To my brother: in his khaki habit like the one the missionaries wore
who were sent to the windy end of empire to serve and secure,
he turns in his cubicle, he rends a veil with his pencil,
he moves a decimal, he breaks and sets code like bone.
For the poor.
To my brother: in jail in his Wu Wear and absolutes—
everything’s a knife—there’s no such thing as silence
as John Cage said when there was irony and random
was a tunnel under the symphony of another century.
For the violated.
To Emma: that demon who was Linnaeus or Levi-Strauss
in another life, publishing the ideologies and taxonomies of smell—
fox, rot, scat, gall, goat, and once a rasher of bacon.
For the cherubim. For the kin.
To the debutant I was: a glistening fly in winter.
For the fevers of children.
To the man at 60: a turnip disinterred, a peasant in snow with bad shoes.
For the cult of the exaggerated girl.
To the rich: chattering dolphins in a sea of benzene.
For the afflicted.
Tonight, in the untowered downtown of Syracuse, the currency
hardens to the gray slugs the slot machine spits out and as the ghost
fish smell in the low haphazard heaven, I make this vow to look around.
For the ones to my right and my left.
Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
“…The try to come to [and maybe failing] is what the poem does, and what language does as it fails in attempts to be more than itself or care for another thing.”
- Bruce Smith, from an email. Ars poetica in its own right. Read this one of his poems, from “Devotions.”
Devotion: The Burnt-Over Districts
Late fall in the villages of Pompey, Preble, Oran, Delphi Falls,
churched
river and woods. In Homer and Ovid, the localities
and principalities
of central New York, the hollows and corners of the
burnt-over districts
visited by angels in the 1800's who led us to greatness: awakenings,
gold, portents and lies, heaven, women's suffrage, and bundling
with the other in the love beds while we waited for the lamb,
the dove, the velvet of the ten-point buck grunting through
the underbrush
to rut. We learned in divine time a year's a day.
We learned obedience
and had charismatic children. And now the boy's an angelic
eighteen days or six thousand years, as he leaves to serve.
He did what we told him: blocked for punts—no one likes to
block for punts—
and when his friends crashed the truck in a ditch, he waited
for the cops
and took the rap, nice kid, because he did the act of deliverance
one does
in central New York and made the vows, pledged, testified,
and swore
and participated in the sport greater than the coming of the dead,
and escorted the exaggerated girl to the prom where he
was befuddled
with organza and tulle and he did not forget the corsage, an orchid
in a box he stared into: the white outer whorl and the inner whorl
and pouted purple lip. He butterflied the pollen with the lashes
of his eyes.
The flower was his terror. He was not meant to be the
indwelling beauty
of things and surely he was not meant to be the wind in Iraq
with three others
in his division and become the abstract shape of a god formed from a blood clot.
I've seen the pictures, the vague shapes that ripple in the heat
until I was terrified. It looked like he still moved. Remember fall
in Delphi? All ardent and catastrophic and counter, elbows flailing,
he ran in the flat places scraped from the gold hills and valleys.
- Bruce Smith
Students
You see me here smeared
with chalk and pressed against
the slate-gray triptych from fear,
white as paper, white as a flensed
seal. Sometimes I can step outside
myself and listen
to my voice in its best bedside
manner reassure with glistening
lies, with cool purgatorial lies,
that although this is fall
we are not complying
and my heart goes out to myself.
I think when I go home of the syllabus
of love and horror movies
you’ve sat through in the Very Rich Hours
of your summer. The corpses are gorgeous,
and the books just begin to be
the artifice we need to begin.
To begin: to cut open. To love:
to be cut open and to heal and to cut open.
And I thought I could be above
It all—professional, textual, sacrificial.
- Bruce Smith