Steve Davenport
Diminishing Innuendo of Hog Sonnet
Blue-veined junket pumper boner cock pig ding dong dipstick
Weapon of mass insertion dangling thing with one hole
Doughnut holder firm worm hang down dick hard on knob
John Thomas love muscle pork stick member prick
Purple-headed trouser snake pecker pole
Love truncheon meat whistle trouser trout
Willy woody weiner weinie
Purple-headed percy rod
Salty dog schlong skin flute
Pink oboe pork sword
Throbbing python
Piece of pork
Stiffy
Hog
National Geographic
Refinery town, a lake of gasoline
beneath, the bird it might become, lifted
by the water table after spring rains,
gold feathers octane-slick and belching flames
that make of mere being a luxury,
an afterthought, shining above the flood
plain, where a palm at the end of an arm
cups a match on plant property to light
a joint that opens into bronze distance,
work the nothing that exceeds the nothing
that waits in the mind.
The Sestina Has Been Drinking
Jimmy crack corn and set back some mash for his still
You give a solid half a chance, it’ll seek its liquid form
That was Dean Martin’s swizzle stick talking, not me
Ask Judy Garland’s cigarette who was shooting the moon
Last night when Otis begged Barney for one more break
Gertrude Stein, Toasted Suzie’s crazy about you
You give Whiskey River half a chance, girl, it’ll drown you
Oh Danny Boy, everywhere last call is calling you still
Yes, Calamity Jane, your life’s not been an ice cream break
But Huzzah! Jimmy Corn’s got that liquid taking Jesus form
And Jesus, that Sultan of Swat sent some shots to the moon
That’s straight from an old Foster Brooks bar stool, not me
That poem next door poured a bottle of Anne Sexton in me
I wonder, Babe Ruth, if Josh Gibson drank more than you
Dylan Thomas twit jug jug twit jug twit jug jug moon
That old drunk Joe McCarthy’s finger’s shaking still
Sestina, O Sestina, you come with Alabama in your form
Contents of moonshine and stock cars drove for broke
Jimmy Crack, mind the jars in the back don’t break
And that was Robert Mitchum on Thunder Road, not me
Sestina, you give a still half a chance, it’ll blow up a farm
And you keep on cheating the jar, your heart will tell on you
Hank drank fast and hard as Whiskey River’s gone still
Now that Willie’s all weed and moogoogaipan
Here’s the thing, Sestina, you can’t outdrink the moon
’Cause the moon’s elastic and porous and it got no brake
Go ahead and check the box: bad heart and a liver to install
Them’s good old boys drinking whiskey and rye, not me
I know this guy, Sestina, this guy’s in love with you
Hey Jimmy Jar, put some more content in that form
Jackson Pollock’s drip and splash is the content of his form
Dorothy Parker, you drank and died lonely as the moon
Did you know O’Toole and Burton wanted to wrassle you
Moon’s a cell and the spotlight’s looking like a prison break
That was Sinatra’s 2 am tux busting out at Jilly’s Saloon, not me
Singing bye bye cuckoo pie another round of gasoline stilly stool
Give a hammer half a chance and form’s a thing to break
Ah hell, Jimmy crack the shine of your best moon over me
Sestina, O Sestina, this guy’s in love with you still
Travel and Leisure
Let the big river arch its scaly hump
and hiss, slap banks to keep time, roll around
the crooked fingertip of Calhoun County
to hook the Illinois and flood Grafton,
the Great River Road, and the loading bays
of the mill where once on midnights, after
using hoses to blow cake mix off machines
and rags to clean washroom shitters, I felt
my way in the dark by augers and belts
for a girlie mag in a catwalk room
with a glorious view.
Rebecca Wolff
The Curious Life and Mysterious Death of Peter J. Perry
(from the Fall 2010 issue of TLR, Refrigerator Mothers)
At the end
he was tilted that he might
remain in sleep.
If he woke he would know
just how bad
things were, would cough and dislodge
the intubation tube. A certainty. Fluids
in, fluids
out. Tilted his head
below his heart, all the rest
he never sought pooled
in the sunken gates
of his eyes, the
grate of his jaw.
Points of sophistication
sophistry
the bony knobs of his arthritic
knuckles. His Adam’s apple
his lungs filled up
he never woke up.
*
Between the misery of the end
and the glory of beginning
all the glowing love made flesh
time collapses
disgorging banalities.
Certain are goldmines
certain are minefields
Time, mind, brain: “collapses.”
The body functions
that much his sister knows
but the ties between the mind
and it
she will not recognize. He’s dead; she’s eating
his leftover painkillers to kill
the pain of muscular
spasms
brought on by the free-floating sadness
putting Bozo to sleep. The dog would not eat. In his obituary,
in a town paper he never knew,
a middle initial he always used. His daddy’s
name was Jennings, his middle name was
Jennings. It’s irritating when folks
don’t spell it out. That’s my hidden voice speaking. If I did not speak
you would have to assume I was the one
that killed him.
*
To move through the death back
alive
a green and gold brightness segmented in the screen
door’s squares, stitched with glue
where the dog poked through, his loyal
claws. Peter sitting there
day after day, unbelievable what a being
can come to. Coke Rewards in the drawer, he would
cash them in at the store but
he can’t get there, can’t get anywhere. Twelve
years ago or so he had a massive stroke, suffered
it, they say, routinely. The things we say routinely, we say “we,” routinely. I
dive for these worn phrases, and suddenly
it’s all about me again. It’s not all about me.
Peter J. Perry
was born in West Tennessee. No. He lived in West Tennessee. Peter J. Perry
was born
in the south of France, to Pat, a motherless drunk from Buffalo, escaped the convent, Jennings
a philandering newspaperman, fled Nashville to be Hemingway
already. Writing stories for the rags
on hounds and fishes. Two escapees, really. Their stories are so much richer for the times they lived in allowed it.
*
Peter’s time allowed that he die with the television on in his hospital room as it had been on around the clock for twelve years as he sat, bony knees and elbows, bony ass, on a malmy couch in a corner of a living room overrun by kittens and wild dogs and mice. The kittens ate the mice and the dogs ate the kittens, right in front of his eyes. He had a sweetness, Pete. Sweet on the animals, so he wanted them near, but hard so that he could bear it when they went and did their animal tricks: getting hit by cars in front of the house, at the far end of the lawn, Pete sitting in his wheelchair on the rotting porch. Pissing in a corner of the room where Pete kept all the important things, his genealogical charts and the albums of photos of Pat and Pop, a shot of the two of them on bicycles in the Sahara. It is said they bicycled across the Sahara desert.
Who says it?
It is not important that you be convinced of Pete’s importance. What follows is family history, in my voice the way I learned it.
Peter was not loved properly by his mother. Pat was tall, bony, elegant, mannish, with a small squared-off mouth, a cigarette jammed in it. A proud nose, a high brow, thin, lank hair, small eyes, long face, the bones of her cheeks high and prominent. You think “Supermodel.” She did do some modeling, for sculptors and photographers. She had big hands, big feet. She posed as a diver, and the Jensen swimming suit company used her bowed form for its logo, a Deco figure. Then she was drunk and dove off a bridge and hit her chest on a log in the river and tore the tissue of her breasts. There was some surgical repair. In France.
Peter was not loved properly by his mother; she did not take care of him. He played by himself on the beach down at the bottom of France, tall cliffs behind him, speaking both languages, and felt lost. He did not know where she was and she allowed him to search for her. She infused him singly with her own desires and set him on a path down which he loped. Eight abortions between his birth and that of his sister, Pamela. Pop could not, or would not, take certain measures. There was something about Pop like a stud horse, something like a prize bull, though he was not a large man, very dapper, like a squinty Clark Gable. George Clooneyish. Maybe they were “crazy about each other,” maybe the love they felt transmuted into flesh, over and over again, and had to be removed surgically.
These are the people who made these people. These are the true stories of their lives, though I am telling them. This is why soap opera is important to my friends. What else is so real: video art? Documentation of a moment, elderly man breathing into a mirror, yes, but it neglects the span, the span of years, about which I am aching, alive with mortality. It takes years to watch a whole life pass. Days of our lives.
So now when he dies, can you feel it? You can’t feel it, and when I say it it’s just the word, and you are permitted to feel nothing but informed.
Every time I feel it again I’ll come back to this page for you.
*
Three points
Three reasons
Three rules
Aggregate of the diameter, the reasons he lived, the reasons he died, the rules by which he lived, the rules by which he died, the point of talking about it now he’s dead. Deterioration of his majesty, his manhood. He was a tall, sexy man, a deep rich voice on a tall, skinny man, not overly nice, long arms and legs, lean, naked ladies tattooed on his forearms. He made them dance by twirling his wrists, and in the first years after the stroke you could still feel his strength and his aggression even in his disability. At first he wanted to speak, and he tried to be understood, with the half of his face that worked. But over the years he lost the power, or he lost the desire, if he couldn’t be understood. Over the years of his abrupt, then gradual decline his patience for visitors grew shorter and shorter. A side effect of the stroke was a mildness, an acceptance, a resignation, even, and he lived for twelve years in an isolation and inactivity that would have made any other man cry out. It is possible that he did cry out, sometimes, alone in that old farmhouse in West Tennessee, on a country road, bordering cotton fields and wild dogs, the tenant farmers dropping by once a week or so to check on him, replenish his stores of buttermilk and TV dinners, the big pint mug of flat Coke he kept on the Plexiglas-topped coffee table next to the couch on which he sat all day long, day in and day out, and lay down on to sleep when the night grew deep enough that he could give up. He watched television all day long, and all night long. I don’t know what he thought about; I don’t know what anyone thinks about. His thinking must have had a flatness to it even before the stroke. He kept a little calendar, and in it he wrote the anniversaries of his parents’ deaths, his own birthday, doctor’s appointments, when the cats kitted and the dogs pupped, noted his sister’s quarterly visits.
When Pam came she brought her hair-cutting scissors, trimmed his beard and the lank, iron-grey hairs on his head. He wore a black air-force cap every day, and as best she could she would free it of the oils of his hair. She got him onto his plastic chair in the shower, washed him. Scraped the cat shit off the floorboards, vacuumed the rugs, hired a man to patch the porch where it was rotting. Hired another man to mow the lawn, another to come by for emergencies, like the time the pipes froze. For twelve years every three months, leaving behind her more immediate duties and responsibilities, and shored up his attenuated life in the old farmhouse in which their father had been born, and where they played as kids.
And what did she get out of it?
And did they converse, while she restored order? It was not in their nature to converse. Muted by mother? It was in Pete’s nature to tell stories, discomfiting stories, about hurricanes and suicides, about family dementia, stories of a peculiar grisly glory. But now he could not get far enough in his sentences; would close his mouth on the gob-stopping word and wave his one good hand, long, bony, in front of his own face, like shooing off a lazy fly, a perfunctory rejection, a perfect dismissal—say “F’get it.” And she was not a talker. She came to the farmhouse so that she could not talk to her brother.
*
Unbelievable what a being
*
a stage-hand
summer stock
prop handler
in his youth
he was loved
by women but he did not
love them, it seems. There was no love or talk of love.
He married one wealthy woman, a recent divorcee, a new mother
of a baby boy named Mikey. Complicated situation. She was not simply
wealthy, she was an heiress, they lived in Bohemian
grandeur in Patchin Place.
Who else lived there?
e.e. cummings lived there, a shady doorway. Theodore Dreiser lived there. John Reed lived there. I think
Dawn Powell may have lived there, for a time. Deborah
paid for Pete, bought him
an airplane, a sailboat, an Amagansett
getaway where they kept thirty-two cats. Pete
raised the boy, and when Deborah threw Pete out he took
Mikey and flew off to St. Croix in his
little plane. Kept him there for weeks,
returned him without a fight. What’s best for the boy. Mikey
has been alerted of his death. Mikey sought him out once, a grown man, weak chin,
flying in from San Francisco to visit
the eviscerated man, bony and dehydrated in his wheelchair. They spent a day, Mikey
flew back home, didn’t keep
in touch. It’s astonishing how people
will abandon
will neglect to
will abstain
will restrict
will refrain from
will hold themselves away
will deny Pete
*
Pat and Pop
Pop and Pat
At the end
together.
Pat o’ershadowed
her children. All three of them in Greenwich Village
in shared apartments, swapping beds and walls and jobs
sometimes. They had all fled Tennessee.
Later on, when her children wed
and began to breed Pat fled
to Athens—seat of civilization? Or maybe
that’s Israel—or Baghdad. And then
she lived a while and then
and then
and then
and then
and then
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
when she began to die
she began to die
she began
dying
dying dying
dying
dying dying
dying
dying dying
dying
dying dying
dying
dying dying parts of her body
failing: retina, kidney, heart, lung. All the systems abused
with drink and smoke
in final rebellion
deported (can you believe that? An old dying woman)
ejected. Pam picked her up at the airport
in an ambulance. To St. Vincent’s, where
others have died (Edna Millay’s named after it for
the sanctuary her uncle
received)
and when it was clear
she was dying
sent on back to Nashville
to die at home with her husband with whom
she had not lived for twenty-odd years. But apparently
they’d always loved each other. Wrote letters. Thought of one
another constantly. Pat just didn’t
want to live in Tennessee.
But she died there.
*
The pint mug was from TGI Fridays.
Pete was a bouncer for five years or so while
Pop was ill. Pete set himself up
in his old bedroom upstairs, piles of porn all around
the bed, worked in his spare
time on an Austin Healy Mark 3 up on blocks in the yard. Haverford,
sounds like a country estate. A small stone house with a coolness, a dimness, a breakfast
nook where Pop sang Little Boy Blue and other rather mournful songs. He had Parkinson’s, and it took him a long time to die. Surrounded in his den
by young women. One buxom red-haired nurse took up with Pete
and kept up with him for a while, even after Pop died, until Pete
bought a houseboat in St. Croix. And then he lived there till
the hurricane took everything. He had no insurance, and he came back to
stay at the farm, to fix things up. Built a woodshop in the back, started
fixing things up. Fixed things up, built shelves for his records and books, fixed up a
cat door on the back so the cats could come and go. Pruned the trees, hung his tools on hooks, mowed the lawn, one day woke up on the floor and could not speak, could not
use his arm or leg, dragged himself across the floor to the phone and called my mom.
No relation.
*
Who will remember Peter J. Perry
his non-representative life, his pointless, ineluctable, singular death?
There is no reason that he must be remembered.
Everyone deserves to be remembered?
For the extraordinary things he did.
For his ashes.
Memory: A memoir. A memorial. In memoriam. For the ages. His ashes
disseminated. It is
my love that draws him out. It is my love
you must contend with.
—Rebecca Wolff’s Poem,” The Curious Life and Mysterious Death of Peter J Perry,” was published in our Fall 2010 issue, Refrigerator Mothers. The poem is one of TLR‘s six nominations for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. You can read more about Rebecca Wolff and find links to her books here.
* * *
James Richardson
Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays from Vectors 3.0
- If you can’t take the first step, take the second.
- Experience afraid of its innocence is useless: no one is rich who cannot give his riches away.
- My mistakes are not mine, but they are embarrassing because you might mistake them for my sins, which are.
- Sophistication is upscale conformity.
- The days are in order, the months, the seasons, the years. But the weeks are work. They have no names; they repeat.
- Too much apology doubles the offense.
- Hard disk: the letter I remembered as embarrassing is OK after all. I must have revised it just before sending. I never confuse what I dreamed with what I actually did, but this is different: which draft am I?
- What is more yours than what always holds you back?
- Few plans survive their first success, which suggests they were less about their goals than about the possibility of a little success.
- The heart is a small, cracked cup, easy to fill, impossible to keep full.
- How proud we are of our multitasking. What is Life but something to get off our desks, cross off our lists?
- The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.
- I need someone above me—the Committee, the Law, Money, Time—to be able to say No. Sad my lack of integrity, though I suppose it would be sadder to need them to say Yes.
- Self-sufficiency clings . . . to itself.
- If you do more than your share you’d better want to: otherwise you’re paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.
- Beware speaking of The Rich as if they were someone else.
- We’ve learned to wonder which neutralizes truth more effectively, the tyranny’s censorship or the democracy’s ten thousand media outlets. In the former truth is too costly, in the latter there’s no market for it. In Freud the facts get around the censor in the metaphors of dreams, in Shelley we live in a dream of overfamiliarity and dead metaphor that only the poet can revivify. Does repetition emphasize or hypnotize? Which is clearer, what we see or what we don’t see. Are we new or old? Do we love hate or hate love?
- You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don’t.
- The peril of arguing with you is forgetting to argue with myself. Don’t make me convince you: I don’t want to believe that much.
- Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else’s lines.
- Roadkill. Something eats the eyes first, starved for . . . what?
- As a couple they are salt of the earth, sodium chloride. As single elements, she was a poisonous gas and he a soft and desperate metal, turning even water into roil and flame.
- Don’t touch, don’t stare. But no one minds how hard you listen.
- That book, that woman, life: now that I understand them a little I realize there was something I understood better when they baffled and scared me.
- Nostalgia for a Lost Love. At a certain distance the parts of you and her that could never love each other become invisible, which is how you got into that whole mess in the first place.
- Freedom has just escaped. Peace has forgotten. Boredom is pounding on the prison gates to be let back in.
- It is with poetry as with love: forcing yourself is useless, you have to want to. Yet how tiresome and ungenerous is the one sprawled among flowers waiting for his impulse. There’s such a thing as knowing how to make yourself want to.
- I’m forced to admit I’m second rate: I don’t have the genius’s certainty about who he is. And when I talk myself into that certainty? I’m third rate.
- Solitude: that home water whose sweetness you taste only when you’ve been someone else too long.
- It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.
- No one in human history has ever written exactly this sentence. Or anyway these two.
- Sure, no one’s listening, English will die in a hundred years, and the far future is stones and rays. But here’s the thing, you Others, you Years to Come: you do not exist.
James Richardson’s collection, Interglacial, was a finalist for the 2004 National
Book Critics Circle Award. These aphorisms appear in By the Numbers. Read more poetry from James Richardson on Beatrice.com