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,
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
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,