Read an Excerpt
Said Not Said
Poems
By Fred Marchant GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Fred Marchant
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-773-3
CHAPTER 1
Psalm
So why bother with it, let it go,
this business of deciding if,
or how long, a string of words
should take to stretch across
a page, or float, as if weightless,
or reach down like a priest
who after listening to your list
says you are forgiven. This is
not something for a grown-up
to worry about, nor is it for
anyone who votes, or is listed
demurely as head of household.
Nor is it your question for today,
not after you have, in traffic,
followed a purple flag to
a grave where, inches down
in East Providence, R.I.
a yellow backhoe has revealed
a layer of vivid red clay.
The workmen who loop the straps
under the coffin are whispering,
wondering if the seal remains true.
In this question they are like
the priest who, upon finishing
his Prayer for the Dead, offers
remarks on the poet by which
he means the psalmist, that singer
who, though he knows better,
insists: when I call, answer me, God.
The Unacceptable
How?
How do you write about a cough?
How to hint at the sound of it?
A cough that was odd, not from a cold, or something else you catch.
I think now it was the sound of what was eating away my sister's mind.
I first heard it at our grandfather's funeral Mass.
I was seven and thought she should just quit it, stop bothering me, and
everyone.
Forty Years
Howard, her life spent on William A. Howard's farm, Howard the short
form for what was originally the Asylum for the Incurable Insane.
How the gentle Pawtuxet stream flowed past, and how I composed a song
she could sing under her blanket:
O bless this sweet layer of wool, bless my warm halo of heat.
How the illness clutched her by the neck, tossed her up and let her go,
and in the second before she landed, how she thought she might escape,
could drift away like smoke from a long drag on her cork-tipped Kool.
How the sound of the rust-bucket trawler named Memory followed her
wherever she went, its iron nets dragged across the floor of her being, the
silt clouds and debris fields, a stern winch sounding a lot like pain.
How she ached to have them examine what they pulled up there, some of it
thrown back, some saved in the ice-hold: a few scaled creatures to be studied
in the labs, their weird antediluvian appendages, their would-be limbs.
How rage at times so transformed her face I was sure she and Nero had
gone fishing in the lake of darkness, and me, I had become the sane but
cleverly gibbering Edgar hiding in the hollow of a tree.
Howard, a downbeat, and off beat, a first note in the music we heard when
the kitchen knife found its home in her hand as she reached in the drawer.
How the legal involuntary moved in and imposed itself because the great
orange snowplows out on the mid-winter highway were trying to run her
down.
Me
To her I was airy sunlit ice, a comet tail, in an elliptical once-in-a-while
orbit, a vague portent, a streaky omen, with nothing much to say anymore,
just the rest of my self-comforting ditty.
Bless the blanket over her head and under her feet.
Bless the hands that weave the thread.
Bless the sheep they sheared it from.
Our father, meaning to protect me, said it would be good for me to visit
and see this, so I'd know, so I would know know know how not to end
up here or there or wherever Howard actually was or would in my life
someday be.
too wanted to give that place and her a world of berth, the Xmas visits
all I ever had to do really, just get a box with stick-on ribbon, some CVS
shampoo, wrap it in paper printed with holly, candles, Victorian joy.
An hour in the Howard parking lot, my father and I signing her out to the
backseat where she opened what we brought her, a chocolate interlude,
an engine idling, the heat on.
Our spot outside her own red brick How and her wherefore Ward, decked
out year after year in the tinsel and the garlands of disordered thought.
Howard, our one and only name for the world headquarters, the genuine
article, real deal skit-so-free-nee-ya, its live-in campus to the left of the cornfields,
just off Rte. 2, heading south from Providence.
Her
Her last day on the planet she thrashed and spit while the nurses tied her
wrists to the bedrail with strips of cloth that only worsened what was
happening.
Her face was radiant, her whole being flush from the long struggle with
those she knew she should never have trusted.
They tried to keep track of her vitals, charted her erratic heart, peered
into her cranium with a flashlight through the eyes.
She said they had taped a death-line to the port in her arm.
They said she should believe in the plastic tube at her nose, that it would
fill her lungs with good clean air.
She shook her head as hard as she could, got her whole body to say nope,
thou shalt not, no way, nothing doing, thou shalt not touch me.
Not with the elbow-bendable straw adjusted to the lips, not with the
insidious needle pointed upward and dribbling over.
And absolutely not with that wheezing apparatus of the unacceptable the
big attendant in his scrubs was wheeling in.
In the As If
we plan to stuff steel wool down the doctor's throat get lighter fluid
ronson
squirt it in his ears and up his hairy nose ignite that fucker inside out
my-my-myelin
while an infinitely dull month passes between first pills and the pucker
tardive
and lip-smack on the day after the tomorrow when your head starts to
trigger
nod like a horse trained to say yes the tongue feeling a little loblolly
semiotic
and pink as a dog's a tongue that says you're late for the prom you're
sorry
so sorry until one morning a pinto-splotched nerve gallops into the corral
bushwhacked
where your old inner wrangler straddles the fence a lasso and snaffle
paladin
draped over his arm while his fingers scratch the pony behind the ear
jangling
as good cowboys do while telling the bewildered animal all will be
¡hola!
well in all the ways nerves have when they start to nicker and twitch
okeydokey
while the stray dogie-tongue rearranges a chaw I must never never
spit
Intake Retake
A hand reaches out to help you across
you feel the swell under a shifting point
of contact and hear the ropes strain as if
you are a boat entering the harbor passing
a red outer buoy where the gulls perch
watching and waiting for you to tie up
shut down the twin engines and stare
into a waxy Dixie cup the diameter of
a silver dollar and in which two major
tranquilizers float on a rising tide while
on the dock gather those who want to hear
the tasty details of your story's close calls
with love and the lazy firing pins unwilling
as ever to cooperate and relieve you of duty
ok I'm back now is what you say to ruddy
non-responders on whom nothing is lost
or past or forgotten especially getaways
like yours so you toss the thick manila
folder of your history to a longshoreman
whose beefy nonchalance you say reminds
you of dinghies on the Titanic yes but not
a good association given the expert coming
in under a crushed hat with pheasant feather
angling 45 degrees up from the cerebellum
as if his jowly being was a taxi whose sign
is lit and says he is on duty though you are not
sure what he says or if he has asked a question
but you have dis-remembered more many times
before so you say the best words you own
for his parsing by which you intend to show
him you are truly compos in search of a verb
and its subject and only then do you go out
on a limb for the complement which as you
say to anyone within the sound of your voice
is spelled with an e and means the sentence
and these thoughts hereby are now over.
Cement Mixer
I helped her board the windows,
spit in the dresser, shut the gate.
She was the legatee,
a this is this tattoo on her arm,
glazed roads to look down,
glimpses of a sky-burial.
Mournful pines, a girl's wandering mind.
There was always ragweed
and burdock to welcome her back,
hints of love and friendly
lower organisms — moss, algae.
She was soaked to the skin with tears
she had yet to shed.
Then it was back out to sea, a ferry taking on water.
She lived out the rest of her stints
beyond the idea of salvation,
with four to a room, a standup
tub to shower in, shallow sink,
the remnant of an easy chair,
long gleaming linoleum halls.
Gummy flowers pasted on the wired door.
Asylum, refuge, sanctuary
red-brick palace of peeling paint,
oaks brushing against the walls,
her group sing in the every a.m.,
a gray-haired volunteer at the piano,
the rows of folding metal chairs.
Slim Gaillard to get the day going right.
Cement mixer, put-ti, put-ti,
cement mixer, put-ti, put-ti,
a little poodle da skoodie,
and poodle da skoodie some more,
that is how, that sure is how,
you make the good concrete.
twintulips
I ran a finger
down her stilt-like
stems and over pale
green petals my sister's
water color the paint
weeping down the
page she was trying
to hold onto as
long as as long as
The Name of the Painting
on Titian's Europa (The Rape of Europa)
In her exposition the docent avoids the word rape,
as does the museum in the brass nameplate beneath.
She says the work is a literal tornado of unfinished
diagonals in an unfinished story, thus violating all
boundaries of time and frame, inventing the modern.
A pair of putti with arrows hover over the woman
while another cherub rides on a green scaly fish
and stares up Europa's loosened skirt. Her sisters
on the dim shores of Sidon are waving in dismay.
In the distance they are so tiny you can barely find them.
What you do see clearly is how tightly she grips
the chalky horn of the bull, while over her head flows
the wild red scarf that Ovid mentions. The docent
says the energy of that swirl hints at ambivalence
and the lure of an adventure, noting in an aside
that the word rape is kin to rapture, the scarf like
a wild force lifting her up. The girl's face, however,
is filled with palpable fear, her brow pale as the far,
private reaches of her thigh. The putti, the lewd fish,
and we standing in the gallery all eye her nakedness
at the center of the painting. Some say the bull too
peers with desire over the folds of muscle in its neck,
but the animal looks as frightened as the girl he carries,
and senses some lascivious and indifferent Almighty
intending mayhem has taken over its body. Plus,
there is this screaming creature flailing on its back.
At first the bull had let her lean on its flank, touch
like a feather, but when the command or urge came on,
the animal was compelled to turn with all its strength
toward the western sea. The instant it happens the girl
knows this is forever. As she looks back at the life she
is leaving, her eyes turning into dots of terror, I realize
I am seeing my sister again, how her madness descended
or rose up beneath her, took her beyond known islands,
washed her up in a geri-chair, delivered her to the shore
of a bright-lit day room where the white board waited for
a nurse with a thick magic marker to fill in the blank
Today Is
CHAPTER 2
A Bone in the Throat
Imagine a fishbone lodged in your throat.
Imagine it kicks and squirms.
You cough, you hack, you try to heave it out.
As you are human, you adapt,
you learn how to speak, eat, sleep, work,
and dream with this thing within.
You read the stories of tumors like grapefruits.
There is nothing consoling in reports
of massive and painful deformity worldwide.
Imagine your children inherit the problem,
though you know the issue is not genetic.
Periodically there is violent physical reaction,
a rejection, but nothing changes.
In the early hours just after your prayer,
and before splashes of water clear the eyes,
you try as you may to discern meaning
in the situation. You feel the bone stirring again.
It is like a dog you have awakened.
You do not marvel anymore at metamorphoses
such as that from cyst into a cancer,
the tumor that turns into a dog.
Suddenly, the whole neighborhood is barking.
Trials and dangers await you. The racket
makes you run to your child's bedside.
Now what do you do?
The window is wide open.
For some indecipherable reason, she has stopped breathing.
Here is what the mind does
when my laptop opens to a small red car
a tight street in Jenin gray-yellow dust
an electric window half open and five
lean-to cards where on each a number
denotes a round spent or the place where
it began to travel at the speed of its idea
while by an open car door the blood pools
pools and follows a tilt in the road — not
far — more a lingering as if blood could
choose not to leave could hang around
be curious and puzzled like the children
who stop to watch men who have duties
do them as quickly as they can in a slow
reluctant and deliberate picking through
which is what the mind does at moments
like this — really little more than nothing
From The Sender
Pupils, jittering eyelids, axons,
random charges, scribbled nerves,
images arrayed like iron filings,
our magnetic north, the dog star,
rotating spits, an arc of language,
an impatient dream clamoring at
the door like a small wet animal
barely alive, who looks up as if
to say The Sender wants you to
do more deliberate reasoning,
knock off the cascading syntax,
quit acting like a puppy in a pool.
Consider then the captured dictator,
his bound arms, sweat-matted hair,
and his dark, bewildered little eyes.
Listen to the inaudible plea he makes
for mercy, though he knows full well
there will be none, not today, not in
the desert light that gives to his body
a soft glow of sacrifice, not with his
face chiseled like a goat's whose neck
is held open to the knife, whose legs
and hooves start to twitch, just now
remembering they are supposed to run.
Marwan
who says the only work left
is to read the olive trees,
takes me to his groves,
who stays awake all night while
I sleep on his foam pads,
a sweater hooding my eyes,
who taps the plastic keys,
works the Translate screen,
his sole companion,
who greets me when I wake,
says he is not sheep, not goat.
What he means is the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
is a wind that scorches the air,
makes it impossible to breathe,
let alone translate.
Below the Fold
someone in Benghazi with a hose in one hand
uses his free one to wipe down the corpse
water flows over the body and down
a tilted steel tray toward the drain
what washes off washes off
E pluribus animus
One-soul sits weeping on the seawall,
a hero wishing to flee the enchantment.
Dog-soul stands guard, swivel-headed,
guarding its bony idea of the enemy.
Good-finger-soul twitches as it labors
to keep the chamber oiled and clean.
Soothe-soul wipes with a gauzy swath,
circles of comfort on the blued metal.
Prickly-wire-brush-soul scrubs the lands
and grooves free of the flecks of the past.
Hand-soul weighs the weapon, marvels
at its simplicity, service, and perfect fit.
King Chestnut
Earthworm, seedpod, the hidden life
inside the sable skin of horse-chestnuts,
the tree-grounds littered with them,
each perfect to drill a hole through,
hang at the end of a rawhide strand.
We had no name for the game that
had you hold your arm out straight,
steadying the chestnut dangling under,
while another boy took aim with his
and tried to smash yours to pieces.
The best you kept in the cigar-box
papered with gilded royal faces,
fit company, along with the screws
and washers, for a king chestnut
growing aged, wrinkled, and hard,
what you hoped for, getting ready.
Quitter's Rose
The San Diego recruit depot unit signs
in gold lettering, city airport next door,
a smiling Nanook painted on the tailfin
watching over ropes that dangled from
the O course, its obstacles empty now,
but as I leaned into the plane's window
I saw my young self shinnying up, trying
to touch a creosote crossbeam at the top.
A callous ripped open under my fingers,
the palm a mess of blood, skin, rope-hair.
Just shy of the top I let go not knowing
how much this was a failure of character,
but when I landed unhurt in the sawdust
I felt giddy with relief, as if I had come
back alive, maybe even won a medal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Said Not Said by Fred Marchant. Copyright © 2017 Fred Marchant. Excerpted by permission of GRAYWOLF PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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