Simply awesome.
Ken
--------------
Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/
"All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."
--Francine du Plessix Gray
On Dec 19, 2010, at 6:24 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:
> My only seasonal poem, as far as I can remember.
>
>
> BY WAY OF THE SEASON
>
>
> 1
>
> After its struggle the gazelle
> surrenders to the lion's grip, useless
> to fight. Does it think then, does it think
> 'if only I'd dodged to the right. If only.
> Maybe next time.'
> As the cat disembowels it and begins to feed.
>
> Farewell to the hills
> farewell to the herd
> farewell to water hole and tender grasses
> and the joy of the young at the teat.
>
> 2
>
> At moments when the consequences of choice are upon us we say
> 'this can't be all there is,' but it can. Regret, nostalgia and longing,
> on the other hand, are ready gifts, one can live
> as if there were choices with no consequences, as if
> the life could be unlived
> and lived again.
>
> 3
>
> Day before Christmas in the supermarket the Stones are singing "Can't get no
> satisfaction," but we try & we try & we try & and we try
> and we buy something.
>
> 4
>
> No way no way
> elusive as wind.
>
> 5
>
> Stories and the stories of stories.
> A vocabulary of places gathered and left.
> Putting death aside, one wonders whether to climb that distant hill, as in
> the conservation of matter.
> There are so many windows to look through.
> Opposite, a building seems to wear as a crown the trees
> beyond it. Close one eye or the other
> to recover its true flatness. If I say
> 'rock dove' do you see 'pigeon?'
>
> 6
>
> No gull rests now on the cross above the church's triangular facade, but
> it's apparently a perch
> reserved for gulls to take turns at.
> So much for religion. One prays
> to invest oneself in the known and unknown places,
> the simplicity of the abandoned and the immanence of ruins.
> Ghost-whispers.
>
> 'I am the demon that whimpers at night,'
> he said, and the pigeons
> (or doves) ride even the steepest wires. The oblique
> is granted them. Across the street
> in front of the travel agency
> a gruff Santa makes Christmas noises
> in Caribbean Spanish. For a moment I thought it the ghost
> rising through the radiator from the apartment below.
> He dances now to "The Entertainer" played on a portable keyboard.
> Ragtime Spanish Santa from the Dominican Republic.
> And what would Dominic have made of this? 'Church
> of the Immaculate Deception,' he might have said. As in
> 'I bring you pestilence'
> he might have said.
> It was an epidemic of grace.
>
> 7
>
> That year three virgins bore sons.
>
> Zeus the King displayed his thunderbolts.
> Chango fell as a shower of gold.
> And Chac arrived as rain.
>
> Where you find it bring joy.
>
>
>
>
> New from Chax Press: Mark Weiss, As Landscape.
> $16. Order from http://www.chax.org/poets/weiss.htm
>
>
> "What a beautiful set of circumstances! What a lovely concatenation of particulars. Here is the poet alive in every sense of the word, and through every one of his senses. Instead of missing a beat or a part, Weiss’ fragments are like Chekhov’s short stories the more that gets left out, the more they seem to contain… One can hear echoes from all the various ancestors...[but] the voice, at its center, its core, is pure Mark Weiss. His use of the fragment is both elegant and bafflingly clear, a pure musical threnody…[it] opens a window, not only into a mind, but a person, a personality, this human figure at the emotional center of the poem."
>
> M.G. Stephens, in Jacket. http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-weiss-rb-stephens.shtml
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