|
Alexander Long: Two Poems
Still Life with Suicide II: With Hendrix and Vallejo Folding Their Cards and Showing Their Losses | Still Life Recapturing One of the Worst Things I’ve Ever Done
Still Life with Suicide II: With Hendrix and Vallejo Folding Their Cards and Showing Their Losses
The pain I have has no explanations.
— Vallejo
I. Collingdale, PA 1988
For once, no one will die or be dead
Because it’s not allowed anymore;
Because, for once, I say so,
And for once, almost believe it;
Because I will begin listening to this still life
Just after midnight,
While you are sleeping, reappearing
As yourself.
And what I hear is the sweetness you loved,
The way you made the Sloe Gin spill
Over your chin, the way you’d refuse
To take it as a shot.
You’d pour it to the brim
Of your father’s coffee cup
And slam it,
As if there were things
Still to be settled.
That seems right,
Hammered and righteous and right,
If only this one time, your eyes
Ablaze, belching and offering
"Pardon me, motherfucker,"
Before you resume your lecture
On Hendrix’s "Fire."
Very simple, you say.
Not his best, but his most accessible.
Two, three notes. All that style
Simplified, as if he were listening
To all he’d lost.
* *
You never said that. You’re dead.
You got out, and I don’t know
How true that is anymore.
I almost miss you,
And I can’t say that
In a poem anymore.
I’m required to give it some style,
To cut it out
Of myself and offer up it
To my next-to-last breath,
Where air is part mescaline, part music,
I’m thinking, where style is as foreign
As any pain you carved out for you
And for me,
Where loss is a parade and carnival,
And at dusk everyone joins hands
In the town square singing hymns
Laced with fire and brimstone
Without fear, and at ease.
No such luck. What I say here
Has to be caught
In an image that needs to sing
Beyond explanation, pain, song;
It’s got to beat itself beyond oblivion
And memory, beyond rhythm,
Itself.
A poem can’t be about itself
Anymore, not when you’re in it, B.
A poem can’t be about the dead anymore.
II. Now
That’s what’s kept me up all these years,
That one thing that’s kept me
Here on this page listening with you:
You keep revising yourself
With me as your muse.
It’s like you’re not listening.
III. Now & Forever
You motherfucker.
You’d like the crudeness of that.
You’d admire the anger.
But, dude ... respect, you’d say.
You can’t say "motherfucker" in a poem
Anymore than you can say "I miss you."
Then, you’d take a smoke
From my packed pack without asking.
Decorum and respect, you’d say,
Blowing the smoke in my face.
Listen: why you keep showing up
Is why I’ve got to slow it down,
If just for a little while,
Because I came here to talk about hope,
Just like you used to,
When you were my muse,
Before this poem started listening
To itself
And got all mixed up.
It’s long past midnight, and the crickets
Are dozing off.
Now, and forever,
You’re some still life,
And you will live in these lines
I’ve cut and burned
Inside my lungs, behind my eyes;
You will be a branch that breaks
Like a spine, a wave smashing a skull,
A flock of geese set aflame in flight,
A city walled in,
No bread, no music.
Now and forever, the world keeps its own, B.
It misses little, and has
No memory, finally,
I fear.
Leave me alone.
IV. Folding in Heaven
Just watch, you say.
That’s Vallejo and Hendrix over there,
They just showed their cards — straight flushes
And full houses —
All the nothings luck requires —
Onto the table and called it even.
I heard Vallejo say the felt feels
Like a newborn’s head.
Their cards hold our wills,
Hammered and righteous and right.
V. Collingdale, PA 2006
Right.
The stars are brighter this morning
Than any vision I’ve gotten from you.
You shot yourself.
I won’t be looking
For your gravestone
Any time
Soon.
Still Life Recapturing One of the Worst Things I’ve Ever Done
Meet you in the next one and don’t be late ...
— "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)"
Actually, two things:
I had this friend who shot himself,
And there are some poems about it.
The other one I don‘t have words for yet. Funny
How connected the two can be.
Besides, you can’t put someone else’s words in a poem
Until you’re ready to lose
Your own.
In a truer sense, that’s called style; deeper
Still, influence, where the living
Go on trying to live.
* *
This friend — you may know him — once told me
There was this sweet spot
On the fretboard of a '60 Stratocaster,
Hovering somewhere between the twelfth fret,
Seattle, and London, where Hendrix finally met
Himself. He, my friend, knew all there is
To know about Hendrix.
All you need to know, man, is that he knew
How to hurt people
in all the right ways, you know ....
He understood, for example, that
"Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" — if played loud enough,
Long enough — could splice its way from ear to ear
Like a spider web holding a drop of rain
That resembles — what else — a tear.
He also knew that having a tear in anything
Was too cheap,
easy, like what‘s her name ....
And dangerous.
Don’t never cry your way out of nothing, he’d say.
Thing is, when I finally cried for him,
Two years after, I was listening
To the both of them:
I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time
Give it right back to you one of these days
I don’t need you no more in this world
I’ll meet you in the next one ...
don’t be ...
It felt a little like I was losing myself.
* *
You can’t put someone else’s words in a poem
Until you’re ready to lose
Your own.
Poet's Biography:
|
Alexander Long's Vigil was released in 2006 from the New Issues Press Poetry Series (2006). Co-editor of A Condition of the Spirit: the Life & Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington UP, 2004), Long is also the author of a chapbook, Six Prose Poems (Brandenburg Press, 2004). His poems, essays, and book reviews have been published in American Writers (Charles Scribner's Sons), Blackbird, Quarterly West, The Prose Poem: an International Journal, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Currently he is a member of the writing faculty at West Chester University, and writes, plays, and tours with the band Redhead Betty Takeout.
|
|
