Songs We Darkly Know ∞ Poems by
Thomas Zimmerman
Author photo by Monica Cialek
Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been active in the small press since the late 1980s and has authored nine poetry chapbooks, including In Stereo (Camel Saloon, 2012). Tom's website: thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com ∞ Thanks to the following publications, where the poems in this book first appeared, in somewhat different versions: Brickplight; Full of Crow; The Future: A WCC Poetry Club Anthology; The Open Mouse; Plainsongs; Poetry Pacific; Priestess and Hierophant; Sick Lit Magazine; Tipton Poetry Journal; Verse-Virtual.
Book design and artwork by the author. Copyright Š 2020 Thomas Zimmerman
zetataurus press ann arbor mi usa tzman2012@gmail.com
Songs We Darkly Know ∞
Poems by Thomas Zimmerman Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
Song of Ghosts and Smoke Song of Pages Song of the Other Zimmerman Song of Friday Night Song of Surprise Song of the Water Rising Song of Wings Nailed On Song of Namremmiz Samoht Song of 3 A.M. Song of Ripening Song of the Interstate Song of Pioneer Woods Song of Resurrections Song of the Shamans of the Stars
1 Song of Ghosts and Smoke So Grandpa Horace kept a still out in the sticks, the vines all twists, the garden gone to weeds. He played the banjo, gambled. Farmed, offhandedly. And I drink water now. Imagination fails. Too early for a drink. I never knew him. Ghosts are what I want: my grandpa’s wildness, Dad’s compact and vivid wartime visions. Borrowed lives. My father’s dead. I have no son. We haunt, or hunt ourselves, extinction drifting, smoke on our peripheries. Like last night’s scotch, a single-malt of brushfire peat. I sipped it neat. You thought that I had fallen asleep, but I was in the sticks, with flames, plucked strings.
2 Song of Pages My wife and I have had our morning romp. I’m eating last night’s flank steak, warm and rare, black pepper, burgundy, and rosemary still clinging to the char. A string quintet (by Edgar Meyer, if you care) hums from the stereo. The neighbors’ Sunday news lies bagged and wet in drying driveways. Geese honk overhead. We sleepwalk on a bed of wind! Like dancing skeletons, we shoot tequila, lick the salt, then bite a lime! Or have we mixed the order? Childhood, death, senility, adulthood, first kiss, birth all jumbled like a book without a spine. Or was this ever meant to be a book?
3 Song of the Other Zimmerman for Bob Dylan
I’m drinking porter in the kitchen, Blonde on Blonde still playing soft. My wife is gone, the dogs are zonked, and I am trying to create. I sip. There’s bitterness without much body: true with beer or marriage. Dawn lies hours away, and I am lying through my teeth. There’ll be no poem tonight, just doubt that gloms on to my Thomas, sacred bond that chafes yet whets. The music? Well, it woos: a country band behind Rimbaud, the best thing rock has ever offered. Darkness sifts its richness through the pines, my mind and chest expand, relax. And now my spirit lifts. Sound corny? No more than the singer’s blues.
4 Song of Friday Night A single-malt, the wind that smells of rain, and Mahler’s Ninth just playing soft behind me: God could pop up, like a website ad. Or even that old cornball, Satan, horns and pitchfork, cloven hooves and sulfur farts. Philosophers are right, that evil is banal. Just like my waking dream of life: existence thinned to food and sex and sleep. An animality I crave. To crawl and writhe and rave, like something from a Blake engraving. No. Somewhere in me a guide, a puling whelp of conscience, grabs the wheel to swerve us clear before we hit the tree. O better angel, you bedevil me.
5 Song of Surprise The century’s late teens, its acne bloom. The street’s ice-scabs I pick at with my dogwalk boots. The only bleeding, energy and time: a lava flow, an avalanche that swallows just to spit us out at death. Cheer up, I tell myself. Good beer is in the fridge. The poet that I’m reading now glides smooth as cream and buries sweet dreams deep. The angel loves the animal in me. A soft rain ticks, a clock reversed. That sax that Ornette Coleman tweaks draws laughing birds to perch inside the porches of my ears. Is beauty such a rare thing? Hmm. I turn the volume up, surprised by joy again.
6 Song of the Water Rising The water rising over reason, neighbors dressed like animals, dog barfing on their sidewalk: better taste than I. We must be patient. Something’s coming closer, ghostly. Let it. Be. Each syllable a cry, a curse, an incantation. Long-haired boy who keeps a cat inside his jumper: do you love him, sister? Gargoyles perched on eaves, our selves on shelves. The way you play that violin sometimes, dear Jascha, makes me want to cry. A man who choked up only when he spoke of beauty. That’s an epitaph. My business is on Earth, with vibrant colors, mostly grays. Jeweled window: raining still.
7 Song of Wings Nailed On The night drapes velvet, wet: our bellies rub against an ocean oiled by our molt, the stars fly by, linguini in a pot of brine that boils as hard as Whitman’s brain OD’d on Emerson. These dreams we slub and scuff to grunge up/down, a day-glo bolt of cloth that tweaks our nakedness, too hot to bleed with post-post-irony, to stain my kisses on your breasts. Your free hand’s tight around the mic. Let’s take a thousand you’s, and multiply by I’s, then add a pinch of weirdness we’ve cultivated: right amount of spice. Let’s love these delta blues. Let’s find the empyrean inch by inch.
8 Song of Namremmiz Samoht The mythic mumbo jumbo you’re a sucker for—the vagina dentata in Dracula, all those trees that haunt Macbeth, the long black bag you drag, the one the Jungians say you stuffed with troubles till your thirties and will spend your gray life emptying—what if it’s all real? At least as real as Shostakovich on the stereo right now, as coffee almost gone, as Percy’s turds you bagged this morning in the park, as last night’s visitation— no other way to say it—woman’s hand around your sleep-stiff cock, whispered words “Our shadows stain the earth,” the shudder when it dawned on you that time will wash it all away.
9 Song of 3 A.M. The dead are coughing in their stony boats. The waves eat steadily above, below, inside, beside. Their dream-born monster bloats and burps, grown fat and strong on vodka, roe. There’s coupling, yes: the memories and bones might tingle-tinkle like a harpsichord of tin, a zither made of pins, the groans stretched thin as salt-fish in a winter hoard. And we, awash in troubled sleep, death’s twins that cling to fitted sheets, that listen to the ticking of the sleet, the clock, the fins and gills in wind, inhuman gibbers. . . . Who or what is stuffing in or tugging out the dark? Then waking us all wet with doubt?
10 Song of Ripening Tonight I’m sitting in my underwear, a scotch in front of me. I’ve gotten soft, begun to smell. I think about the women that I’ve seen today. I think about old flames. My face of course is ashen in the mirror, but it’s also like a clock, and we know what it’s striking. I’d be much more striking with a beard: I look too much like Mom before she died. She smoked but rarely swore. My father liked her dressed in red, but she preferred her favorite, blue. Just like her moods. I hear her now: “You’re rough around the edges. Cut your hair: you look like you’ve been sick.” The last of Shostakovich’s quartets is playing softly, tones like workers sawing wood. I wonder what they’ll build.
11 Song of the Interstate Our temples and our spirits gray with age: the story of the world. But in the car with you, I’m bigger than a country. Road tunes from the stereo: it’s Leonard Cohen you like best, ambivalent, shorn, sexy, warm— or silence’s familiar rhapsody. Slow curves, then flat-out speed through many states: afraid, content, exhilarated, bored; that’s Texas, North Dakota, Illinois, and Iowa. Don’t try to match them up. Keep moving. Don’t discuss our future in a parking lot. Let light and shadow blur and flicker. Through the windows, road and sky, field, river, fire: our will engulfs our world.
12 Song of Pioneer Woods I’m walking in the woods, with smells of smoke and sweet decay. My mother smoked, then selfdecayed. My father too. And they were sweet sometimes. Good parents. Troubled like us all. The snow drifts, ghostly ash, as if God broke a spent oak log above my head. Those twelve crows in the branches eye me, living meat still stumbling on hell’s roof, about to fall. My thoughts grow thorny as a Bartók string quartet. Don’t blame the age: a dot lost in the scatterplot, a leaf trod into mud. Yet all around me fact and fancy sing: the swaying pines, the southbound geese, the spin and wave of quantum rebirths in my blood.
13 Song of Resurrections The morning sun makes bonfires of the pines out back, and I am drinking bottled water, keeping balanced as I can. New emails from my youngest sister mention Mom and Dad, both dead now several years. And how’d I sleep? Oh, let’s not speak in metaphors. There’s Mahler’s Second on the stereo— my favorite, Klemperer, conducts. The dogs will lie zonked out downstairs until their bellies tell them five o’clock, and I will drift, ambiguous as Ashbery’s selected later poems, which lie so mildly on the bedside table. Hello, world: I’m passing through. No, not stillborn: still being born.
14 Song of the Shamans of the Stars The lovers clench and drift to darkness rich as gold. They’re somewhere near the glowing chunks of soul, these shamans of the stars. The pitch that roils in hell, the Styx awash with hunks of sinners and mislabeled saints: false tales. Instead, the painters’ path, the flyways of the symphonists, the bards’ cells inside whales can weave reality for those who love. And where the first half of the journey ends, expansion then begins, where gods conceived eternity, the wheel of fire that feeds itself. Engulfed in light, the couple bends, then breaks, then mends—ecstatic, rapt, retrieved by spangled angels bearing wreaths and seeds.
zetataurus press ann arbor mi usa tzman2012@gmail.com