2 poems
Untitled Capture
Tintoretto painted his dead daughter.
But the apple still remains.
So the poem says.
Things that might be yours are falling.
Don’t get too far ahead.
Checking all the locks.
Looking for the subject
Of a longstanding verb.
Year now coming to an end.
Things that might be yours are falling.
+++
You wake up early in the dark.
From now on take it as a given.
There were just too many people
He said last night
When I was a reader there
So we looked for reasons
To reject. Sheets of cross light
In the passage you want to show them.
Song played the same way but slower.
+++
Here you want to say too much.
Here you want to take it down.
No path now runs out from here
To the flame acanthus.
The lighting bolt or zigzag pattern
Woven in the web.
Year now coming to an end.
What’s happening to us?
Is what you think. Another
Night falling at the end of the year.
Another night coming on or falling.
+++
Don’t get too far ahead.
You tried to say it before.
Years ago you opened the door.
Had the spider spun a web
Or was it merely hanging there
Missing two of its legs?
You wanted to protect it
Like it was just one thing.
What Derrida said about Celan.
Or how she translated
Mandelstam. (The step you took
No longer there to take.)
Trust
Think about the good.
Aristotle did.
The good is where people are out walking.
Where people are breathing.
Where they take ten steps and
turn right into the shop.
Where some of them are just now
coming out of the water. Where they have put down
one formerly would have said roots,
now one says foundation.
Where they can imagine each other,
where they sing songs about a past,
where they certainly certainly certainly
are not burning.
*
Believe in the good.
Aristotle did.
He says some men are cattle
(I say like cattle?
and he says no, are)
and they avoid
the life of contemplation. Some men
(here I say Aristotle,
when you say men you
leave out so many people
and he says I was wrong
about that you
can tell everyone I’m
sorry)
*
Look for the good.
For awhile I tried
to take this instruction seriously.
I sanded the wood.
I wrote things down. Because of the news,
I thought about complete annihilation.
I sat down at the baseball game
and asked someone the score.
I said I am an instrument
calibrated to the sun.
Which would make this sadness
a kind of accuracy.
*
Lament the good
its having passed.
When a woman writes about the river
and a man would be a river
and Heraclitus speaks about the river,
I, here, alone in the wind
and the tall grasses, just want to get to the margin
and stop. Live in your poems
before you write them, in parentheses
Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Don’t
get angry with yourself—in another form,
in parentheses, the same. What
does the scene tell us about intention?
What inside himself, by saying,
is the author trying to unlock?
It takes a kind of pity to be a reader, pity
and some starvation. Aristotle agrees
it doesn’t sound good, but someone
had to say it.
*
Imagine the good
(1 dead, 19 injured
3 dead if you count the police).
Imagine the good
as already here or an aspect
of everything that’s happened.
Aristotle doesn’t like this part.
He’s turned away. He says this
is a delicate problem
and when I have a delicate problem
sometimes I set it to one side.
*
Close up of a boy
sitting on a bus. He’s turned away from us
and looking out a window. He’s in another country.
He and his mother are crossing a mountain pass.
They are high up. He holds in his small hand
a smaller candy wrapper. He holds
it out the window and watches it flutter in the wind.
He looks at his mother. He lets it go
and watches it go down forever. He thinks all the time
of the scrap of paper, the text, Coetzee’s Boyhood, says,
that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it.
*
Medium shot of a boy
holding a woman’s hand. The scene allows us to understand
he’s walking beside his mother. They’re returning,
after a long day, from an errand in the city. The boy
is curious about what he sees: the blue sky
above the horizon. He asks his mother if it isn’t much farther
away than it appears. She doesn’t answer
and he waits, he keeps walking, he decides
to ask it another way. But it irritates his mother, her son’s
reframing of the question. The text, Beckett’s Company,
says reframe. And then she made you a cutting retort
you have never forgotten.
*
Rocky the orangutan
who is behind glass
who wanted to inspect
the fresh burn scars of the woman
on the other side
and everything
people want to say about that
Is it enough? His eyes
the only thing in the world
you trust.
*
I concentrate on the voice. (Aristotle says
this just mixes things up, don’t
go too far in this direction.) The voice is what
I remember most. We were in the library basement.
He was showing us, using a projector, slides
of his paintings. But the slides were blank. The projector
just threw a square of light
up and out onto the wall. Punctuated by the complicated
click of its advance. At first, we thought he’s making a mistake!
The scenes he described were from his life. Maybe
that was the lesson, I don’t remember the details.
I didn’t know it then, but we had agreed
as his audience, to listen. And he had promised
to try to make us understand. Now, I know the slides
were part of a trajectory, a history, an aesthetic
pedigree (cf. Zweig’s “The Invisible Collection,” cf. Lacan’s
representation of representation). Maybe that was the lesson.
You’re a person, Aristotle says, there’s no remedy for that.
Carter Smith’s poems have appeared in Cream City Review, The Seattle Review, Rattle, Pleiades, and other places. Further Other Book Works published his mail art/book project Rounds. He lives and teach in North Carolina.