From Green to Blue and Back
[Poems]
Thomas Zimmerman
Copyright © 2016 Thomas Zimmerman This digital edition was produced by the author. Fonts used are Britannic Bold and Calibri. The author thanks the editors of the following publications, where the poems in this book first appeared, sometimes in different versions: Abstract Jam: “Flying Off” The Asses of Parnassus: “Classic Enablers” and “Springing Eternally” Black Elephant: “Saint Lilith” By&By Poetry: “Obligations of the Feathers” Clementine Poetry Journal: “Dogwalk” and “Splinter Worlds” CSHS: “Basho Says” Dime Show Review: “For Lou Reed” Let It Be . . . Spring: A WCC Poetry Club Anthology: “The Season” Liminality: “The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra” Paradigm Shift: An Out-Space/WCC Poetry Club Anthology: “Spectra/Spectral” The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society: “Road Trip” Rasputin: “Coyote” and “Letting the Monster Get Us” The Sacred Cow: “The Gallery” Soul-Lit: “Green to Blue” Thirteen Myna Birds: “Insomniac Sonnet #26” All photographs were taken by the author. The front- and back-cover photographs, as well as the one on p. 12, were taken at Sunset Junque Shop, in South Haven, MI.
Thomas Zimmerman teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. He has been publishing poems in small journals for 30 years and began Zetataurus Press in 2010. Tom’s website: thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com
From Green to Blue and Back [Poems] Thomas Zimmerman Contents Road Trip Coyote For Lou Reed Saint Lilith Green to Blue The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra Insomniac Sonnet #26 Two Epigrams on the Writing Life Letting the Monster Get Us Spectra/Spectral Basho Says Dogwalk Obligations of the Feathers The Gallery Flying Off The Season Splinter Worlds
zetataurus press ann arbor mi tzman2012@gmail.com
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Road Trip The interstate’s alive with whining tires tonight. The sun’s chugged back to Santa Fe, there’s Tom Waits on the stereo, and choirs of crickets mating in the grass. To stay in place is negligence. Chicago’s five fast hours away, the Mississippi less than eight. So hook your bra, zip up your dress: we’re heading west, as far as we can drive on vodka, coffee, chewing gum, and rest-stop sex. We’re not too young to gnaw the rind of weird old America, to test the strength of selfmythology, to find what Whitman, Kerouac, and Dylan blessed, a dreamscape horny, mad, poetic, kind.
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Coyote These woods behind the house are home to a coyote that I haven’t seen but heard. It wakens sleepers in the brain, that yip that’s not a dog’s. The dusk is sifting down, blue powder like a medicine, or bane, that, either way, we take. And I am out with Scarlet on reconnaissance. This turf is hers, she thinks, but something feral’s in the shadows, large and ratchetlimbed. This world is mine, I think, but something wild and dark’s inside: it’s pulsing, burning, deeper than my heart, a thing that I will leave for now. I pull the leash to get us safely home— but know that I must circle back, alone.
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For Lou Reed A Kansas farmgirl in her bedroom all alone on Sunday afternoon, and nothing on except the radio: “Sweet Jane.”
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Saint Lilith One night, we broke a bed in Illinois. The landlord came with wrench and screws to put it back together. We’re together: foot to ankle, shin to knee, and thigh to joy that never seems to tire me. I’ve lost my head. You give me head to make me whole. You’ve got a hole. Thank God for that. Who stole this magic, brought it back for us? The cost imponderable. Too much for Eve. You lick like Lilith, angel bait, engendered in the Great Abyss. Let lightning strike to thin the merely living out. Our blood thuds thick and black as any branded witch’s. Earth be praised! Our deeds and words a scourge, a birth.
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Green to Blue A doe and fawn clop quick across the street. The green wood swallows them, a bubble in a workman’s level. Workman-like is John Lee Hooker, stomping from the stereo to drown my neighbors’ Schubert, lovely as it is. When I was younger, certainty was inbred king. His blood fed grass and trees, tornado skies, and me. Tonight, strong beer will do. “It serves you right to suffer,” growls the singer, accidental Buddhist, hellhound squatting on his love life. “Make more noise!” I shout, but no one’s here. The beat’s my heart as well—as well, the feral memory of that hot pulse that doubled mine most nights.
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The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra plays Shostakovich 8. I drink the dark and crank the sound. Conductor’s brilliant, yanked from the quotidian as if his bark were battered by a storm, the ocean banked and seething, every hand on deck one mind. If only I could stay so wired in my Shakespeare rants at work, my passion blind but honed as Hamlet’s, splicing prayer and sin. I swim and breathe in essences this rare if you are here. You’re gone. I’m terrified to doubt that the sublime is everywhere, a heaven right beneath our feet, a wide and sparkling sky to guide you back, lone crow that roves, that bears a song I darkly know.
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Insomniac Sonnet #26 “There’s not nothing,” we tell ourselves, on fire with waking dreams of life and drowning in our teeming cells, their little deaths. “The wire is in the blood,” we say, like skulls that grin in movies, pointing at a satellite. “This implant in my dick, the aliens put it there last week. My tandem angels fight, and every seventh thought is sex.” The soot keeps powdering down, and all this chimney is is breath. The clock, the rain tick-ticking, clean as dead men’s fingers on the window screen . . . . We think it never stops, the manic fizz, the plop of thoughts in mossy wells, the smell of skin on wrinkled linens, bed as hell.
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Two Epigrams on the Writing Life 1. Springing Eternally Incendiary images, tremendous tropes, an income from his verses: How a poet hopes! 2. Classic Enablers His poet friends play blind to his banality, so he has set his sights on immortality.
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Letting the Monster Get Us You’re sliding down the mountainside, your pick won’t help you grip . . . . The monster gets you every time, and bites you into bits. You can’t remember you forget you crave it every time. You’re eaten. You’re inside. You’re loved. Perspective shift is all it is. A fish’s eye that’s drying on the beach. A God’s eye that she made at camp for Mom. A blind eye that they cannot turn. The weak “I” that the author hides behind, the unreliable that none of us escapes for long. I know he knows I lust for it. Because he knows I know he knows, I’m his.
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Spectra/Spectral The secrets of my nights and days, they hide, prismatic, shadowed. Soul, or something like it—hormones, vertigos—all roiling. Ride the wind, a witch. That blood-drip on your spike? The moon. The grass on fire, the storm on skin. Our city shimmers, kisses brim with beer. My hand’s white spider down your pants. You’re thin as milk and blue as I, my eyes. But fear eats only edges: succulent the pip, the iridescent center gleaming just for us. Your ass-print at the ocean’s lip. Remembered sad quintessence of the dust. Ambiguous, of course, but something on this page could save your life. A ghost. A dawn.
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Basho Says A cento using Lucien Stryk’s Basho translations as its source
We’re charcoal fumes, we’re shadow guests, we laugh like waterfalls. We’re cherries budding, sick ducks reeling in the night. We leave the moon to grind the rice. We’re snoring prostitutes, we’re imitators, melons whacked in half. We’re white-hairs bowing over canes, we’re thick as bedroom moons, we’re drunken bees that swoon inside a peony. We’re hugging roots, we’re draining sake, poems scribbled on a fan. We’re sworded women, squatting crows. We’re boars wind-tossed with leaves, we’re plums behind the virgins’ quarters. Clap your hands, it’s dawn. We’re thin on love and barley. No one knows the chasm’s bridge our ivy-braids still bind.
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Dogwalk The cottonwoods have left their lint along the neighbors’ walk, and I’m with Percy, black as Cerberus, invisible against the grass. There’s no one here but us. A song is what I should be writing, but I lack the ear. And we should both be muzzled, fenced: Who else but one demented dog and his befuddled dad would wake up barking mad at 3 a.m.? Millions, probably. I contemplate the stars, he takes a whiz. Perhaps I have that backwards. Always bad at getting home without a map, I see we’re heading west, last whereabouts of day. Percy snorts. Or laughs. I don’t have a say.
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Obligations of the Feathers Iconic pen, styled hair, a certain way the worker spreads the spackle: feathers. Dreams like dust mites, times when making signifies. Now indirection’s at the wheel, the kids in back are smarter. Good. They spend the day ironically, with me, a meme that streams out owl-like in its glasses, poems a wisecrack lode. I love you, life, but wonder: id’s passé, yet I’m still wanting you, the wings between your legs a hummingbird, a fern beside a brook, two shells pressed in the sand. Last movement of the string quartet: it sings a requiem for Adam. Listen, learn why angels molt. Have patience. Let them land.
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The Gallery Tonight the gallery will open wide as dreaming’s yawning maw, the famished mind alight with torches, dogs asleep beside the fire — the wrench, the ledger left behind. Kandinskys, Rauschenbergs, and Blakes appear. Picassos, Klees, and Leonardos glow. The dark of Caravaggios, the fear and awe of Turners swirl with Dürers, grow immense with Goyas, Michelangelos. Cezannes and Rembrandts, Jackson Pollocks flare with inner energies. The bold Mirós, Rossettis, and Van Goghs imbue the air with god-light. Dreamers wake, reborn to dawn, to potencies, to robins on the lawn.
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Flying Off Loose parts of me keep flying off: my thumb stuck in the tulip tree, my tongue grooved in the gutter, skull cap rocking by the poop can. Someone, come and flip my mind to its B side, its bonus tracks, its live bootlegs. The moon is fumbling with Orion’s belt. Seems everything is hunting. Percy barks at 3 a.m. Then burping, snoring—ugh!—and passing silent lethal gas. Small red erection. Much like me. And later, song— not mine, thank god, but cardinals’, so a friend who knows such things has told me. She smells like grass, streaked hair’s a nest. Doesn’t wear her ring. Though leaves are turning, feels like spring.
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The Season You kiss her breasts, her belly, move on down, while Schumann’s First is on the stereo, galumphing where it ought to pirouette, and breath and blood thump, Lover, give me life. And later, in the woods, your senses drown in earth-squelch, musk of last year’s leaves, the glow between the branches, smell of her still wet. But that was dreams ago, the thought a knife, survival tool for when she’s gone, when you carve out a place, rough-hewn at first, the raw space strong but awkward, coltish, pale as dew. But time will darken it with rain, crow-caw, whatever you create, whatever burns electrically, in hell, till she returns.
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Splinter Worlds Though parts of you still fly like water off a shaking dog, we see you clearly in a nimbus of yourself. Were God to cough, let’s say, and splinter worlds like ice in gin so we could keep our buzz . . . . In just that way, we apprehend the Western slant on flux, no river twice, a fractal art with play and wobble, spiked by rays of light redux in darkness, cuts in vision, stretch marks of the infinite, a center somewhere— There— No, there . . . . In just that way, we understand that you are I, and all are we, that love must live like this, on breakers, waves, with care and chaos, shells and beach glass strewn on sand.
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zetataurus press ann arbor mi tzman2012@gmail.com