The Participle Poems
THE
PARTICIPLE
POEMS
by
Bill Yarrow
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1.Playing for Keeps
2.Burying the Hatchet
3.Staring at Waves
4.Searching for the Word
5.Looking at Waffles (8 Different Ways)
6.Drinking an Orange Julius While Listening to Pink Floyd
7.Crossing the Center Line
8.Getting Home Alive
9.Annulling the Future
10.Theorizing Salsa
11.Playing Pinochle in Your Snout
12.The Knitting Needle
13.The Learning Curve
14.The Sticking Point
15.Not Drowning
16.Just Foundering
17.Disappearing Ink
18.Ash Coming on Second Wednesday
19.Here's Looking at Euclid
20.Villon, Stop Following Me Around
PLAYING FOR KEEPS
I woke like an animal
breeding thoughts like flies,
my arms loaves of bread,
my eyes cups of milk.
"Set the sawdust, I'm
hungry for locusts."
They never appeared.
I ran grumbling
for shrubbery. Gone!
The colors have no money left.
The world was a leaf
at the cockpit of dust.
I screamed and it shattered.
Water poured through me.
I ran, a crazed rabbit.
Shots rang out from the bunker
ocean. I was laid low
by the shrapnel of design.
BURYING THE HATCHET
I wanted the pain to go away,
so I let them stick me. No luck.
I still feel rotten, and now my head,
deliciously empty for decades, is
clogged with thoughts of dying.
I'm doomed. I'm a goner. Forget it.
I'm riding the rails of deterioration,
I know it. Soon I will be boneless
and alone. But I am not alone.
Not yet. In the other room,
my mother is wrestling a mongoose.
Between rounds, she sits on a
radio instead of a chair. I can't
quite hear what is playing, so
I say, “Turn it up. Turn it up.”
A fireman holding an ice pick
adjusts the volume. The Chemical
Brothers appear on the Jumbotron.
Australia secedes from the U.N.
STARING AT WAVES
“In sequent toil,” my father was quoting
Shakespeare, “all forwards do contend,”
but I wasn't listening; I was staring
at the waves, all green and gooey, all
pommes frites, ruinous, insolent, half
fractal, sawing like insolvency, Swedishly
benevolent and Irishly violent, in whose
reflection I saw deciduous shellfish
nibbling a fragrant net; fit minnows
winnowing a wave; sunfish at worship,
contiguously religious. “I'm talking to you
about your future!” he was saying.
Me? I was wondering about the smug land,
the politics of weather, the insurgent sea.
SEARCHING FOR THE WORD
Searching for the word which might bring
back better words, I writhe in condign pain
witnessing the cacophony in which she
twists. Once I jogged the perimeter of Eden,
swam laps in the Lake of Siamese hearts,
and hiked the icy top of Mount Amor.
Today the pinkness of vision is blackened
by the debility of having persisted.
I separate my thoughts into two camps
and rush between them carrying forbidden
messages which I burn so as not to incriminate
the pale sender or the ruddy receiver.
There's no daylight in the life to come
when the darkness is not medicinal.
LOOKING AT WAFFLES (8 DIFFERENT WAYS)
1. the mind (in its righteousness)
waffles
2. the conscience (in its scrupulousness)
waffles
3. the heart (in its cupidity)
waffles
4. the soul (in its annihilation)
waffles
5. the tongue (in its appeasement)
waffles
6. the skin (in its lethargy)
waffles
7. the body (in its luxury)
waffles
8. life (in its delirium)
waffles
DRINKING AN ORANGE JULIUS WHILE LISTENING TO PINK FLOYD
I was strapped for cache
so I called my friend Paolo
who wears Ecuadorian gray
and prefers Celine to Celan
and asked him how to juggle
all the crap life was throwing
my way, and he said, “Boyo,
take your chessboard to Andorra
and mate someone” but, I had
already done that, so he was no help
at all, so I grabbed one of my shelf
improvement books and read: “I
saw the best minds of my generation
enter law school” and realized that
all the works I thought I knew had
been defaced by assassins. I asked
the Wife of Bathroom for a hit of
Relieve. She handed me the anodyne
and went off to make chicken
á la Siegfried. I drifted into dream:
A man in a turquoise slicker sat on
a skittish horse wearing an iron hat.
He was pointing at a group of children
in the housewares section of Wal-Mart
playing catch with the throw rugs. A
tsunami was rolling through the aisles.
The man bellowed, “Watch out!” but he
couldn't force their attention. The waters
poured over all the products of mankind.
Death came as a scythe of relief.
CROSSING THE CENTER LINE
He was a Decembrist but he was not
one of the hanged. They dragged his
frozen bones to Magadan where he
toiled in the ruined mines. More than
fresh air, he longed for glimpses of the
speckled light that sparkled off the sea.
He was used to the moldy smell of gold
ore and the whiskey whispers of his
comrades in hell. But he never adjusted
to the crisp loss of Ludmilla to scarlet fever.
And the white nightmares never left him.
One day, he got a letter from his brother.
Their mother had died in a suspicious fire.
He lit a cigarette and filled his shrunken lungs.
GETTING HOME ALIVE
He enters
the pavilion
from the left
and surveys
the indigo walls
In the alcove
by the pond
scarlet shadows
thatch
the empty bench
br />
In a grove
of dying
birch trees
a wasp loses focus
a sniper coughs
ANNULLING THE FUTURE
If you can't consummate tomorrow
you may as well just annul the future.
That bride is a sticky risk anyway.
Look at her—ruffles in all the wrong
places. Her perfume stinks of wrinkle
cream. She uses bleach to keep her
complexion stiff. She's infested with
multiple lovers from the past. She's
not the future you remember. Her
bones are porous from overexertion.
Her glands are full of pride. You see,
you see that push-up look in her eyes?
How beautiful she looks in the indigo shade!
Careful! She is a maid of weaponized affection.
THEORIZING SALSA
Janet and I
had the tilapia
fish tacos and
talked about God
God ordered the veal
cutlet and was rebuked
by the vegetarian Politburo
The beer had a divine odor which
attracted the wasps of mortuary remorse
PLAYING PINOCHLE IN YOUR SNOUT
The paneled linoleum basement rec room
with tables set up for pinochle, salami, and
schnapps. My uncles, grandfather and father
at one table; my aunts and mother at the other.
The blurry TV on. The bookcases with glass
fronts and carved locked doors holding auction
volumes and foreign coins. My three sisters
in ballerina tutus running up and down the stairs.
My unemployed younger cousins on the back lawn
smoking Luckies. My coiffed older cousins discussing
the subdivisions of the Republican future. Albums
of peeling Polaroids, dirty doilies, fuzzy rugs.
The fetching wreckage of an arsoned heart. “Does
anyone want anything else to eat? Anyone? Anyone?”
THE KNITTING NEEDLE
It was early in the morning when Lucien Carr stabbed
David Kammerer in the chest with a Boy Scout knife,
dropped the knife into a sewer, the body in the river,
and buried the dead man's glasses in the park.
It was later that afternoon when Lucien Carr
went to see The Four Feathers with Jack Kerouac,
walked to the Museum of Modern Art to look at the Legers
and turned himself in to the skeptical police.
It was a grey afternoon when Lucien Carr
holding a torn copy of A Vision by William Butler Yeats
pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter
and was sentenced to a reformatory in Elmira, New York.
The odor of William Blake hangs over this narrative.
Opposition is true friendship. Eternity in an hour.
THE LEARNING CURVE
There's always something negative to say:
that's what she learned by listening to her
bereavement and exercising on the heads of
pins. In silence, she bakes zucchini bread
and reads The Lancet a lot. There are days
she opens the valves of her attention
to the sprawl of phlox and felicity,
but she's blind to the creeping peevishness
of stevedore philosophers. Doesn't
she understand the reactionary
pessimism of the local helots?
What she needs is a hot shot of Cedar
Rapids, a close dose of liberation
biology. Look up! Look up! She-wolves
are eyeing the somnolent underclass
while the bearded Cialis bankers hawk
municipal treachery, sip Arnold
Palmers, and feed on underdone seabirds.
THE STICKING POINT
I went for a walk to reinvigorate my head,
but the grass on the side of the access road
was wet, and the sucking mud stuck to the sides
of my new shoes. I scraped my soles on a railroad tie
and used a piece of granite to remove some of the rest
of the mud, and, were it not for some sticking point
I can't articulate, I might have been able to remember
back to boyhood and its muddier shoes and scraping
sticks and river's edge and summer wounds, but I was
dirty and hurting and my mind was stuck in the ugly
present, and all I could think about was funerals
and me standing on a mound of dirt and me shoveling.
And with each shovelful, I sank a fraction of an inch
deeper into the dirt until my suit shoes were caked
completely with black mud. Looking up, I saw the guests
walking slowly to their shiny cars. The wind let out
a funereal howl. “Get in the car,” my wife called
from our van. “Hold on!” I said. I bent over and finished
cleaning off my shoes with my debit card. I felt dark,
dark, like a heron on one leg in a Florida pond at dusk.
NOT DROWNING
The young boy writhes in the screaming water,
terrified by what's not there: the bottom sand.
He winds himself around your neck and climbs
up your head. You don't so much save him
as not drown yourself. You were a buoy. You
kept afloat until the tide pushed you into shore.
As you emerge from the water, he's still hanging
on to you, saying, “You saved my life! I owe you.”
You tell him that he doesn't owe you anything.
I didn't do anything, you say. It was the tide.
The tide pushed us in. He's not listening.
He doesn't care. He's got a hero and he's not
letting go. He follows you around for weeks.
At 9 years old, you learn how cloying gratitude is.
JUST FOUNDERING
“the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks”
—Moby Dick
The savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathéd beaks.
“Sheathéd beaks”? Ridiculous, but I love the iambic
ring of Herman Melville’s prose. The line with its three
long “e” sounds and six “s”es explains why Ishmael
in the sea was not eaten by the birds. And the sharks?
Melville has that covered too: “The unharming sharks
[n.b. the short “a” in “unharming” + “sharks”], they glided by
as if with padlocks on their mouths.” Only because Melville
needs Ishmael to survive. Needs Queequeg’s coffin to pop up
out of the vortex. Needs Ishmael “for almost one whole day
and night” to cling to it until he is rescued by the Rachel.
Otherwise, who would tell this first-person tale? Who would
write this book? Li would
first-person tale, is bookrvive. So Queequeg'terature, you see, without plausible
justification, without a narrative anchor, is just foundering.
DISAPPEARING INK
The inverse of disappearing ink
is invisible ink, writing (with
lemon juice, for example) which
can be seen only when warmed
(that is to say, burned). I guess,
their marriage was kind of like that,
him writing with ink that disappeared
over time, her writing with ink no one
could see. As the years passed, she could
no longer find him, though she looked hard.
As the years passed, he couldn't read her
(could he ever?) even as she became heated.
They didn't run out of each other's ink.
They just grew tired of reading, I think.
ASH COMING ON SECOND WEDNESDAY
turning and turning
because I do not hope to turn again
mere anarchy
the infirm glory
shadows of indignant desert birds
something upon which to rejoice
and I who am here dissembled
now I know
the vapor in the fetid air
I know
the lost heart stiffens
know
the whiteness of bone
moving its slow thigh
HERE'S LOOKING AT EUCLID
He's looking at Euclid
but he can't concentrate
The noise of Bakersfield cicadas is invading his ears
He's looking at Euclid
but he can't concentrate
Hoboken memories are marching into his mind
He's looking at Euclid
but he can't concentrate
Far East anise is stuck between his teeth
He's looking at Euclid
but he can't concentrate
The elevated smell of Delphi is seeping into his nose
He's looking at Euclid
but he can't concentrate
A Catalan fishing boat is sailing into his eyes
He's looking at Euclid
Meanwhile, the sandstorm of time
keeps polishing the geometry of space
VILLON, STOP FOLLOWING ME AROUND!
Villon, you've got to stop following me around!
It's enough already. I'm not going to tell you
where I've hidden the loot. Touchez pas au grisbi.
Villon, get the hell outta here!
My work is dangerous and you're an orphan.
Go back to the reformatory and paint with oil.
Villon, I'm not going to tell you again.
Shoo. Vamoose. Take a hike. Scram!
If I see you here again, I'll beat you like a dead horse.
Acknowledgements:
These poems appear in Wrench (erbacce-press 2009), Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX 2012), Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku (Červená Barva Press, 2013), and The Lice of Christ (MadHat Press 2014). The poems first appeared in the following journals: blossombones, Blue Fifth Review, Everyday Genius, Gloom Cupboard, Magma Poetry, Muse Apprentice Guild, Negative Suck, new aesthetic, New World Writing, OF ZOOS, and PANK