August 16th, 2009
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Jeff Streeby
SHEEP KILL
for Dave
David, for years lost in drug-fogs, opens the throats of stunned lambs.
After half his life, grown patriarchal, he puts off all Armour’s gear—
safety helmet, goggles, apron, gauntlet, rubber boots, all their iron mesh and leather.
Shirtless, his Old Dominion baseball cap backwards,
he stands in cut-off Levis and sandals, prelate of the prostrate flocks,
singing each gashed fleecy neck some private sacrament or psalm.
Snugly grottoed in his windowless room, he moils away
smoothly stoned, ankle-deep in blood at the foot of the trundling conveyor,
his face pacific but spotted and striped with the dark wine of slaughter,
his torso, too, streaked incarnadine, splashed with arterial spray.
Year after year, he regards the slow ascent of his bleeding sheep
as they are carried off on wide black belting that rises through his ceiling.
Carotids bubble, jugulars weep, blood runs down the dull rubber in sticky ribbons
that glow honey-gold under long florescent lamps flickering in the basement’s dinge.
Mild berserker, smiling or whistling, he hones his blade against its sharpening steel,
makes it scrape and ring there until it is slender as a Hittite queen and irresistible.
One morning, as ordained, Dave wakes into the blizzard of an empty TV.
Too lucid, he finds he is unable to remember what day of the week it is or
what has happened to that ’58 Chevy Belair he drove in high school, or
whether his married sister is dead or alive.
Unable to explain to his stained self its solitude or
to name with certainty that gray face that looks out of the bathroom mirror or
to confront his other gigantic burden-all those years of pointless doing—
he panics, leaving little behind.
That night, under the doormat of all places, his sister found the knife,
its well-worn haft polished black with blood and suint,
its long edge dressed and keen.
She was furious when she found him in the basement,
a step-ladder in easy reach,
his toes just brushing the floor.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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August 15th, 2009
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Review by Maryann CorbettSIXTY SONNETS
by Ernest Hilbert
Red Hen Press
P.O. BOX 3537
Granada Hills, CA 91394
ISBN 978-1-59709-361-3
2009, 93 pp., $18.95
www.redhen.org
One look at the cover of Sixty Sonnets lets you know you’re dealing with a poet who’s got both slyness and chutzpah—at least if poet Ernest Hilbert and cover designer Jennifer Mercer worked closely together, and the acknowledgments suggest that they did. The cover design parodies the staid, pale dignity of a classical music score like the ones published by G. Schirmer and Boosey & Hawkes—the color, the placement of the graphics and rules, the typefaces, even the fake opus numbers. To that pattern the designer adds a splat of tea stain, a trompe-l’oeil ripped corner, and what looks like the print of a drippy wineglass. The seriousness of real art, and the grit and mess of real living. It’s a fair, and clever, representation of the book, and it was a smart move to turn it into the publicity stickers that the Baroque in Hackney blog tells us about. While we’re considering the looks of the book—something we should do while we still have the privilege of reading real books—we should also applaud page designer Sydney Nichols and note that 6-by-8 inch pages consisting of fourteen lines of Bembo set 10 on 18 are lovely to behold.
But you are reading this to learn about the poetry, and the first bit of poetry to be assessed is the title itself. The plain words Sixty Sonnets are a complicated sort of claim. One can’t ignore the likeness in sound to the TV program title “Sixty Minutes,” and the suggestion of an assortment of news stories. The word Sonnets by itself tells us that Hilbert means to engage with the tradition. “Engage” means both to gather in, as a speaker does to listeners, and to square off against, as an army does to enemy forces. The tradition with which he means to engage goes back to the Italian “little song” and comes in assorted classical forms, and is shaped (usually) in fourteen lines, most often iambic, and has a very definite sort of argument and structure, right down to the placement of its prescribed change of direction. Sixty Sonnets, with no other embellishment or limitation, tells us that this will not be a thematically unified collection like Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets, or Tony Barnstone’s Sad Jazz: Sonnets, or Kim Bridgford’s To the Extreme (about world records), or Philip Dacey’s New York Postcard Sonnets, or Moira Egan’s Bar Napkin Sonnets. We know we’re going to get a unity of form but also a variety of theme and subject matter. What we’ll want to see is how inventive, how various, how insightful, and how wise the poet can be within those limits.
August 14th, 2009
Hilary Melton
UNDER THE KNIFE
There must be ways of making sure children
don’t remember. The intensity of fear, the proper
amount of pain, a certain kind of death threat.
My aunt smiles sweetly, tells me she has absolutely
no memory before she turned 16. My friend Cal
has flashes of someone coming into her bedroom—
it is dark, she is afraid, but she keeps her knees
shut. As a child I was often present in my sleeping
dreams—in the middle of flying, or walking
naked into school, I was there, outside the self
I was being. I could make my dream-self fly higher
or faster or even force my eyes to open.
The day I go in for surgery to remove the bone cyst
they say is causing my jaw to lock, I panic.
Counting backwards from one hundred I think,
what if they don’t give me enough halothane, what if
I can feel them slice, but cannot move or speak?
There are families who don’t suppress memory.
Parents confess, siblings confirm. These families have
police reports, doctors’ notes, witnessing neighbors.
Then there are those families who function best
by the story they build to tell to others, to one another,
to themselves. Pity us Cassandra types, who see back
instead of forward, into the viscera of the horse.
If a dentist takes a needle full of Novocain, injects it
into my gum, then pushes here and there on my numb
face, asks, Can you feel this? I say, Yes.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
August 13th, 2009
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Laurence Snydal
AUTHORITY
When Norman sent me for the cows
I couldn’t bring them in. They stood
As if they had all day to browse
The short grass down, as if they could
Graze all the way to China. When
I hollered, some of them would swing
Their huge heads round and stare and then
They’d swish and stamp and blink to bring
My eight years into focus. Damn!
I had to go and get the dog.
And everything I think I am
Still sees them file out of the bog
Down by the stockpond, up the hill,
Back to the barn, the dog behind,
And I behind the dog. I still
Remember how he made them mind.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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August 12th, 2009
Eric Kocher
DISPATCHES FROM THE DREAM OF PERSONAL FLIGHT
It is my first winter home and the moon
appears as if it doesn’t understand its place
in the strata of heres and elsewheres.
I am getting high because I know how
to be part of a body that leaves itself
for something ethereal. I think of Laika,
the dog we sent into orbit, the first Earth
born organism to leave the atmosphere,
all of the commands she might learn:
sit, stay, how to become a satellite.
The story goes like this: she survives
the ascent but only lasts a few hours
before her heart beats itself silent,
how she remembers the cold
streets of Moscow and they howl
for her to come home.
I think of all the planes with their turbine
groans, proof the voice can spiral
out of control, that we can still
be heard long after we’ve passed.
There is a theory some insects navigate
according to the relative position
of the moon and this is how easy it is
to get lost in the electric glow of streetlights,
to hold onto the idea of some bright shape
thousands of miles away from here
where there is no such thing as night, or winter
for that matter, and home is how close
you can get to the sun before you remember
Icarus, a river of sky, a river of hands,
and your wings are gone, incinerated,
and perhaps you continue upward
like a cartoon whose universe is drawn
by a sea that trembles
only if acknowledged and a space that opens
and continues to open infinitely.
I too am trying to escape. I too am full
of waves that are breaking. Here the air
is always moving and when the trees shake
I think of the wind-chime
my mother made of seashells. My mother
made of glass. The woman who drove me
to the E.R. after I tried to parachute
from a tree with a bed-sheet,
she explained that there is something
we are always avoiding, the moment
at hand, for instance, where I am
smoking a joint on the roof
of the same house I grew up in,
where I am writing this poem
because it requires a sort of downward
motion to exist. In one of my lives
I slide off the roof like a sheet of ice.
In another I was already falling.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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