(no subject)
Jul. 30th, 2006 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unearthingboneTwo more poems I really like, this time from the Summer '06 issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal, a poetry journal local to Farmington.
The first one absolutely bowled me over with how beautiful it is -- I think I read it six times before I really understood what it was saying. And the second poem is really just incredibly smart and very much play-on-wordsy, and I dig the way the stanza lengths undulate like the rhythm of a sexual act.
Marsha Pomerantz
WHAT THE TENOR DOES WITH HIS HANDS
Sometimes sketches out a winter sun
and covers it with cumulus,
then from the center gently cleaves
a cloudbank, leaving listening women
exposed like an icy harbor, men
straining toward a steamy cove.
Sometimes it is fall in the tenor's hands
and they keen over lost leaves, then round
a rock, a breast, a Cape of Hope, sink
back, bereft, pleading inconsequence,
quickening in their innocence. The stage
inhabits and old anatomy hall where
from this balcony you could see
a scalpel separate throat from sound,
a larynx from its silent string quartet,
eight bones in the privity of a wrist.
Life was staunched, death was then
contained on a table. Now sound
incises me, the piano is implacable,
the weather palpable. I pour.
Eric Paul Shaffer
THE FAMOUS POET'S WIFE
At the podium, the famous poet is having sex with his wife
in the poem he reads tonight. He uses the four-letter word.
The act is all ankles and elbows, slits and staffs, grunting,
sweating, and unnaturally assumed positions. Naturally,
I'm embarrassed because I can see the famous poet's wife
squirming in her chair as he caresses the heft of her breast,
the eager spread of her knees, and a tiny, beautiful blemish
none of us will ever see. Handy with his tongue, he speaks
of that moment her thighs muffled his ears in her passion
and lingers on a lonely moment when her rush of pleasure
left him behind. The ladies are glassy-eyed. The men nod
and grin. I'm shifting in my seat. The famous poet's wife
sighs as the last line kisses the poet's lips. Some of us clap,
and the applause raises her husband's head from his work.
P.S.
[Poll #781786]
The first one absolutely bowled me over with how beautiful it is -- I think I read it six times before I really understood what it was saying. And the second poem is really just incredibly smart and very much play-on-wordsy, and I dig the way the stanza lengths undulate like the rhythm of a sexual act.
Marsha Pomerantz
WHAT THE TENOR DOES WITH HIS HANDS
Sometimes sketches out a winter sun
and covers it with cumulus,
then from the center gently cleaves
a cloudbank, leaving listening women
exposed like an icy harbor, men
straining toward a steamy cove.
Sometimes it is fall in the tenor's hands
and they keen over lost leaves, then round
a rock, a breast, a Cape of Hope, sink
back, bereft, pleading inconsequence,
quickening in their innocence. The stage
inhabits and old anatomy hall where
from this balcony you could see
a scalpel separate throat from sound,
a larynx from its silent string quartet,
eight bones in the privity of a wrist.
Life was staunched, death was then
contained on a table. Now sound
incises me, the piano is implacable,
the weather palpable. I pour.
Eric Paul Shaffer
THE FAMOUS POET'S WIFE
At the podium, the famous poet is having sex with his wife
in the poem he reads tonight. He uses the four-letter word.
The act is all ankles and elbows, slits and staffs, grunting,
sweating, and unnaturally assumed positions. Naturally,
I'm embarrassed because I can see the famous poet's wife
squirming in her chair as he caresses the heft of her breast,
the eager spread of her knees, and a tiny, beautiful blemish
none of us will ever see. Handy with his tongue, he speaks
of that moment her thighs muffled his ears in her passion
and lingers on a lonely moment when her rush of pleasure
left him behind. The ladies are glassy-eyed. The men nod
and grin. I'm shifting in my seat. The famous poet's wife
sighs as the last line kisses the poet's lips. Some of us clap,
and the applause raises her husband's head from his work.
P.S.
[Poll #781786]
