In which I attempt a glosa

My job went suddenly full-time, so I've been neglectful lately. But I've been working on the following slightly dirty poem (apologies to anyone who might not be ok with the blue language, but ach, sometimes you gotta). I've quite obviously fudged the rhyme in the lines that are supposed to rhyme (6, 9, 10 of each stanza, if you've never been foolish enough to try one of these), but I do that a lot, so whatever.

I also want to comment on so much of everyone's recent stuff, and that will happen very soon.


Sight

How nice to register the world in shapes
you might squeeze or eat. Better than words,
plus you can get your hands dirty, like work,
but fun, like playing in the grass at night

from “For Ann, Whose Studio Burnt to the Ground in the Big Futon Factory Fire Across the Freeway from the Coliseum,” August Kleinzahler


The newspaper this morning says that artists have sex
with more people than anyone else—they've done a survey.
It doesn't say quite what they mean by artists, but I get it.
Staying overnight with friends in the city. Purple duvet.
The other guest in that house: a painter with grey eyes,
bony hips, the warm smell of salt on him. He came
to the borrowed bedroom's door and wasn't wrong
to wake me. I let him in knowing already his damp sternum
thrummed for someone else; that he'd soon forget my name.
How nice to register the world in shapes,

like a toddler gumming wooden blocks, how pleasant
to be so intent on remembering things with the eye, the hand,
the tongue, that the rest falls away, all burn-off, dross. Bodies
trump names. We end up in their beds, so many of us—
if the survey's right—to be just once the form desired,
the surface palmed. Great salivating moon-eyed herds
of us, slavish, lunging for that twinge of skin gone hot
beneath the painter's eye. The sculptor's roughened thumb.
Skin a colour to be consumed, consumable and used, like fruit
you might squeeze or eat. Better than words,

their cryptic pictures, for getting what they want and whom
they choose. We're mentioned in the survey, too. I don't buy it.
No one ever bedded me because of the word poet. We're
a lonely lot—our drunken nights end with the air grown still
and fingers wanting not flesh but the clean touch of paper and pen.
My last painter was a redhead with a cock so thick it hurt
and a Nordic beard he blushed under when I told him
it was gorgeous. He was inventing a new colour. I'd kill to see
inside his studio. A space like that lets you wear a purpose,
plus you can get your hands dirty. Like work,

like fucking, art demands certain favourable conditions to click.
Over coffee, my friend Emily says “Really? Artists? More than
investment bankers, hey?” and we laugh, shaking off the truth.
I count all my old flames and clench up. I'm keeping up.
But when will I clear my surfaces of this debris and
see in colour? When—when—will I learn how to type?
And, oh, to grow pickpocket eyes and roam the city
groping invisibly, taking what I want without a thought,
with plain, grasping lust in my nerves. Like the old sight
but fun, like playing in the grass at night.

Walking Granville Bridge

in spring, sky placated
but only for now, everything green
or metallic for miles in either direction.
Angry sea a bit of both; hard surface
with chips bitten from it.

To the east and west glass towers--a future
city, beautiful, cheap, terrifying.
A billion shards piped together waiting
for disaster. The hot overcast air
makes its way under my hair.

And there, below, the whole world,
the visible world, every piece
and particle,
about to take flight.

Earplugs

For when the city's pulse is too quick and
furious--shouts of construction workers
matching the steam-whine of their instruments,
bicker and twitter of the man and woman
in the apartment next door (her giggle
a piccolo, his basso profundo
palpitating the wall), thuggy buses--
there's you two little orange wonders,
oversized pills to cure the world of noise.
Gone is the dry-hump thump of Beyonce
beyond the wall. Sound becomes a thing
to feel, not hear. Time passed not by watch-tick
or tap-drip but by the soft, predictable
one-two tide of my own quiet blood.

---


A silly aside: the National Post (which I never read b/c the politics drive me crazy) has currently got on a contest in which they ask for poems of any length or form about the doomed incandescent lightbulb. The prize is a box of assorted soon-to-be-obsolete bulbs valued at 95$. I think this is funny and lovely. The deadline is tomorrow afternoon sometime, contest@nationalpost.com. I might write one anyway, but not bother with the National Post.