The
Chickasaw
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Ed Taylor's fiction and poetry have appeared
in Fiction International, The Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, 5_Trope,
Washington Review, Black Ice, Exquisite Corpse, River Styx, and other
publications. His e-chapbook "The Rubaiyat of Hazmat" was published in summer 2004 by
BlazeVox.org.
EARLY MORNING, VETERAN’S DAY
For
GWB
“far off, o keep far off
you uninitiated ones”
--Virgil
At
5 the black curtain of world
& cold window a pearl scrim.
The
dark opening: a pastoral scene.
A grass street. Streets.
Small gray facades. Like houses.
With names, all in a row.
So
you know who lives here
&
who does not.
--
Ed. Taylor
JOHN R. GUTHRIE:
On the
Matter of Adultery and the Red-Headed Nurse
Your love,
it is the poltergeist, the ghost
that
haunts the keeping room of memory.
The djinn, insistent, raps upon the door,
your
voice entreats that you yet burn for me.
Gale swept, the polar ice now shifts and cracks.
A tidal
wave; its breakers crash and swirl,
sweep
bare beachheads of distant continents.
Your taste,
your scent, your speech; red hair cascades
across
your carmined breasts; I am lock-stitched
to you by
witching hands whose touch I know
too well. Your wraith, now petulant within
the dark
and secret counsels of my night,
uncaring, hurls about the treasures there,
leaving
but ruin where order once maintained.
--John R. Guthrie
Li Po
(701-762) was a bon vivant, soldier and poet and periodically an officer of the
court of Li Po. He is generally
considered to be the greatest Chines Premodern poet. He gained recognition from the Xuan Zong, Hew was eventually
exiled returned to favor and then exiled again. The below is John R. Guithrie’s interpretation.
Endless War
by Li Po
Last year
we fought by the head-stream of the Sang-kan,
This year south of the wall on the Tsung-ho
road.
Our armor’s been washed by the warm waves of the distant sea,
Our horses have grazed
This
endless war goes on, though our three armies,
ten thousand
miles from home, are weary and
worn
and the Hun sews the wasteland with our bones;
The emperor
Chim built the Great Wall against the Tartars.
The signal fires upon it burn even yet.
But now
it’s the Han that tend the beacons there.
And still the war goes on.
On the fields of battle men struggle and kill and die.
Then ravens and kites draw forth their guts
and drape them as grim remembrance on the limbs
of
lifeless trees. The empty husks of men
are
scattered and smeared over the desert grass,
the
horses of the fallen look skyward, screaming from their wounds,
and though the generals have accomplished nothing
still
they are planning the next battle.
Wise men seldom invoke war,
for what
is victory?
It differs
little from defeat.
The Poems below are by Robert
Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the
The back, the yoke, the yardage.
Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam
to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in
nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers--
Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt
ballooning."
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall,
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt,
devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker,
the navvy. The planter, the
picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have
satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the
facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
By
Robert Pinsky
A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy
wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting
Infinitely upward through an upturned
Swollen golden bell rimmed
Like a gloxinia flowering
In Sax's Belgian imagination
And in the unfathomable matrix
Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven
Humming into the cells of the body
Or cupped in the resonating grail
Of memory changed and exchanged
As in the trading of brasses,
Pearls and ivory, calicos and slaves,
Laborers and girls, two
Cousins in a royal family
Of
In Christendom one cousin's child
Becomes a "favorite negro" ennobled
By decree of the Czar and founds
A great family, a line of generals,
Dandies and courtiers including the poet
Pushkin, killed in a duel concerning
His wife's honor, while the other cousin sails
In the belly of a slaveship to the
port
Of Baltimore where she is raped
And dies in childbirth, but the infant
Will marry a Seminole and in the next
Chorus of time their child fathers
A great Hawk or Bird, with many followers
Among them this great-grandchild of the Jewish
Manager of a Pushkin estate, blowing
His American breath out into the wiggly
Tune uncurling its triplets and sixteenths--the Ginza
Samba of breath and brass, the reed
Vibrating as a valve, the aether, the unimaginable
Wires and circuits of an ingenious box
Here in my room in this house built
A hundred years ago while I was elsewhere:
It is like falling in love, the atavistic
Imperative of some one
Voice or face--the skill, the copper filament,
The golden bellful of notes twirling through
Their invisible element from
Rio to Tokyo and back again gathering
Speed in the variations as they tunnel
The twin haunted labyrinths of stirrup
And anvil echoing here in the hearkening
Instrument of my skull.
The
Chickasaw
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