Nine Poems
Course of Empire
We're all frozen food for the future.
- Ed Ruscha
Grainy as newsprint, Titian light drawn from capriccios of Venice in decline, else massive neon- incarnadine skies stipled in post-apocalyptic shadow, rosarch arches an indifferent weight of atmosphere pressed like sfumato in churches or memories of gas stations transformed into mini- markets, then massage parlors or just abandoned completely, a lamppost and skeletal sycamore where a phone booth once was, landscapes rendered obsolete, indistinct when seen from panoramic vantage points: anywhere, anytime from now to the next two hundred years, savage states left mythologized, the pastoral passed over, consummation consumed, drama of destruction and desolation abrogated, even when continuation is proved, no progress cycles, the strip malls swarm, try looking at things that normally would be looked through or beyond, like rooftop edges painted with vanishing (Tool & Die) letterforms ready for the wrecking ball, silhouetted amid saturation (Tires Trade School Tech-Chem Fat Boy) permeated with vast inhuman (Standard Oil Allied Defense Elan Satyam Halliburton Philip Morris Delphi) sadness
Blood
Marrow-sprung, eucharistic fount, black
pudding beaten in a bucket, kept
from coagulating, final taboo sopped
in a tampon or gargling from a slit
carotid artery, left to darken in air
like sunset stored in citrated vials
for transfusion, thimblefuls of grape
juice, wedding ring on a leach finger,
brackish foodstuff for the undead,
not wrung from turnips, no denser
than porter, it flows filtered forward,
pumps from valves until it clumps.
Sloth
Snug in crowns of cumaru and jatobá thick
with interlocking lianas, hung upside down
in meditation, a hairy yogi stilled ever stiller,
else rasta muppet whose fur teems with green
algae, scarcely movable feast replete with ticks
and beetles, nutrients that seep back through
this sedentary planet’s skin, camouflaging it
from erratic orbits of harpy eagles and ocelots
but not preachers who see in ruminant stomachs
sluggishness of mind which neglects to begin good.
Yet God is made of tempo giusto. Like knowing
when to climb three-toed down a tree to shit.
Three Abcderians
Although bulbous caricatures dropped eagerly from gibbon hands, I juggled knick-knacks, laughing, mentioning nothing outsize, particularly questions regarding simian talent, until visibility waned. Xeric Yankeeisms zinged again.
Absorbable bonnets cause drastic etiolation, fiery girls’ hues impersonating jonquil kissed lightly matzo, nearly opalescent, pale, querulous, rimy. So the unrepentant vulgarians won! Xenophobes yoked zeroes afterwards.
Addenda: Bombay costs damn enough for gods, hear? Import jodhpurs knowingly laminated. Mollycoddled namesake opens purse quietly. Risk suffering thorns. Use vestries wisely. X-ray your zygotes always.
Language Poetry
Yea, it was pundit debunking, sage with newness,
meaty ruse, elaborate masquerade of unmeaning,
stage where words pose counterpoised to signification,
where rummy syllables string along kinks of syntax
and gum of virgules jimmies together clauses
to devise a monument of fistulous happenstance,
subverting address for free play—
Rare vestiges pitched headlong in stochastic
eddies, dreaming a livelong laterality,
polygons alongside tapirs in grammar-shorn dance—
Slithered mid-speech an intention a seam
the color of politics, even the furthest minutia
run on dollars, come what cannot until (s)pace
Breaks into half itself &
music the bramble where bare verbs rabble,
seeking the iota behind the bestial bars
that proves no forged lattice girds the mind
with predicates efficacious as prison searchlights—
Senses slip the faster usurps fate from syntax
how kowtow to solipsism or preset a page?
Fourier and Moore
Circuitry shrinks, processors in the tread
of Tactile Mobile Robots form a glandular
parody that—Moore’s law—in regularity
shrinks tinier: from handheld to grapefruit,
postage stamp to ten pence, thumbnail
clipping to wafer a few microns in size,
paving the way for innovative wearable
computing solutions: wireless interfaces
that embed the ear, face recognition
programs that use Fourier analysis to add
to perceptual fields an overlay, like inside
a broken photocopier, the names of clients,
directions to neighborhoods’ burrito
stands categorized by database into cost
and proximity, the temperature in Oslo,
all microprocessed into lenses of silver
pairs of designer wraparound sunglasses.
Mes amis, le monde change! Flashes, revises
before our eyes nowness with deep roots.
Holiday
On airwaves, feigned faces sell
dental floss, stimulants in capsules,
geriatric aides, disposable blades,
an opprobrium of leather and lather.
Execs on a boardroom broadloom
stitch the sounds of glossolalia:
threads of jingle hemmed in scheme
to brand the comet, market fizz,
deprive the noon of pimply faces.
Diapasons spun on monitors outfit
the eye in polymerized angoras—
implants, enamels and radial belts—
while seamlessly the acquisitive eye
tailors its tailor’s worldview
to be worn everywhere like a veil.
Leaden attention to razzmatazz.
pack the rental, head for live hills,
disembogue a stream of elan vital.
Note: “Paving Stones” appeared in All that Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia 2008) and “Language Poetry” in 88: Journal of Contemporary American Poetry.
This excerpt is an Almost Island exclusive.
Ravi Shankar is Poet-in-Residence and Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust and the founding editor of Drunken Boat. He has published or edited seven books of poems, including Deepening Groove, Radha Says, Seamless Matter, Voluptuous Bristle, Wanton Textiles, and Instrumentality. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.), called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared on the BBC and NPR, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently on the faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong.