Dream Gig!

I will be launching my new chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, published by Modern Metrics, in a featured reader spot at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York on Friday night! Details here!

Uncracking a Cryogenic Obit

Arthur C. Clarke, 16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008

Small Change

Malik came in from Washington to hook
my laptop to the network: “This will ease
your access to the e-mail server… Look!”
A Windows® message popped up in Chinese.

I left him tapping and I took a walk.
This kind of thing’s been happening for years—
the “simple” fix, the crash, the techno talk…
When DC gets involved, it ends in tears.

I bought a deli sandwich down the street
and found currency, again, retooled!
“It’s got a purple ‘5’— I think it’s neat,”
the cashier said. I don’t. I’m overruled.

It’s entropy. Perpetual decay.
The only choice you get is “click OK”.

New Chapbook!

Aquinas Flinched, a book of 15 of my poems, has been published by Modern Metrics, an independent press specializing in “formal” verse. Find out more about the chapbook and the press and how you can get a copy right here.

Here’s a poem from the chapbook:

Manasquan
(for Steven Phillips)

WE crab the ruin rocks at Manasquan,
The Island of the Squaws, we Forfeit Boys,
Embraced by our paternal Grandmas on
A beach of Kodachrome and rubber toys

Where, as we tumble, adamantly tanned,
They come up bleached and ghostly in reel two:
Our fathers talking, standing in the sand,
Their pallid chests, long pants and business shoes.

A moment. Then they crack and fade to light.
We’re back to waving matriarchs against
the bank of blue and yellow clouds that shade
the field of skeletal remains, condensed
8 millimeter tidelines to a night
that pulls us to the lights of the arcade.

_____

I have my copy, and I can vouch for the physical quality of the book! Modern Metrics produces very fine books, indeed. The cover, by the way, was designed by R. Nemo Hill, incorporating a photo I took of the Tick Tock Diner on Route 3 in Nutley on the way home from a Bruce Springsteen concert. As for the quality of the poetry, well…it is published by Modern Metrics. But…you be the judge!

Thanks for checking it out.

Fourth Movement

I’m navigating Bloomfield Avenue
To Coltrane’s chronic prayer for saxophones,
A love supreme, divine and overdue.
Pedestrians behind the orange cones
Are waiting for their bus or heart attack
With coffee cups and modulating bones.
The melody advances front to back
And lingers at this corner where I stopped
to find an alternating rhythm track
beneath the cut of dynamite. I dropped
The flying highway with my other glove,
And now this sound, meandering, has cropped
The temporal continuum above
A love supreme, a love supreme, a love.

41 Junior High School Science Projects

Count ‘em.

Psalm of Robins

A hearty winter psalm, the redbreast robins work
The holly tree from base camps in the bramblewood
Across the street. They disappear into the green
To pop out one by one and cut through icy air
En route to comrades waiting in the naked sticks.
And aren’t redbreasts thought to be a sign of spring?

Disturbing all the new-dropped snow, the branches spring
And wings unfold to flap above the dirty work
Of shovels through the hardpack and the slush that sticks
To everything, including cords of firewood
Left stacked beneath the vagaries of the open air.
Neglect and reckoning. And still, the evergreen

Resplendent in its alb convenes its wintergreen
Communion. Slings the laity. A constant spring
Of russet softballs, the preliminary air
Support for April’s landing party sets to work
Across the wires. It flips to diving patterns that would
Throw the errant angels earthward as it sticks

To February gorging. Crimson berries, sticks
And brambles, snow and sunlight complement the green
Cathedral and the mistletoe. The ice and wood
Will be here in the morning. Set the spring
Of winter’s clock to wind as slowly and to work
As unpredictably as cloudlines in the air.

They’re everywhere, endowing the suburban air
With Hitchcock premonition. Here’s a scene that sticks
With you and draws you in. Inspired by the work
Of Bruegel and Hieronymus—the devil’s green,
A pastorale of grey and white—these songs that spring
Across the lawn have sketchy harmonies, a wood

Ensemble hitting strings and tympani with wood
And wind that lift the redbreast to its hectic air—
Survival. To a resurrection at the dawn of spring.
But in its transit from the holly to the sticks,
It comes to light upon a crucifix. The green-
sward is a mirror of the heavens now, the work

Of a capricious God, a work of frozen wood.
The swelling in the green will flutter in the air
As, tentative, the sticks hold out a prayer for spring.

Souvenir

I.M. Ray Pospisil

We had our maps of Paris for November–
Ray would be vacationing with Anne,
And I’d be on my own. I don’t remember
Why we hadn’t thought ahead to plan
A rendezvous, in light of all the time
We’d spent in cites like Atlanta when
We worked together in the eighties. I’m
Haphazard when I’m on the road. But then

I saw him walking toward me through the crowd
Near Saint-Germain-des-Prés on Friday night.
I recognized him in the way you know
You’ve spotted a celebrity. The light
Preserved his step and shadow in a cloud
Of silver halide by Les Deux Magots.

Across the Grid of Streets

Quincy Lehr, a son of Oklahoma finding himself in Galway, Ireland, via New York City, has published his first full volume of poetry with Seven Towers, Dublin. It is called Across the Grid of Streets, and it’s available in hard and soft cover. There is also a companion chapbook.

Quincy is well known in the world of formal verse, though he is fluent in free verse as well. I have read much of his poetry and it comes highly recommended.

WHY THERE IS NO SOCIALISM
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

At 4:15 AM, the city bus
Had pulled up to the curb, its silhouette
Marked dimly by the light that crept through grates,
Fencing in empty stores. I paid my fare
And squeezed beside a sleepy Barnard girl.
She moved a centimetre to her left—
Away from me—and twitched a pinkish nose
Below grey, narrowed eyes, accusing me
Of something, so I leaned against the glass
And stared at greasy, distant streaks of light.
Each one of us was tired, pissed-off, and bored,
Angry at the hour and with those pricks—
That fat-assed bitch, who muttered at a cell phone,
That rat-faced airline worker at the front,
That punk-ass hoodlum, glaring at his feet,
That stuck-up twat, that sad-eyed brown-haired schmuck
Gawking at New York’s predawn, backlit blackness.
And if we were united, our disdain
For every dumb-shit creep—in short, ourselves—
Had fused our isolations into one.

~Quincy R. Lehr ©

The Holiday Season

–Westmoreland Bar, Westmoreland Street, Dublin, September 12th 2006

2-14

All around the world,
every boy and every girl,
need the loving.
The humble and the great,
even those we think we hate,
need the loving.
Soldiers of the Queen,
all the hard men that we’ve seen,
need the loving.
Babies at the breast,
those in power and those suppressed,
need the loving.

Andy Partridge (XTC)_____
Image: Patricia Wallace Jones ©