©2004 by Bob Grumman
Acknowledgments:
Some of these poems previously appeared in Of Poem by DBQP Press and in Sticks 4.
I
His Origin
After a Night on the Town
Poem Responds to an Emergency
Beachscene
The Final MeaninglessnessII
26 October 1993
Healing Process
Her Willingnesses
Up Her Skirts
The Cat
On the Toilet
He was just fragmentary echoings
of Stevens, Roethke, Hughes
some misslept vagrant thought one day set racketing
through Crazy Jane's untrellised ardors,
shedding feathers and farting
as he faltered into words princed
eventually, with occasional fingers,
genitals, and voice struggling always
to light up
with silence.
Poem lay in the ditch
between the blonde and her voice,
morose and unhovered,
but filigreeing.
It took Poem less than 3 minutes
to break open the toilet
but he was too late:
only the porch-steps,
a few crevices of sparrowing
and the orange popsicle
were left of
her daylights.
Champion Florida Sun;
barnyard sea
rollicking with yachts;
and heron,
motionless,
at the water's edge to the right
of a deserted pier
two octaves below Stonehenge;
but Poem was thinking of skirts unpursued,
and whether he'd ever get laid again.
Deep in the October sun's now-alto
understanding of a lakeside park
Poem sat meditating on his life,
aware of the final meaninglessness
that all his many meanings
would eventually lead to,
but not caring,
the park's maples, birches and pines
ampling him forever too large for that
as their appreciation of the sun
trembled into, and partook of,
the sun's understanding of them.
Poem, a beggar-woman two voices
previously, then crow,
shrieked like both at once
over the ashes of his mother
unable to wonder
even the outline
of any kind of re-attachment
that seemed possible in a rational universe
or that would not take
all meaning out of earthly existence
and anything that could follow it
in an irrational one.
On the back porch
Poem sat by himself watching
the canalwaters slowly uncripple her
hearthbeats, the telephone
and the closet down to
pine-shadows
and fragments of
almost-audible stars.
Half a chorus below noon
Poem pterumbled through
the splurged willingnesses
she'd uncandled on the steps
of his expectations.An aria lower, he fused with
blueberry guesses
in a shadowy cold field
piss-colored cottages had exhaled
someplace in the remotest reaches
of her preliminary attentions.
Nuns on black bicycles were everywhere.
There were crows in the woods
Poem was remembering up her skirts,
but he kept his head
into an ease that trembled
like the world's opening intentions.
The youngest reasons of Poem's back yard
fidget piratically into the dinless, pasty sky
but never come away with more than a splotch or two
of green, or less-than-green,
a fragile botany slivering between
a vastness of meteorology
and a greater vastness of geology,
Poem experiencing it beyond all sense of size
or consequence,
withdrawn to the dot in his mind
that the dead tumble of cat
the yard has now been holding
for a full year
keeps unzeroing to.
Between movements, it occurred to Poem
with an almost-blinding certainty
that his were the most superb lines of verse
in the history of the cosmos.
He chuckled as he thought of how long
it would take the rest of the world
to realize this.
Bob Grumman is well-known in avant-garde circles as a poet, a critic, and editor/publisher of the Runaway Spoon Press. He has also perfected the verse form "mathemaku," which crosses haiku with mathematics, challenging the reader to a hybrid experience similar to doing long division while reciting Creeley's "The Bird" at the same time. The poems in the present collection, in contrast, are not quite so demanding of the reader, and, hopefully, will introduce Grumman's work to a wider audience. To view his current projects, visit his blog Web site.