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Rachel Sherwood 1954-1979 "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" —Erich Segal, Love Story The first time we talked was in the rooftop cafeteria at Cal State Northridge. Misplaced poets, we sat amidst a crop of clean-cut freshmen while, round the college, smog-smudged San Fernando Valley beckoned, panoramic and bland. I’d just returned from my debauched year up north—sad, drunken sex at the baths, in dark parks. You still yearned for St. David’s, your stint as a foreign exchange student. In Wales, something fearless woke you up: you drank, wrote, fucked. Now, stuck in the suburbs, we talked poets, punk rock. This was the late seventies, disco’s zenith. We both wanted to look like Patti Smith. We both wanted to look like Patti Smith on her Horses album: disheveled, pale, thin, intense. You were scanning Meredith’s “Modern Love” for British Lit. I thought stale anyone before Sexton. You laughed, threw back your head. I puffed a Marlboro Light. In truth, you were too hearty, and I too uptight, to do punk. I praised, as twilight dimmed the gray valley, a poem you’d read at the student reading: a pitcher cracks, foreshadows a car crash. The skyline bled behind you. I’d also read that night—racked with stage fright, trembling uncontrollably. You seemed at ease, more confident than me. You seemed at ease, more confident than me, more independent. Lived on Amigo Avenue with a roommate, a moody science major; and your alter ego, a tomcat named Baby Tubbs. Still at home, I had no wheels. You drove a battered white hatchback full of newspapers, beer cans, comb, brush, books—half wastebasket, half purse. One night early on, we split a fifth of scotch, spread your tarot cards on the living room floor. You predicted long life for me, then said of yourself: “I might make twenty-five.” Your roommate walked by, shot a look. Later, I passed out beneath Lord Byron’s watchful eye. Passed out beneath Lord Byron’s watchful eye— the poster tacked above your secondhand couch—I dreamt I was falling down the side of a mountain, a scarecrow, twisted and limp, limbs ripped, bouncing from rock to rock. On every wall an idol: Toulouse-Lautrec cancan in kitchen, young Chatterton’s wan figure over your desk. Shuffling the deck, you asked the same question, drew the same black card: Death. Together we consulted all your oracles: Ouija board, zodiac, I Ching, palm, a fickle Magic 8 Ball. Hoping for more time, you inquired, believed like a convict praying for a reprieve. Like a convict praying for a reprieve, you were more alive than the complacent suburbanites I despised. Drunk and peeved at the world, I started an argument that ended with you hurling a full Coors at me as I fumed down your stairs. Four weeks passed before we spoke, a rift I endured by writing a poem about the freak- ish night a black cloud followed us—we lit candles, toasted oblivion. Battle scarred, we entered the undergraduate poetry contest at Northridge. Daniel Halpern guest judged...or was it May Swenson? After your death, I’d be happy you won. What can you say about a twenty-five- year-old girl who died? That as a child she loved horses. And dogs. And cats. That Monty Python made her laugh. That she was alive to the disruptions of her time. That she liked Byron, Rod Stewart, Mozart, Waugh, Poe, Keats, the Cars. That she lived on Amigo and was my friend. That she once threw her keys in anger; once threw a New Yorker, shout- ing “I hate John Ashbery!” And that she once, after a speed- and scotch-fueled orgy— Some Girls blasting, her last boyfriend passed out beside us—straddled, rode me like a horse. Rachel, can I say this: your cunt felt coarse. After your death, I’d be happy you won the contest—at least you had that. “Don’t turn on me,” you pleaded. Losing wasn’t fun, but I couldn’t begrudge you your prize. Burned out from an abortion, a vicious bite— a German shepherd lunged at your nose, slit its tip—and a violent unrequit- ed affair with your “Don J,” a closet case obsessed with Kerouac, you spoke of making a change. By then it was summer: Blondie on the car radio, Fourth of July, craving fireworks. I remember headlights; reaching for the steering wheel, you. Next thing I knew, I woke in ICU. Next thing I knew, I woke in ICU: machines beeping around me, doctors and nurses hovering in an eerie blue light. Tube down my throat, I scrawled, with bruised hand, your name, question mark. My sister was steered in, wept to tell you were dead. The night they moved me to a private room, you appeared, pulsating white presence, in the hallway outside my door. “I’m all right,” you said, “You don’t have to worry about me.” I’d lie there in traction for six weeks, almost two decades ago, a ghost that fell from my own scarecrow dream, numb to that deadly drop. The first time we talked was on a rooftop.

If it takes me all day, I will get the word freshened out of this poem. I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second, and now it won’t come out. It’s stuck. I’m so frustrated, so I went out to my little porch all covered in snow and watched the icicles drip, as I smoked a cigarette. Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike off the roof with my bare hand. And used it to write a word in the snow. I wrote the word snow. I can’t stand myself.

Grandfather advised me: Learn a trade I learned to sit at desk and condense No layoff from this condensery

Out of the deep and the dark, A sparkling mystery, a shape, Something perfect, Comes like the stir of the day: One whose breath is an odor, Whose eyes show the road to stars, The breeze in his face, The glory of heaven on his back. He steps like a vision hung in air, Diffusing the passion of eternity; His abode is the sunlight of morn, The music of eve his speech: In his sight, One shall turn from the dust of the grave, And move upward to the woodland.

As P strolled the path around the pond, he sniffed the humid air. His kimono brushed the parched ground. The metals of the earth rose up in traces of dust and hints of lightning: a waft of petrichor, the smell before the rain. Beyond the pale hills of his peaceful land, scores of horse soldiers prepared their armor. Soon the soldiers would sweep across the plains, and the dry politics of princely maneuverings would be as rice paper soaked with blood. Instead of petty policies — immensity. Peaceful farmers would be impaled, paltry officials imprisoned — twisted, screaming, then praying. There on the dusty path the young poet P was just perceiving the beforeness of it all, the pre-. From his masters he had learned that immensity makes the small crucial. A little poem before a big war becomes a necessity. And like a small poem on a long scroll, a lily pad appeared on the pond. P stopped to peer. He puzzled through its pattern of green inside green on water. A poem began to perfuse. It was inside P, but it was also on the lily pad. At...On...    At first only prepositions came to him. He stared into the water, seeing the silvery clouds reflected. Then he leaned at an extreme angle and noticed the pattern of his gown wavering in the reeds. A pinpoint of a poem stabbed him, like the sharp scent of earth before the rain. Petrichor:before, before. • Then drops pelted the pond, pipped at the pond, plunged toward it, plummeted into it, driving P to take refuge beneath the deep tiled eaves of his house. Inside the sliding paper doors were a desk and a futon. On the desk lay a brush. On the futon lay a lover in uneasy sleep on petal-printed silk. He chose the desk. He lifted the brush while looking down at the restive slumberer. In a mere matter of stopped time he had his poem, written from the very tissues of an arm and hand that could plunge a sword. Silver soldiers mass on far horizons, but here, silk pools on the bed. The rain rained; moisture curled the edges of the paper. Seventeen syllables, an epic of energy, made him drowsy and hungry. His lover still asleep, he rose, ate leftover peaches poached in soy sauce and ginger, and, with the rain a drizzle, thought again of his poem. How could he have loved it in the instant after he wrote it, but now be so unsure? He sat at his desk again. Another one? This time he drafted: Poppy? Penis up. Prow into periwinkle. Peony behind. After he calligraphed the puzzle of passion across the page, he woke the one in the pond of pink silk, and they proved it on the futon. He heard the pluvial patter on the eaves, while they angled and slipped, perspiring on silk. The stamping and snorting of the horses sweating in their armor was far too far away to be sensed by P, but he heard. He felt the pond muddied and the roof cracked and the poems scattered. How far was he now from this picture in his mind? He worked to make his pleasure stay, pitiable and small against the portents rising, for P was afraid this afternoon would never be remembered after the bloody conquering. But later the barbarians would bivouac in this house, the pond saved for drinking water, the path roughened by horses, and the 
reverse of P’s scroll used for another man’s military diary, his afternoon’s foreboding and pleasure a preparation for the future, and in the future, a stay against another’s view of the past. “P from Alphabetique,” 2013 by Kara Kosaka

Tiny bit of humanity, Blessed with your mother’s face, And cursed with your father’s mind. I say cursed with your father’s mind, Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back, Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot, And looking away, Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond. Can it be that already you are thinking of being a poet? Why don’t you kick and howl, And make the neighbors talk about “That damned baby next door,” And make up your mind forthwith To grow up and be a banker Or a politician or some other sort of go-getter Or—?—whatever you decide upon, Rid yourself of these incipient thoughts About being a poet. For poets no longer are makers of songs, Chanters of the gold and purple harvest, Sayers of the glories of earth and sky, Of the sweet pain of love And the keen joy of living; No longer dreamers of the essential dreams, And interpreters of the eternal truth, Through the eternal beauty. Poets these days are unfortunate fellows. Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way Or new things in an old language, They talk abracadabra In an unknown tongue, Each one fashioning for himself A wordy world of shadow problems, And as a self-imagined Atlas, Struggling under it with puny legs and arms, Groaning out incoherent complaints at his load. My son, this is no time nor place for a poet; Grow up and join the big, busy crowd That scrambles for what it thinks it wants Out of this old world which is—as it is— And, probably, always will be. Take the advice of a father who knows: You cannot begin too young Not to be a poet.

0. the first line? “blackface is sometimes the truth.” the poet knows this will make fire. ponders performing in some dark room, squinting at the black type— red gel spots like laser sights from a rifle big as a bus. but here, the sniper stirs herbal tea, has a cell phone, the number of a woman the color of thrush wings. for now: the sniper with the cell phone will be he. he misses the next line beneath the spoon clanging in the mug like the clapper in a schooner’s alarm bell. the third line, perhaps: “. . . the smoldering cork testifies . . .” or “. . . the moldy corpse terrifies . . .” he considers each. and wonders about the second line —then about the girl he saw boarding the bus, what her name sounds like whispered in a dim room of red candles, a radio where the poet is. “—ncing and bucking. and the yes and suh . . .”—he misses something else, the new line of little to do with corks or corpses—courts, maybe— and what’s “. . . un a gold coin promise, layaway heaven with teeth and silence . . .”? he is lost between a poem, a cell and a thrush’s wing. so by this time the poet should probably place a refrain as this is going to be a long poem, long enough to make the poet famous. 1. blackface is sometimes the truth but with added emphasis. a boldface where the smoldering cork testifies. [the issue is intent, nahmean? like what is nahmean whenyousee knows its way around the alleys of the tongue? what is nahmean, nahmean? and the intent is the issue, you see?] [nahmean?] blackface is sometimes a lie but with added detail. a bold face where the smoldering cork testifies. 2. but to what? the sawdust packed pockets, the brogan’s salty shadow? to the straps? scraps off the hips of tin platters? the train’s constant is a-comin? the minister’s constant that Someday what is the cork, still smelling of cheap wine, some doe- eyed muscatel, a poor man’s dream-color of velvet, some sap fresh from a cicada tableau to a night club in a Sunday suit, cardboard under his left sock, the bootblack ache slithering out above his ass, the bootblack cash kissed in waxy fingerprints offered up, offered up to the waitress who won’t smile for a “what this get?” the bottle brought back, armpit warm? this cork, tossed to the floor and kicked, a careless jig swung by a white chick, and rolled below a table awaiting some jittering negro, whose gig it is to eyeball these corks, to swoop down, hands a pair of crows, to swoop up the cork, bear it backstage, to pull it from his pocket like a magician’s dove, transform it into smoke and ovation. what does this testify? what is this truth? why speak of the fire, the first kiss of flame to the cork? watch Bamboozled. that’s all I did. what does this testify? 3. what is truth? again reading some magazine, again waiting for the dressing room door to open: fire gleaming off the platter like a breakfast of stars, burning cork from Portugal, and cork doesn’t sink in rough waters, like fine schooners from Portugal, and fire splits the blackness of dark like the fingers of sailors from Portugal, whose tongues teach new tongues to the lips in the darkness of blacks from Africa, and burn the sea into their faces like smoke in a blue lit dressing room. and I close the magazine full of rappers swimming in denim, ism smoke and wait for the door to open. the embers to ignite 4. dancing and bucking spotlight’s prison-break eye and the sweat that lifts from the skull and the pancake sheen allowed for the cameras, the pancake that will not run, and the clothes that cling to the mouths of wetness and the red gels that turn the words into spastic ants holding tiny cue cards!!!!! but the stomach churn of memorization,no no no, the revisions on the other copy in the other notebook in the other room no no no the gimpy music stand tilt, the red eye, the spotlight’s stomach, the prison-break sheen, the ants cling, the pancake mouth, the spastic words, the cameras lift, the clothes’ wetness, the skull tilt, churn turn run no no NO DANCE                BUCK *   *   *   * the yes and sir the room. the books. hands telling what I know to a machine. alone. dreaming, yes, dreaming of pinning myself to journals like a prized butterfly. the ink of my beauty fading on the white pages. 5. a rusty bicycle is a copper skeleton against the mattress. through the chain link, children kneeling on the concrete look lined for butchering. chewed sedans bleed into the street, into sewer bellies. I’ve written these images too many times. DC is my ghetto— every black poet should have one, as every white poet should have a movie-house or a lake. white poets have attractions. black poets should also have grandmothers. I have grandmothers—one living, one not. neither mopped any floor but her own. if I stand on their memories, I am too tall to be jammed into a tenement. black birds peck at my journals. my fingers work grime into Elm Place in LeDroit Park, divine urine from Florida Ave and goad fiends from T Street’s throat. these are not my muses. an adjective. a noun. a simile. “ragged storefronts like beaten wives.” I must imagine what might go on behind bricks, past the railing climbing up the stoops like wrought iron centipedes. the windows are open sometimes at night. it was hot, one black grandmother had a pool. air conditioning. on days without smog, you could see the sea or someone riding a horse past the liquor store. no one needs horses in Altadena. here, horses are diamond necklaces. diamond necklaces that shit in crosswalks. in DC there is a different kind of horse, and I need it for poems as I need ink. it is not my muse, nahmean? one black grandmother didn’t sit in the back of buses. Raleigh lay before her, already mopped. the crows are waiting at the edge of the page. see, the madhouse that seeped out into NE before exploding into panhandlers stranded in phantom ants, drifting mothers birthing flying dutchmen, that man who walked all the way to 6 th Street swinging a golf club like a white woman dancing— these are not my muses. they aren’t even mirrors. they are cork awaiting flame. blackface IS sometimes.

The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck. —The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet. The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers. Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns.Dr. Peebles.The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint. The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room. The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say,I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say,That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together. How they talk in old movies, like,Now listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I 'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean. Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river of forgetting. Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car. Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said,One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply,Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.

Beauty, I’ve seen you pressed hard against the windowpane. But the ugliness was unsolved in the heart & mouth. I’ve seen the quick-draw artist crouch among the chrysanthemums. Do I need to say more? Everything isn’t ha-ha in this valley. The striptease on stage at the Blue Movie is your sweet little Sara Lee. An argument of eyes cut through the metaphor, & I hear someone crying among crystal trees & confetti. The sack of bones in the magnolia, What’s more true than that? Before you can see her long pretty legs, look into her unlit eyes. A song of B-flat breath staggers on death row. Real men, voices that limp behind the one-way glass wall. I’ve seen the legless beggar chopped down to his four wheels.

Pyongyang, if you’ll please, STOP appearing in the poem like this— unannounced * In writing to your Pomomomo (that special critical topos between an ideolophe fahtha’ and a para-juridical muhtha’) This-side-of-the-Hudson Psycho-Acoustics Jangling— Claim you what? “We call it dead in the wa wa don’ mean jacky bits” “Pyongyang” * But it does... as an In Walk Bud flips the whooole session on its head lexicals in range clash and dash out patch 14ths off the scale to perfect fifths effects REACT rather more differently than before with “Pyongyang” in there * And “Quetzalcoatl” Lands on “Tarragon” jangling it? If that’s where the Nitro’s stored, in “Tarragon” bird’s already been blown off feathers falling field’s been re-charged * And “Thatcher?” as guest jaw-harp soloist? The E.U.’s formative contradictions unresolved? some kill in that cut— you got the mic,pomomomo make a ho’ youself and Maggy and us