A smoky gray evening fraught with long-billed curlews & a pergola awash in pink roses & a maroon Pontiac Bonneville marooned in Daly City all unstuck in time—a wall clock lemon yellow & cornflower blue & thistle pink its face scalloped & floral—a checkerboard linoleum floor in a theater lobby—a single instant that stands in for forever like a luna moth in a truck stop sodium lamp
A Pennsylvania interstate phosphorescent at 3:00 a.m. & strewn with cigarettes & impossible laughter & poetic voices & other suicidal gestures—a smoky gray evening fraught with a gray Dodge pick-up hauling a horse trailer down North Grays Creek Rd & the polyrhythms of hummingbird wings—& here comes another star & it’s just as you say the stars are shattered glass like a C major 7 chord that won’t stop ringing
A mild dissonance a cognitive dissonance a tiger lily a paperback copy of Alcools tipped over on a shelf a pack of Camel lights beside an Adirondack chair a Bloody Mary garnished with celery all unstuck in time—a willow tree fraught with sparrows & the limbs are guitar strings in smoky gray air you cannot touch—a statue of Nuestra Señora housed in a scrap metal shrine beside a pink rose—a single instant that stands in for forever
Jack Hayes
© 2010
and a reader fraught with magnificent images and a brain that will eventually catch up. I can't tell you how impressed I am. I wish I'd written it.
ReplyDeleteHi Dave: Many thanks--there are two more in the sequence--I believe they'll post on Thursday & Saturday.
ReplyDeleteThanks again!
Beautiful. I know that PA turnpike well. Love that ubiquitous willow tree. (giggling over Dave wishing he had written this)
ReplyDeleteHi Willow: So glad you liked it! Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI'll add these to my reading list!
ReplyDeleteI should have read more Apollinaire. Am interested in things French from that period. Just getting into playing some Poulenc - one of his "Mouvements Perpetuels". Not me, but:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb6xO2WkOls&feature=related
I like that suble link to "Alcools". Nice segue. I'm going to have to start filling up a piggy bank for a John Hayes poetry-purchase fund.
ReplyDeleteIt's great to come across a line like this one:
ReplyDeletea single instant that stands in for forever like a luna moth in a truck stop sodium lamp
and just think This is right. This is how it is.
Also your use of language can be wonderfully synesthetic:
stars are shattered glass like a C major 7 chord that won’t stop ringing
Hi Kat & HKatz
ReplyDeleteKat: Well, it will be awhile on the Alcools project! As I said in another comment, it means a lot to me that you've shelled out $ to buy these books. It's funny, but the image of the paperback Alcools came to mind before I decided to finish my translation--these poems were written a little while back--I think the segue was in my own sub-conscious!
HKatz: Thanks for that--I'm very flattered by your close reading of my poems--I do very much appreciate your involvement with them!
Hi Dominic: Thanks! I'll have to check out Poulenc--I don't have much knowledge of his music. Thanks for the link. That was a really fertile time for creativity in France for certain--from before the turn of the century well into the 30s. Have you ever read a book called "The Banquet Years" by Roger Shattuck? He looks at this time period, esp. from say the 1890s to 1920 thru the careers of Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, Satie & Alfred Jarry. Although Shattuck has a bit of a prickly edge toward surrealism which is political at base I suspect, the book overall is a good read--I'm pretty sure it's still in print.
ReplyDelete