Three Poems by Robert McCarthy
Wretches of the earth we are, all of
us,
here on earth, as it will be in
heaven;
abraded, displayed, physically alive
but civically expired; fungible,
porous, the half-invisibles, we are
the see-throughs, the static-y
holograms,
hardly more than interferences of
light.
Our papers not in order, we share
the same face: half-vizard, half
semblant skull.
Wretches of the earth, we interiorize
our skins, those deformations from
ideal
types our declinations a cardinal
sin,
repeated failures to accomplish brightness.
Patched, pealed, we loll, chained, in
chain-linked,
weather-reproofed bungalows,
in tents made of bedsheets, in
foot-sore
caravans, ditches, in newly dug
graves.
We rehearse our exequies in cathedral
basements, in lightless rooms where
broken food
is compiled, dished-up, ‘til the
gorge rises.
The cold-slowed blood turning, our
catarrhal
voices left behind in hallways,
vestibules,
in corridors and entryways; the
footprints
we abandoned as we struggled up
from the sea are blotted out by tidal
sweepings, susurrus of wet sand and
wave.
Elective affinity between ourselves
and force; we its nourishment are,
natural
food and teleology, fueling
the hyperbolic fecundity
of violent murder; the flaying
and flensing of our tedious, detested
bodies, abominated even by the Furies
who pursue us nevertheless, having
mistaken our identities (even so,
we beckon and beseech the kindly
ones).
Monotonous desolation our result,-
or has in us resulted; force’s object
and incitement, our flesh its
addiction
its irresistible target, its
plaything.
A mark is placed by a name. Thus
cancelled
is the name’s bearer. Our faults in
our stars,
ourselves, in the darkened countries
of our skins
that we must live in, deported to
blackface
homelands, bantustans, banlieues,
interim Guantanamos. Our first
flights,
our airport introductions, return us
to Tartarus just lately escaped from.
We bed down in former earthquakes;
we spread our blankets in
stratigraphies
of coprolites. We the wretches who
have
lost our shadows, stolen, bartered,
earmarked
for the abyss. Present, we are alive
but undetected, the ghosted ones
they pretend not to see, until
pretense
becomes reality, an accustomed
blindsight,
holes in the fabric of being, we,
our personalities, lovely
differences,
idiosyncrasies, quenched,
snuffed-out,
a too-expensive luxury, candle-wicks
stinking of fatted smoke. Ours a
prosthetic
existence, though each prosthesis
connects
only to another. Our mouths empty
of words, of breath; haggard teeth
biting
on air our betters have claimed the
retail
of. A corpse in being, a zero sum—
witches nibble pieces from my face.
Outside the barred gate,
under the shedding tree,
you wait,
(leaf-moldered,
moss-stucco’d garden
gnome) all but
insensate.
Suiter not rejected
so much as overlooked,
un-denoted, never a part
of the longish queue
here to regale the she
all, notionally, are here
to woe, or woo.
An imprecise presence,
yours, submergent, a shape
in topiary perhaps,
trained by clips and tugs,
standing ‘neath a window’s
partial view interior,
of loveseat, fireplace,
and happiness, as you
might think it was, scarlet
bright, plucking from its heart
some arrow reciprocal.
While in your own heart,
for sorrow, its fellow
lodged, showing what another
reaped, though not so lyrical.
Spring
and All, 202_
I
Spring
and all.
The pure products of America
have
gone crazy, and all the hospitals
contagious,--
from which the pure products have
been
warned to stay away, not to visit,
to
steer clear of, to bide awhile alone,
at
home, there’s no place like it after all,
like
a womb perhaps to shelter in no
not
like a tomb you wander in from room
to
room to room.
April is a
meadow
you
are fenced from, protected from your harsh
realm,
razor-wired, ditched against dioxin
breaths,
the budding trees keeping their distances,
tender
of their leaf-wombs, green hairs unfledged,
they
shrink from your dry-cough-punctuated
passage,
bearer of a blight or rust, bloody
flux,
gloved touch gently parting branch from branch,
though
still they shy away wind-whipped, boughs
shaken,
seeking to dispel exhalation
of
corruption from mouths that fill the air
with
what will not disappear, miasmal
trails,
droplets laden with emissions you
imagine
a noxious mephitic smell
from
caught breaths trapped behind a paper mask,
a
soughing smokey crepitation
from
bed-queues of the unventilated
barging
white-garbed corridors, a sighed gasp,
a
gulp, a sound like dice rattling in a cup.
II
Alone
on my terrace,
two-dozen
floors above
earth’s
flat potholed surface,
I
watch this season strain
to
succeed its winter
predecessor,
as if
I
were predeceased or
something
other, a male
Rapunzel
locked away,
with
insufficient hair,
dumbly
peering at Spring’s
display
of specimens:
ice-glazed
skeleton weeds
under
glass, hibernal ghost
grasses.
How far away
yonder
seems to recede,
the
park, the thicket trees
thinning,
branches unlaced,
gaps
in the dendritic
frieze
the axons shout across
vainly,
for the void is
interstellar,
the cold
stars
gone black, winking out.
A
sessile point alone
I
root in my terrace
squat
while suspect air drifts
in
from Hampstead Heath, from
the
Dry Tortugas, the veldt,
from
the ice at the bottom
of
the world contagion.
The
street’s dark flat of asphalt
to
the horizon leaps.
The
broad river becomes
a
sinuous green string,
my
view measures itself
in
parsecs, in blue-shifted
vanishings.
This is Spring
now;
new life no longer
simple,
inevitable.
Does
earth still spin around
the
sun? Or is motion
the
illusion, the merest
side-to-side
disturbance,
geosynchronous
idling
in place?
III
Spring
stealths in, brings a new sort of silence:
no
voices echoing street-wards, no traffic
commotions,
blown horns, the drifting fragments
of
radio; birds and chirring insects
more
voluble now, or more easily heard;
on
streets a mere dusting of solitaires.
Fragile,
violable man. Better to huddle,
each,
in his cave of steel. Mine, a rectangle
thirty-six
paces from side to side to side to side
(if
I hug the walls, and I do, I do).
Meat-animal
karma; caged so tightly
I
can barely turn ‘round.
Platonic shadows
flicker,
silhouettes of iterations,
copies
of copies so threadbare the light
shines
through all that worn-out pallid matter.
And
see-through self salutes the ghosted other;
white-walkers;
stutter-stepping planetoids
tracing
ellipsoids on sidewalks, street corners.
Visors
down, the eyes suspicious above
smokey
masks; dragon steam escaping from
notional
nostrils, presumed mouths, each self
encased
in a droplet-shaped thought-balloon
of
doubt.
“Viewing,”
not “seeing” or “touching,”
those
are the words – the minimum social
distance
is twice the length of a sword.
Shuttered
playgrounds, abandoned swing-sets
fluttered
by gusts of wind, spragged by ghost feet.
And
streets are lined with anchorites; plinths judder,
lofty,
into deceitful air. And I feel
as
if made of estrangements, losing substance,
pieces
pared away, thinned out, weightless, prey
to
the viewless winds. Like the citizen-
bodies
on the sidewalks, hides or husks flensed,
membranes
leached of dimension, runny
watercolors
painted on onion skins
that
flake away, avoidant specimens,
tissue-culture
slices sandwiched between
glass
plates.
Meanwhile,
on TV, hazmat-suited
praetorians
surround the shrinking
perimeter,
like the ice-wall presumed
to
engirdle our flat-earth magisterium.
O
protect me from edges, folk-science
redivivus!
A
voice inside my head
begins
to mutter: Stay safe, slay the stranger!
And
I wonder, isolate (the meat-lockers
chocker,
the cemeteries replete), how
soon
it will be until words fail me;
how
long before I forget how to speak?
__
Robert
McCarthy is a writer living in New York City. He prefers to use formal means to
achieve lyric ends. Robert has published poetry in The Alchemy Spoon (Summer 2020) and Dreich Magazine (S3/D4, August 2021). His work has also
appeared in the Fall 2021 issues of Yours, Poetically and Neologism Poetry Journal; and will appear in forthcoming issues of Words & Whispers, Celestite Poetry and the Fahmidan Journal.
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