OCCIDENTAL POEMS
Four Stories of My Body
Upstairs the boats drag empty nets.
A fisherman who sorts
can't tell a full net from an empty one.
He reports to the captain:
Nets empty, sir.
The bridge is empty, too.
One floor down they await illness.
Everything's orderly,
bedclothes open in a clean triangle,
new bottles on the nightstand,
doctor hurrying over.
He will find the patient.
Somebody below practices dancing,
a tone-deaf fat man
holding his cock while the victrola
plays a waltz.
He enjoys stamping his feet.
It's all flamenco to him.
The basement has a cubby
full of knees and toes,
mostly rusty or broken.
I'm hunting for a spare knee
in the sliver of light
coming beneath the door.
The Cream City Review
Father, at 73, Stubbornly Likes the Country
Overgrown grass around a tree trunk
is ugly as the hair
sticking out of an old man's
nose," says Mother,
grubbing up tough little weeds.
Tundra
eighty-eight
After the visit, she tells me,
when my son and I had left,
she tried finding us, knowing better
but repeatedly checking one or the other
of her rooms, as if dazed.
convolvulus
Poetry-Reading Room
for Yitzhak Rabin
I
He shoots him through the peace song
folded in a pocket, and meets his needs—
both redeemers highly poeticized by assassination.
II
An invocation, the black disc rotates
unlike the sun, back and forth,
tension knob in its middle, unlike
the moon its cord connected to handles,
unlike the stars because a pulley
for exercising the arms and torso not of Atlas,
nor Orion, Mars, Jupiter, merely
Paunchy Mister Older Guy
on fake skis mushing nowhere
except in his mind going forty,
going thirty, going twenty-five,
his future elongating to accommodate poems
unwritten when he wasn't a real jock either
in the mythic sense, going back to the extraction
of his lower left wisdom tooth,
when they told him gravity would pull the partner
slowly down—hyper-eruption—
requiring the exposed roots to ache
after a generation-and-a-half, today.
III
Between murder and Monday's workout,
snug as flatmeat on a kaiser roll,
we find The Book Fair's second
maybe third best performance space,
well towards the rear, unstylishly hermetic:
ad hoc canvas walls, plywood podium,
calamitous audio, about a century
of plastic chairs. Low-tide arrives
after the SRO Latinas panel,
inadequate to lift the out-of-stater—
African American, gay, good, good—
keening sotto voce about mortality
in Provincetown. His wistfulness can't hold
the one who reapplies makeup then departs,
and it fails to stabilize a clot in the aisle—
tight-red-T-shirt Dad enmeshed
with little children, struggling against a motorized
wheelchair, the way corpuscles fight through tiny,
distant capillaries, to the back beat of their mega-pump
resonating from the exhibition concourse,
multiple voices, clanking garbage cans.
IV
Up next the bards for me:
two psychotherapists, comely, personable,
and young by my degraded standard,
who offer this stubbornly small audience,
this mass of absences—colleagues, clientele,
friends, relations—rather than miracles
of mental health, only—rats!—more
woundedness; his ancestors chained
to a foundering slave ship; her
meticulous dead intimacies, and the losing
war, I think, to bolster self esteem.
That's what stuck, anyway, along
with the template I dreamed up
of a personals ad designed for attracting
necessary assassins (feel free
in fleshing out your own): blank blank
poet good at blank blank blank
seeks serious relationship with implacable
opponent. Let's make beautiful
music together while others, the more
the merrier, observe, as Adversary X,
masked, in black, demeans my words
(a critic), impugns my virtue (lawyer),
betrays my trust (pol), abandons me
to bleed (insurance company), slays
my young (drugs and diseases), drags
me into a narrow grave (mine own Mother
Nature). Only, please, without anonymity.
Heed my nakedness clinging to the tree
of life, my distinctive whatever—size,
shape, coloration. Maybe I'm first fallen
and notable for my pirouette into the garden party
punch bowl; or I'm the one blown down
between your collar and the skin—try
ignoring that!—or undislodged by winter,
say Homer, Shakespeare, I rattle in a gale,
secure until my perch itself, expunged
by fire, hurricane, disappears.
V
Meanwhile
we exercise against our personal trainers,
push ourselves to muscle failure saving
the world for, or in some cases,
from, God and all His angels;
and after the last scheduled performance
head out, passing the main reading area,
where Norman Mailer, looking tired,
sits at a table autographing books,
a long, silent line in front of him.
Convolvulus
Busman's Holiday, Cloudy
Back against a rock, legs
flat on the sand, I listen
to the sea, its analyst, drowsy
while it grumbles incoherently
(won't shut up or leave—
sociopathic, I suppose, and dementing
from all the garbage it swallowed.
No guilt, that's for sure,
about the dead—the engulfments,
kidnappings, battery—no more than Napoleon,
beached at St. Helena, apologized.
Can one tolerate a patient
who's never been innocent, just oblivious?
If it could care, it might protest, I've done
some good: given birth, played,
when I was in the mood, kept
secrets, donated food. I'm no
Hitler, not prejudiced! This ocean
resembles a flasher I saw through community
mental health. He'd been kicked out of jail—
old, scuzzy, illiterate—his pleasures
booze and waving. Condemned to psychotherapy,
he treated me like an idiot. Finally
I wised up. We agreed
our sessions were just killing time.
Poetry Flash
Sleepover at the Old House
I don't know where she came from
originally, maybe the South Pacific,
this little flying sex goddess
about eighteen inches long
hanging from a ceiling hook
by string.
Her wings are green
with gold accents, her skin very white,
nice bare breasts, large pixieish
ears, her arms spread and reaching
like she's about to hug you
even though part of her foot
has broken off.
She's heading
up the bed in my general direction
but angled so as to miss my face
and sail out the window, taking
her flower-ornamented black hair,
red lipstick, sarong and bangles
to someone more deserving.
Religion
works that way. It makes you think
there's a profound reason you're alone.
More Questions Than Answers
The complete text of More Questions Than Answers has been posted on the
tel-let website: www.johnmartone.net/
All poems in this section are included in my book manuscript entitled
Counterofferings.