Eyewear is very pleased, this rather grey April Saturday in London, to offer readers a chance to get to know one of the best of a new generation of American poets, with a selection of seven recent poems.
James Grinwis (pictured) is the author of The City from Nome and Exhibit of
Forking Paths, which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the major National Poetry Series (America) in 2010 and published by Coffee House Press in 2011. He
co-founded Bateau, a letterpress journal and chapbook press, in 2007, and lives
in Northampton, Massachusetts. His work appears regularly in US journals and
reviews, and has appeared in the UK in 20 x 20.
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| Grinwis is a significant American poet |
HYMN FOR
FLUTE
There is
a scribe on an animal claw chair
surrounded
by palm bearers
looking
out on a landscape of creepy individuals.
My baby
was growing up with the hunters
in a
forest of snake trees.
A Titan 3
Centaur rocket
blistered
off, peeled from the sky
a vestige
of unknown. A series of abstractions:
nail them
to a wall, she said. A real wall, as is found
in the
hearts of men, she said. The truth in a single
shaft of
sunlight. Okay, she sees the bonfire
in the
tundra south of Oolik
and
questions the motivations of the hunters
who have
built it: to entice
bachelorettes
to their bedsides, the fire
having
the effect of a lure, or a hook?
Or much
simply to make of darkness
a
plaything? Because so large a fire
it must
have powers beyond warmth.
It gets
fuzzy, the interior
of a
skull, like fishery workers
burning
fresh bones on the dock. To dig
through
vessels and wastes
in order
to find things, that was what had to be done
though
the dark was riddled with stars.
ETUDE
A
stemlessness.
An opening
like a dead dog on the cement.
Boniness
as nation state.
Bellies
of children.
Puzzles.
One who
knows the names of stars
another
who knows constellations.
A
stemlessness.
Unfamiliar.
Troposphere.
To write one word.
Suspended
by the aroma of tea.
Fragments
meshed into a hole
through
which to breathe.
Cantique:
a short, easy, popular song.
Algol,
the eclipsing: spooky changes in brightness.
A
Chaconne repeats a harmony.
A
claymore is a kind of sword.
A
stemlessness.
A soul
torn apart by beaks?
IMAGE SET
2
Satie:
“haunted by whiteness.”
Pieces
froides, Son of the Stars, Gnossienes.
Three
Pieces in the Shape of a Pear.
My son,
learning his alphabet, my daughter,
focused
on plastic golf clubs out in the abandoned lot.
I was in
the driveway, filling the car with piles of brush.
Avec
conviction et avec un tristesse rigoureuse.
Reexamination:
the art of it: like sitting in a dance hall,
surrounded
by exuberance, pomposity, and mirth.
“Everyone
seeks to transcend.” My friend this
was the nature
of the country when I thought no, I love the country.
Scenes of
greatness, scenes of many lights
leaping
up.
THERE IS
A CONNECTION
Watching
birds will bring infinite rewards.
You must
wait and watch and it takes time
to let
the world open up to you.
The way
an extremely new member of the family
enters
the familial consciousness: like moss.
A man
just then let the world open up to him by becoming
a yawn,
as in a bomb-proof box fully opened in a playground in the sun.
Also: My
wife was driving and ran over the bird.
If I was
driving, I thought, I would have seen him.
NO ONE’S
IN A MILLION
Conglomeration,
as in sheet music
where
each note serves the purpose
of
another, the way a bunch of rocks
can fuse
into one. Igneous rocks
are born
from fire, metamorphic
from
force. In Hindu philosophy
there is
something like three waves
inside
every person, in Medieval thought
there
were four humors.
I was
walking through town,
regret
dropping off of me
like
nematodes clamped to a defunct satellite
on the
bottom of the sea.
There are
times when one
seems
only to have that kind of stuff.
The
full-bellied moon did something
to the
whole planet
that
night of extreme leaving.
But a
speck of one in a million,
a similar
event going off somewhere,
like a
dime store gum machine
dropping
its bright red globes,
the kids
scooping them out
and
chucking them at telephone poles.
THE
ILLUSION OF SEPARATENESS
Men can
beat the crap out of each other
then get
hungry and treat one another to lunch.
When
having an organ transplant
one will
have a drug called mycophen
shot into
the body
in order
to keep the new organ there.
Immiscible
means
they just don’t mix,
but it
sounds sexy and permanent.
“They’re
passion was immiscible.”
In the
aisles of the market place,
I passed
a beautiful woman;
she was
my wife once.
Having a
hard time stopping to love somebody
is having
a mean saint on a dead cloud inside you
that will
get absorbed by other saints and clouds,
they say
one can become a shield,
a stretch
of sky, or a river.
When
walking into a cave, it is good
to locate
oneself and look around first.
SQUIRRELS
ARE NEAT
It’s
better when it’s bland, the relationship,
Christen
said, the up and down nature
of being
involved with someone
taking
its toll in the very fabric
that
takes it someplace. And squirrels,
they are
very neat, running around like that,
like
drummers, errant cruise missiles,
stuff.
Like that word the elderly woman
said to
you, going out the door of the five
and dime,
‘fuck you’ she said,
and that
is okay, you didn’t mind it,
just
wanted to let her feel at peace somehow.
When my
dog goes chasing after a squirrel
I know it
is hopeless, but then
she
catches one, and it breaks my heart.
All this
up and down nature to the universe,
it’s as
if you were a gut instinct
mated to
a way of philosophically
thinking
about things. And there you are,
my
friend, not making anything up,
looking
for stones
that
really look right at you,
as if
they had eyes, which they do,
the eye
of a stone
something not to be messed with.
all poems appear with permission of the author, and are copyright James Grinwis, 2013.
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