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[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

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Carol Muske-Dukes

Maybe it's not the city you thought
it was. Maybe its flaws, like cracks
in freeway pylons, got bigger, caught
your eye, like swastikas on concrete stacks.

Maybe lately the dull astrologies of End,
Millennium-edge rant about world death
make sense. Look. Messages the dead send
take time to arrive. When the parched breath

of the Owens River Valley guttered out,
real voices bled through the black & white.
The newspaper ad cried, We who are about
to die salute you. Unarmed, uncontrite.

Gladiators: a band of farmers, entrenched.
And how many on the Empire's side recognized
the bitter history of that Bow? Greed drenches
itself in a single element, unsurprised.

Like strippers, spotlit. Tits and asses
flash red-gold, while jets shriek above.
Rim-shot. History, like a shadow, passes
over a city impervious as a bouncer's shove

to dreams. Images tell you what's imaginable.
Here comes another ton. We bathe in
what's re-routed from the source: a fable
of endless water in a dipper made of tin.

Comments

[iamkatia.livejournal.com]

This poem sent me fleeing to google for more.

Thanks for the finger pointing.

Here's a GREAT one:


An Octave Above Thunder


... reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.

--T. S. Eliot,
"What the Thunder Said"


She began as we huddled, six of us,
in the cellar, raising her voice above
those towering syllables...

Never mind she cried when storm candles
flickered, glass shattered upstairs.
Reciting as if on horseback,
she whipped the meter,

trampling rhyme, reining in the reins
of the air with her left hand as she
stood, the washing machine behind her
stunned on its haunches, not spinning.

She spun the lines around each other,
her gaze fixed. I knew she'd silenced
a cacophony of distractions in her head,
to summon what she owned, rote-bright:

Of man's first disobedience,
and the fruit...
of the flower in a crannied wall
and one clear call...

for the child who'd risen before school assemblies:
eerie Dakota rumble that rolled yet never brought
rain breaking over the podium. Her voice rose,
an octave above thunder:

When I consider how my light is spent--
I thought of her light, poured willy-nilly.
in this dark world and wide: half-blind, blind,
a widening distraction Getting and spending
we lay waste our powers...Different poem, a trick!

Her eyes singled me out as the wind slowed.
Then, reflective, I'd rather be / a Pagan
sucked in a creed outworn / than a dullard
with nothing by heart.

It was midsummer, Minnesota. In the sky,
the Blind Poet blew sideways, his cape spilling
rain. They also serve! she sang, hailing
closure

as I stopped hearing her. I did not want to
stand and wait. I loathed nothing so much
as the forbearance now in her voice,
insisting that Beauty was at hand,

but not credible. I considered
how we twisted into ourselves to live.
When the storm stopped, I sat still,
listening.

Here were the words of the Blind Poet--
crumpled like wash for the line, to be
dried, pressed flat. Upstairs, someone called
my name. What sense would it ever

make to them, the unread world, the getters and spenders,
if they could not hear what I heard,
not feel what I felt
nothing ruined poetry, a voice revived it,
extremity.

Carol Muske-Dukes

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

excellent~!

she is so good

[mom-star.livejournal.com]

I first found her thru this poem:

The Queen of Tragedy

Here she comes, the Queen of Tragedy,
dragging her train of black feathers …
Grieving publicly, grieving at the great
communal well. Tears, tears everywhere!

But Catullus' lover lost her pet sparrow
and that small moment fit grief perfectly.
The Latin: pipiebat—uncanny the precise
sound of the tiny bold piping—heard

no more. In her lap or at her breast,
Her sparrow lifting like that my sorrow—
cheeping all the time, hopping from one
shoulder to another … pipiebat, little incident.

Yes, in all the translations, it is a small bird,
it is a needless act. This is what makes me
want to talk to you tonight, Catullus. You,
tagging the off-white walls with immortal

graffiti—making Lesbia's tears also eternal.
You eulogized the sparrow—bright-eyed
hopper on her breast, who inspired the great
sentiment—who flittered down the dark

alleyway of the Infinite. You did not flinch.
You'd rather have written of a drag queen,
of Aemilius' ass-breath, a botched campaign,
back-alley buggery. Anything but grief's needless

and sentimental acts, ridiculous forms—
from the tiny chanteuse whom she loved more than
her two eyes and more than you, Catullus—loved all
the way to tonight, this full moon in Los Angeles,

my sparrow asleep in her white cage, her lover flown away.
David dead. Veil Venus is what you said, veil the figures of
conquest in love, veil the image of love itself—for it mocks grief
in its swaggering, is that it? I want to know what lies between

love and grief—I want to know why we thought we'd live forever,
he and I—so unequipped for eternity with our bad jokes, domestic
strife. Caught between love and grief, the Queen of Tragedy
touches her brow, starts up again and everyone, Catullus,

I mean everyone, tells her to shut the fuck up.

Re: she is so good

[iamkatia.livejournal.com]

Hahaaa! Wonderful! :D