Gary Lemons

March 9, 2024

“End Game” by Gary LemonsPosted by

Gary Lemons

END GAME

1.
 
In the beginning the earth was alone.
It had no language. Did not speak. Nothing
Disturbed the blue work of its dreaming.
 
It dreamed blood. Not just water.
Not just a salt filled basin of rain. Something
Momentary. Unable to feel anything
But the desperate ripple of its own stone.
 
Blood demanded blood. Killed to get it.
Dripped from the ceiling in the room
Where earth dreamed of rivers.
 
Let there be an end to lights rising
From windows, the smoke of machines, the
Crash of stricken roses as they fall.
An end to the cadence of hearts, an end
To bird songs. Let there be
An end to mothering the already dead.
 
The dream is over. Earth is awake.
 
 
2. Snake
 
Snake comes down the mountain with a ghost
In its mouth. Ghost feels no pain pierced by fangs.
Tells snake nothing is left alive. Only snake.
Snake don’t care. Snake eats what’s left.
 
When nothing’s left snake likes himself for a meal.
Snake hunt in trees for earth’s early dreams.
 
Snake find ’em and pop ’em in his mouth.
Eat a dream before it finds a dreamer.
That way snake rules in a world without light.
 
 
3. Snake Dreams
 
Snake dreams of water. Seeing
Babies strung with seaweed floating
Effortlessly toward the sun.
Snake is alone with a truth
Worn so thin it has no sides.
A dreaming snake makes no sound,
Leaves no trail, weighs less than air,
Can’t be heard, seen or felt by earth.
 
Snake is the last living thing. Earth hunts
Snake. Snake dreams and can’t be found.
 
When snake is sufficiently invisible
He will awaken and the clock begins
Ticking toward the time earth will
Feel the faint slither of the last blood
Filled tube moving on its skin. Earth
Sensing, snake sensing.
 
Before then snake will eat himself.
Snake will become the distance
Between inescapable beginnings
And inevitable conclusions expressed
By the dying sun over quiet water.
 
Snake will surface in the pink light
Surrounded by pale children whose
Hands are filled with bones that once
Were inside their bodies.
 
 
4. Snake in the Grass
 
Sure snake like a good slither in wet grass
But only if the grass is wet with blood.
Ghosts don’t bleed so snake don’t like ’em.
 
There are billions of ghosts, dandelion puffs
Singing as they fly, screaming when they land.
But snake moves through snowstorms
Of souls knowing his hunger is punishment
For worshiping god one bite at a time.
 
With snake gone the earth would be alone.
Out of compassion snake remains alive.
 
For now snake slithers through a field
Of ghosts looking for vestiges of god to eat.
 
Snake thinks and chews old leaves—thinks,
No, these are only leaves, only old leaves.
 
 
5. Snake Eyes
 
Snake has no eyes. Don’t need to see.
Ain’t nothing to see in the entire world
But snake hisself and snake done seen hisself
In the face of things he ate alive, seen
Hisself in the pool of liquid that came out
Of them when snake squeeze ’em good.
 
Now snake be blind. Sharpen his other senses.
Knows when to freeze, knows the voice
Of every dead soul hanging in the air,
Knows especially when earth has felt him.
Knows then to dream his self away,
Leave behind his skin for earth to mince
While snake drifts through possible doors
Of awakening, not seeing, just knowing
When it’s safe to be reborn.
 
Why do snake pursue another snake to be?
Why not give it up, go be dead? Stop hungering.
Be a ghost like all the rest. Be easy.
Just hold still. Let earth come. Let earth
Rise. Feel the ground tremble. Feel his belly
Sawed open by stones and dirt slide in.
Feel earth inside and no longer be snake.
 
Haw. Haw. That funny. Snake can’t die.
Snake must live so not another world begins.
 

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

__________

Gary Lemons: “It’s almost a cliché to speak of poetry as a transformational process by which the poet begins, through the writing of the poem, the sacred work of becoming a better human being. I believe this. Each poem is a gift much like each prayer is a lesson. What matters to me is the tissue-deep shift I feel each time the words come out in that spare and clean way that tells me I have spoken as truthfully as I can in my own voice. The poem as it is written becomes my window as well as my mirror. I am grateful for this every day.”

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June 21, 2022

“An Aviary of Notions” by Gary LemonsPosted by

Gary Lemons

AN AVIARY OF NOTIONS

Wisdom sits down to dinner disguised
As a guest covered with small birds.
The birds are trying to fly but are stuck
In the fabric of the visitor’s adornment.

No one is happy, not the birds,
Not the other guests, not the table set
With candles or the freshly carved animal
With a knife in it—no one
Is happy when wisdom barges in.

If this moment were frozen
We’d see the birds are actually part
Of the guest, are eruptions from what
In him awakens that wants out.

We’d see the legs of the table tremble.
We’d see the oil from the flesh
Ooze down the knife into a pool
Where bread is dipped.

Speaking for everything
That has been deported to a country
Where love is hunted not for its
Meat but for its feathers,

I say—wisdom does not deliver
Itself to anyone that will
Break bread at its table—this
Is the human folly disguised
As an aviary of notions—

At any minute the birds might
Break free to live in the air,
To sing a song note by note, tree by tree,
About a forest where everything hides until,
Following the song,
We come with our axes to listen.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

__________

Gary Lemons: “It’s almost a cliché to speak of poetry as a transformational process by which the poet begins, through the writing of the poem, the sacred work of becoming a better human being. I believe this. Each poem is a gift much like each prayer is a lesson. What matters to me is the tissue deep shift I feel each time the words come out in that spare and clean way that tells me I have spoken as truthfully as I can in my own voice. The poem as it is written becomes my window as well as my mirror. I am grateful for this every day.” (web)

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January 1, 2022

“New Year’s Day 2005” by Gary LemonsPosted by

Gary Lemons

NEW YEAR’S DAY 2005

for Sam

1

I walk the streets today as I have so
Often in the last thirty three years.
It’s an arbitrary number to look back to
A place to start counting but my number
Nonetheless—thirty three years, the years of
Jesus, that good, misappropriated
Man, the years it took Conrad to begin
To launch dark missals at the human heart.

These are the years a man looks back at when
Winter comes not just to the place he lives
But to his body, left like last season’s
Tools, one storm too long without shelter.

Cold wind comes off the water. Ferries
Labor in grey chop through mill smoke bringing
Tourists, seagulls, perhaps a younger
Version of me to town to begin, one
Hopes, a more fluid way to turn to stone.

I remember this feeling, these shivers
That come from insights and under dressing
When I was a young poet walking from
One bar to another with a warm buzz
In Iowa City in the cold morning,
Late for one class or early for another …
The arctic express across miles
Of open prairie, bringing the smell
Of wheat stubble down from Canada.

There was frost on my face, fresh taste of
Breakfast beer, my words on my tongue.

Into the warm bar, Donnelley’s, where Dylan
Thomas was slapped off his stool for cursing
By the same withered Irish prude serving
Me now, Charlie, who at sixty still rides
Home with his Mother who won’t let him drive.
He sneers, brings me a democrat, a short
Draft with too much foam, would like to slap me
Too but almost got fired the last time
So contents himself with wiping a stain.

I believe in Iowa City each
Cold heart, each cold rustling stalk of corn
Left unharvested in the snow covered fields
Is warmed by a molten core of poems
Written by the dangerously young …

Music burbling under ice in creeks
Where coyotes cut their paws scratching
Holes in the ice to drink from the pool
Freezing slowly over the one remaining fish …

I still believe in the power of poems
To make a place where one wild thing survives.

 

2

So I find my place in a world where war
Is killing my friends, killing people I
Don’t know, killing any hope the old I
May one day become have of looking back
At their life to work out the intricate
Deception of a man struck each day
By a small, personal rock from space.

Because it is almost noon and I have
Not eaten, I pour tomato juice in
My beer—it is 1972
For the first time today and Imagine
Plays above the tinkle of glass, the loud
Sounds of pool, sung by a man still alive.

Too much introspection from a drinking
Poet is like mittens on a cowboy
So I unstick myself from friends, the warm
Evaporate echo of words, tell Charlie
He’s a beautiful man I’d love to kiss,
Dodge the bar rag, open the door on way
Too much light and real anguish.

I head west, a true conestoga poet,
To the Vine where Justice is counting
Money from an all night game and buying
Drinks for Norman who is building complex
Structures from pretzels and writing the last
Poems for In the Dead of Night on soggy napkins.

The new year has come, to the brave and the
Stupid, the ones who sharpen blades and the
Ones who grind what’s cut to bread, to the good
And the evil, but never to the dead.

 

3

So here it is, thirty three years later, thinking
Of my friend Sam whose new year will be a ledge,
Not a slope, from which he will fall or rise.
Thinking the fish breathes under water
Because it doesn’t know it can’t.

I have seen you breathe, in lonely places,
The fellowship that sustains and oppresses poetry,
Seen you daily labor with love, with
Great precision and joy, to extract the
Ordinary, infinite, thunderous
Relevant beauty from centuries of words,
Pissing off, in the process, those whose fuse
Is so wet it can no longer be ignited by ideas.

The first birds of spring fly just beyond the
Falling snow, waiting to land when the country
Thaws, waiting to begin the excarnation
Of my tongue, leaving only the bones of
Joy and one vowel, all that is needed
To begin a song of gratitude.

In everything there is the poem,
Stepping out of its own death.

This new year I have no pledges to keep.
I am doing all I can to be who I am.
To you I hope to say, at least once in
The remaining light, that I love you old friend,
Old teacher sweating rain in the garden.

 

4

When all the winters are added together,
All the summers, springs and falls of the oldest
Man or woman, we see they total less
Than the hair on our arms. This life is not
A nest we may sit indefinitely
But a single drop of water falling
From a clear sky that may, upon landing,
Give rise to a previously unknown vine
That itself will live only long enough
To take one fully awakened look
Around, flower, and then gently, without
Regret, remit it’s qualities to the air
And return to the work below ground.

What it all comes down to is, and yes, you
Can take this as a threat, if it gets
Any colder I’m switching to whiskey
Poured one syllable at a time into
A moment when all the shivering ends.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006

__________

Gary Lemons: “It’s almost a cliché to speak of poetry as a transformational process by which the poet begins, through the writing of the poem, the sacred work of becoming a better human being. I believe this. Each poem is a gift much like each prayer is a lesson. What matters to me is the tissue deep shift I feel each time the words come out in that spare and clean way that tells me I have spoken as truthfully as I can in my own voice. The poem as it is written becomes my window as well as my mirror. I am grateful for this every day.”

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August 2, 2011

“Missing in Action” by Gary LemonsPosted by

Gary Lemons

MISSING IN ACTION

It happens so slowly,
A bare vine planted
In spring, a trellis bent
By summer flowers—

Mother details a small cloth with
Intricate stitches on a couch
Beside father, watching television,
Flickering and silent.

Brothers on the floor, tussling or
Playing children’s games.
Slight wind through lilac near the window,
Code of branches tapping glass.

Father goes into the garage
To check on some noise he thinks
Might be plumbing and never comes out.

Mother sets down her needlepoint,
Walks to a closet for more yarn. Never
Returns. Brothers go outside into sunlight,
Birdsongs and disappear at the gate.

I step out the door, push
The sticky screen open—
The neighborhood, the hedges gray
With road dust, the fire hydrant, painted red
Again last week, disappears.

I wait for the return of everything.
Wait in the darkness without breath
Listening to a million hearts, none
Of which are mine, beating.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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