses

  offered by my former wife, who stood wrapped in a red Navajo blanket

  by the doorway of an old hogan on the rez, shone. She’s gone now,

  into the far lands of chaos; sun-shaped molecules, scent of sweet bay,

  figurations of reordered atoms I’ll never recognize without a guide, all that’s left.

  These dreams let me know we’re still together,

  dancing before headlamps on the beach, or converting

  our savings bonds to cash for a run to Old Mexico. The sun swings along,

  carrying an old silver pocketbook—or that’s the moon,

  jaunty, not so pushy really, only too happy to forget the night. Plum flowers

  and the first pear blossoms, all the white concatenations gather

  at the bottom of the yard. The wind picks up speed,

  remembering its days in Paris, in Ihpetonga and Tobruk. Conversions

  at this latitude are frequent, but rarely sustained; the old ways

  were more comfortable, the pies and Franco-American customs, dollops

  of pure cane syrup on biscuits, the rye grass streaked by an invisible hand,

  still pretty irresistible. I’ve caught up lately on everything

  but time. An old leak, faintly corrosive, smelling of

  uncleaned butter churns, whistles as it goes by, not minding much of anything.

  AUGUST RAIN

  Lacquered Dead

  Balled-up clouds above the graveyard dab the shine off stars.

  The dead fume up, spurious and superior, exchanging

  love’s gaudy reasons for a sub-section replacement

  of elementary particles. Like you I’m a dying tribe. What I know

  shines a moment—like leaves the cat licks—then returns to its place in line.

  Get ready, the prophet says, but overlooks the dream-stalked,

  the solitaries rowing the Straits of San Juan, loose flubbers

  out walking the pinched streets of Fez. A taw-eyed woman on the edge

  of madness leans from an upper story, catching all of space in one goggled glance.

  Queer blue sky smeared with zinc. Each of us bent into one of the shapes

  God makes. Fudged by will. Foot bones, casters, melon rinds—

  emptiness, the future—wash in the runoff. Living’s the least of it.

  (Adirondack)

  Something’s falling in increments of banging and slight popping, klunks,

  and then little

  chittering rolls,

  the roof I mean is being hit by objects

  nuts, fruits

  of the season: this miserable natural world

  hurls these things . . . and then there’re the wolf howls

  or coyotes

  as they call

  them here and the barks and snuffles of so-called bears

  and yesterday I saw a small tub-bottomed bishop

  crossing the road on all fours—porcupine,

  they said—and crows

  strut

  and there are these mincing deer so theatrically bold

  and turkeys like drab bloated chickens

  and tiny

  bronze frogs

  singing in my shoes

  and last night as in the car I huddled over a radio broadcast

  the stars lit up

  in uncanny

  formations: bright pegs

  pictures of my tormentors and ex-wives . . . seemed to hang from:

  and I showed them the frogs: shiny as coins of the caesars.

  Sob Story

  . . . actual tottering that takes place late

  in the season, the recently

  capsized trees, lindens arranged so they protect

  the settlements

  the cities, the oaks slowly giving in to

  paralysis

  the uncultivated elms

  never touched in certain places

  the cumbersome loosely arranged willows

  down by the pond

  illusions sputtering,

  it’s time for the weather report

  that haunts us like

  a death certificate, the icteritious following

  like tiny rabbits

  blowing everything on lunch,

  a tidiness in the faltering

  clouds we’ve seen before,

  longing

  calling a substitute to take over

  the last bit of wallowing

  we’ll recall on closed up nights

  when the stars

  like spittle stuck to your shirt

  beckon in what looks like a new way, speaking

  in a new way of dust

  and alarms

  playing tunes you remember from childhood.

  INVENTED DESTINIES

  Volto

  A spacial infirmity, what’s closed-up like a child in a closet,

  calls too softly to be heard. Like the little stream

  with the broken back, that behind the barn collects

  the bitter run-off. A specialized sky foretells the fall

  of humankind. Clouds like saggy diasporas.

  The fields flex their big muscles, getting ready for the stare-down

  with the stars. It’s winter, then summer comes

  perfumed with toiletries. Raspberries bend quadrate

  branches, the fruit like children about to swing into eternity.

  I’m limited, she says, but not alarmed, and ineffectively violent.

  Sometimes we block love like dump trucks on strike at the kiln.

  The closed-off future taps at the window. It’s the echo

  that’s scary. Suffering completes its tax return,

  listing no dependents. The papered-over bits have shifted in the night.

  Grim looks grimness in the eye. The dead taste of salt.

  At the site tiny storms rage among the balled-up dresses.

  Someone’s heart’s split open and used for a mask.

  Sounds like love, says the mayor, but then to me everything does.

  Cash Flow

  Since you asked, yes,

  the hotel is still down the street and the persistence

  in capsule form of illusion pertaining to one’s standing

  in the order of development is, not astounding

  exactly, but fraught with the scent of scholarship

  and devilment, a casual glance

  in itself enough to place you inside the scout hut

  at the time of the murder, the joshing

  and rib tickling shenanigans of those confined

  by the govt for inexplicable acts always out there

  just ahead of the dogs, the basic premise lost among weeds

  by the river like the time we struck out

  for the mountains on rumors of gold, the big mules

  loaded down with equipment

  and someone up ahead singing a song about

  love’s fits and smashups, the way we told ourselves

  there’d be another chance, the grandeur we always depended on,

  and beauty, they said, our true love, like a reference

  to small time game preserves where the operators

  herded the animals into thickets

  and far fields the customers could never find

  and there set up tents and offered free vittles

  as if the arrangement met some kind of standard theretofore

  unpracticed in the country where most

  were only the tarnished trophies of those for whom the get-go

  was just another way of
saying the doctor is not in.

  Wilderness

  rain like drops of cold lead—

  it’s hard in this city to keep a grip on the natural world

  poking its snout through the wovenwire fence on 7th

  or while ordering fried chicken to go on Ave C

  where once the carts like tiny sailing ships brought

  alarm clocks and unblessed remnants the linden leaves

  and locust leaves like green insertions blow

  down 5th to meet the stiff leaves of bur oaks

  and elm leaves like slender jimmies for all the locks

  of memory on 8th—the remains of a garden

  or lost civilization rise to a grassy mound where

  children veer into fantasy and only bits of spotless sky

  torn from a secret book appear above the lost and broken.

  WHAT I DON’T KNOW

  From Heine

  Wo wird einst des Wandermüden . . .

  Where will I lie in the bye and bye

  where will I lie?

  In fresh snow under northern lights

  permafrosted in a stony field?

  In a desert hole

  of mixed borax and sandstone dust?

  With a few dozen others tossed

  in a pit after a friendly fire massacree?

  Or slumped untended

  on a weary slog from one unsuitable

  home to the next

  ex-animate and overlooked?

  Anyhow, the whole policky skittish harangue

  of comets and skirly

  planet types space dust and infinite

  jitters will surround me, lamps of a looted paradise.

  One Spell

  Now these redbirds,

  cowbirds, flickers making

  noise in the boxwoods, jasmine

  trellis, thrushes and vireos

  clambering in the straw, poking

  out the eyes of children,

  and bugs, waxwings, catbirds in

  wax myrtle bushes, yaupons,

  heart-wing sorrel plants in

  cutover fields, warbler and oven

  bird saying teach-er, teach-er,