Poetry |

“Drowning,” “Supply Side” and “South Dakota”

Drowning

 

It looked at first like a small dead creature,

maybe a lizard left legless by a cat

On the garden edger, that off-white color

common to the stomachs of reptiles, limned

With red. But when I looked closer, I found

a bud from the rose of Sharon, fallen

Who knows why, already decaying, never

to unfurl. Then I had a choice: I could

Think of it as an omen–old people are fond

of those, no matter that we are all

Heading in the same direction–or remember

how, when the moon is full, the color

Of a lizard’s belly, poets are supposed to be

drunk, if possible in a boat, strumming

A dobro or shamisen: singing out of tune,

leaning and swaying and finally falling

Down through the circle of reflection,

in love with their own ridiculous music.

*     *     *     *     *     *

 

Supply Side

 

This afternoon at the strip mall, I am buying

a bottle of shampoo and a corkscrew,

Though the latter is not necessary to the former,

while, through spent thunderheads, the moon

Cuts an anemic crescent–I see it on my walk

from the drug store toward the wine shop,

And it reminds me to buy multivitamins,

so I turn on my heel and go back

Among the shelves of frankincense and analgesics,

and straight to the Aisle of Supplements

As though iron in the blood were a surplus

and not a biological necessity, but there is no

Aisle of Biological Necessities, whole nations

have perished for want of what might be

Found there, whole nations are perishing now

as I put my card chip-side-up in the reader

And let economics happen, as I make my way

through the precinct of potions and talismans

Knowing, as soon as I arrive in the open air,

the moon has already accepted the utter

Failure of human policy and packed it in.

*     *     *     *     *     *

 

 

South Dakota

 

I am done with the poetry of memory, a thing

I am not supposed to say, but if I stick

With memory, all I have is a couple of mental

Polaroids of the Corn Palace in Mitchell

In 1955, and since they change all the corn

every year, where is that Corn Palace now?

Maybe I remember a saltbox farmhouse,

a vanishingly narrow staircase, a strange trap

Door. There was maybe a pile of old coal

where bad children made war. Maybe I

Was a bad child. The gods are convinced

that memory is the sine qua non

Of poetry, but who can remember a single

poem any more? I was five that summer.

There was a golden cloud of bees in the copse

down the hill, sometimes. That was how

You knew the god was present–that and the bad

children disappearing. ​You will not speak

My mysteries​, the god certainly said. I remember

with absolute clarity when I stopped remembering.

Contributor
T. R. Hummer

T. R. Hummer’s most recent books of poetry are After the Afterlife (Acre Books) and the three linked volumes Ephemeron, Skandalon, and Eon (LSU Press). Former editor-in-chief of The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, and The Georgia Review, he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant in Poetry, the Richard Wright Award for Artistic Excellence, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and the Donald Justice Award in Poetry. He lives in Cold Spring, New York.

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