POEM: "A Monkey Looks at the Stars"

A Monkey Looks at the Stars

                                       
                                                           for Hugh Bohane

Riding a bus through Yunnan
Chinese dinosaur fields up ahead
Nothing surprises today in the villages;
Dumbstruck by my own foolishness
Fairly certain that I’ll do most of it again
The tunnels take us through the mountains.

We are grown accustomed
By the familiar, taking all of it in
According to old stories, old names;
Although everything that rings a bell
Is hardly a prescription, there's nothing
Doesn't remind me of something else.

In Dali, the mountains are high
And the Emperor is very far away.
At The Bad Monkey bar, similarity,
It's easier than arguing. And ancestors
Understand their approximate descendants
Will know a thing, a person, and a place.

A small dog is chained in the corner.
When I ask her why, she says it’s because
She doesn’t have a quiet heart. She smiles.
I want to say to her, Past attraction, but
Not past love, yet the stray dog has a soul
But I'm falling up to a perfect sky, and I don’t.

                                                                             Dali, Yunnan

© 2011 Rob Schackne

POEM: "When A Man Says"

When A Man Says
 

When a man says
timetable of discovery
interminable halves—

Bitterness speaking
the sessions release
a running zoo of pain

Light of day sees
a throng of love leaves
buried in river sand

Luck what's it worth
how blithe the sky looks
all of it floats past—

Let's get drunk
and walk across the street
to the Museum of Devils.


© 2015 Rob Schackne

MUSIC: Hank Williams, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (1949)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=130&v=4WXYjm74WFI

(Hank Jr. and Hank III continue their namesake's great work. Really.)

An Eve Robillard Poem

Everything Happens Twice

That bird sitting dazed on the railing
has flown into your window before.

The dead-end street you’ve turned onto
You did that just last month. The boss

calling you into his office
has nothing new to say.

There are only so many scripts.
Everything happens twice.

The friend who borrows your raincoat
will borrow your raincoat tomorrow. The parent

who never loved you enough
is doing it from the grave. You are writing

the very same poem
over & over again they are playing

that old, old song but it’s never
the very last dance. So smile at the guy

who drinks too much
the one with forget-me-not eyes. Sleep

with the one who calls you
by another woman’s name.


(2002)

MUSIC: The Cure, "Pictures of You" (1989)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG9CXd00QHQ


The great Robert Smith. Listen carefully. It's extended.

MUSIC: The Jim Carroll Band, "Wicked Gravity" (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaitsG1hdeQ

"Gravity don't mean a thing". You know it.

A Mary Jo Bang Poem

Except for Being, It Was Relatively Painless

                                        It was relatively painless except for being
all she could see: a world made of dinner, very pleasant; a lunch
at something called a table in the dining room; an endless night;
a half-day; another lunch, this on Tuesday. Yesterday. Today.
Pieces propped up with supports. The therapist tapped his cigar.
He no longer accepted her general opposition to myth, marriage,
Olympic Games, and the course of decades. He said it was as if
she were engaged in an eternal war, either watching a movie
or acting in one, depending on the situation and time of day.
She sat in silence, the sky above a half-baked blue, a blank-
face dying of awkwardness. The simple explanation boiled down
to the too-easy explanation. He was smart and charming then;
and later, much less so. Behind his head, pictures were crammed
together with the top layer hung so high she had to crane her neck
to see the details. He said to please pretend she was listening.

(2015)

POEM: "The Bridge"

The Bridge 

I look to the horizon
east and west, sour days
little rib, the body prone
hiding a soft white belly
the bridge, a weight in dreams
a tiding of magpies scouting
river and clouds and flowers
I join a search party waning
coming the other way, gibbous
moon, argument and laughter
another group to meet us.

                                    V-J Day, Shanghai


© 2015 Rob Schackne

POEM: "The Destruction Of Palmyra"

The Destruction of Palmyra

Where vandals lay charges, no
Not charges, discharges, the
De-charges, that destroy
No, try to destroy time
Something remains
No, it never stays
Very long, but
No history’s
Nothing
Gone
No


© 2015 Rob Schackne

A W.S. Merwin Poem

Berryman

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write


(1983)

POEM: "When The City Goes Dark Brown"

When The City Goes Dark Brown


An eerie brown light tonight
gnomes churning out the coal
their feet intent on dimming
the all-clear wholesome air

The mood is heavy street lamps
the cars are stopped by rockfall
the hoodoo flags the imagination
(I think the gnomes know better)

In this deliberate night of ours
every year the same argument
where darkness gives new eyes
& the odd tear falls in deep places

We discuss the B-flat world
she said it denoted comfort
it was our first date so I demur
(it’s true I sleep better when it rains)

I don't mention the scattered love
vuvuzoolas blatting out of autos
world-wide air-conditioners dull hums
in the ordinary winds of the world

I cut back listen for another note
look at my wall at the Tibetan mask
hanging in blood ringed with skulls
what I am reminded of forgetting

Fire & wind friction of moving parts
inside the daily machinery of our lives
the message the appeal that’s lost us
this other music stored in silence.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

POEM: "I check my newsletters today"

“I check my newsletters today”


I check my newsletters today
I see the big headline question
Just how resilient is Spacetime?
Quickly I hazard a poet’s caution
And throw all science to the winds
Ships sail by the edges of the world
The fruit all sits well in the basket
Spacetime's as resilient as a banana
It’s as good as your weekend plans
Count to 10 count to 20 good luck
Then wait for the endless replies.

© 2015 Rob Schackne

A Chard deNiord Poem

Dream of Heaven


I’d smoke cigars all day and into the night
while I wrote and wrote without
any hope or the slightest assurance
that anything I’d written actually mattered
or rose to a standard of literary merit.
I’d languish in the smoke that did me in
and call it the cloud of my unknowing,
so sweet in its taste, such as it was,
of Cuban soil. That would be paradise
in heaven that’s so overrated as endless
bliss it kills to imagine it's a place for living
forever, no less, with nothing to do
or lips to kiss. I’d curse, therefore,
with the best of them—the legion
of Saved—as I sharpened my pencils
and smoked my Punches in the simple room
that I’d be given with a desk for writing
and bed for remembering the things
I’d forgotten. And reading too, I almost
forgot. I’d read and read since I’d be done
with sleeping, but dreaming, no, still dreaming
a lot. I’d live to live again with moments
of dying to see how “lucky” I was. I’d use
my body as an eidolon with invisible wings
that fluttered in the void as if it were air
and hummed in the dark where I could see.

(2015)

POEM: "Cave, Mastodon & Antlered Creature"

Cave, Mastodon & Antlered Creature


Crystals gleam before the night
she awakes before the others
a cave lit in both directions

Putting hands on hard stone walls
she walks beyond their last erasure
midnight of vision or dawn of sleep

She’ll walk 50 feet past the erasure
in and out again by the force of fire
surprised when the subject is the same

They call her simple they say she’s crazy

which hardly concerns her principles
toting the bag with the colors she needs.


© 2014 Rob Schackne

A Nathaniel Mackey Poem

Song of the Andoumboulou: 166 ½

Decapitism stuck to the end of my
   tongue. What to do but call it names
I thought. It wasn’t thought I was  
                                                        think-
   ing I’d have answered had I been
asked, not even thinking I thought…
  I sat brooding, tracking a feather’s
                                                              drop,
    plummet my lush regard. I sat
brooding, hen’s heat yogic so bent
   my hickory legs were, hickory
                                                         stiff
  transcendent so flexed it was. So it
    will have been said absentmindedly
rolled off my tongue. Least thought,
                                                               last
       thought I mock made-believe I
  believed, prophet shod in castoff
   tread… Profitry rolled off as well,
jelly-coated pill I bit. Bitness rolled
                                                              with
   it or might as well have, qu’ahttet’s
broken jaw. Change was the law I
  sat reflecting, right foot nested on
                                                               my
     left inner thigh, left leg pointed
  straight ahead. I sat, Buddhistic
   hurdler, musing, mouth open, ip-
seities arrayed in a row… I sat, I
                                                           was
    thinking thought’s province re-
 ceded, beauty’s provocation revoked
  as our loins contracted, Itamar,
                                                          Anun-
 cio, all us men. Tantric hoist I was
  thinking, thought’s adumbration,
what ached and what resigned itself,
                                                                    dis-
    placed… We sat checking out the
 yogis in leotards, Ahdja, Eleanoir,
   Anuncia, Sophia, every womanly
wisp under the sun. I dreamt again we
                                                                       were
   away with no way home, this or that
     plane waiting, this or that takeoff
 missed, sweet crease loaded with ore
                                                                    but
   to be absconded with, gold we’d’ve
     otherwise been. Bent intonation inter-
vened, a reed off away in the distance,
                                                                      Net-
    sanet’s name I no sooner gave than
was given back, Brother B’s wild ox
  moan… I sat dejected, thought’s
                                                           ap-
    pointment missed, disappointed,
 abscondity’s eviscerate redoubt. I
  was thinking thought had yet to be-
gin, thought’s far emblem a star too
                                                                   frail
  for sight, leotarded crux and cur-
    vature’s ignition, thought’s due ad-
vent I thought no such arrival, what come-
 liness it wore wore thin. No ideas but
                                                                     in
    them I thought, cloak and conni-
 vance the lords of that house, abode
                                                                    we
   abided
 by


(2015)

POEM: "The Message"

The Message

I lean towards the message

I'm waiting for something
the skies are filled with fire
everywhere the streets are lit
by other screens, by dreams
we march and none can see
I've got to go now, goodnight

© 2015 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Far more crap than"

"Far more crap than"

Far more crap than 
I can shake a stick at
knowledge and poems
don’t help flush away

Point, shout all you like
many won't be looking
it could be true, wanting
but listening like a bird

Bend, twist everything
that includes the strange
shaped by anything, we–
I try to relax and breathe

Sound waves, light waves
exit through the gift shop
over the fence, down the lane
all goes through the mirror.


© 2015 Rob Schackne

A Heather McHugh Poem (3)

Language Lesson 1976

When Americans say a man

takes liberties, they mean

he's gone too far. In Philadelphia today I saw
a kid on a leash look mom-ward

and announce his fondest wish: one
bicentennial burger, hold

the relish. Hold is forget,
in American.

On the courts of Philadelphia
the rich prepare

to serve, to fault. The language is a game as well,
in which love can mean nothing,

doubletalk mean lie. I'm saying
doubletalk with me. I'm saying

go so far the customs are untold.
Make nothing without words,

and let me be
the one you never hold.

(1994)

POEM: "Yearn"

Yearn


In a room that has no corners
on a bend that sees no lights

like a dripping cave with claws
it's trying to expel something

out of the past — a malignant
forgiveness, an axial flexor

a branch line or terminus-fret
these are forests without trees

seas without shipping bubbles
only a nausea that's like noise

oil sickness, fumes & machinery
you would expel it all willingly

for one night's steady beacon
a pure melody above the drum

sure, but everyone must have it
caveat emptor, diddle-dee-dum

entry was below a bridge this time
its structure looked solid enough.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "First Nights Of A Chinese Autumn"

First Nights Of A Chinese Autumn 


I wish I had a mood
About autumn instead of
A sore back, a hangover

Memories of love like
Cicadas drop from trees
Washed in hot rain

I wish I had an autumn
About a mood instead of
Noisy insects, the summer

Still whistles, not autumn yet
It mumurs with fans and sweat
Days are long, calm is rare 

I’m a long horse-tail
Swatting at the flies
I try to order more wine


© 2015 Rob Schackne