Poetry Compilation 3

Swampy

Out and Down South,

Stretched golden on the bayou

He rests

Sour teeth filled with invasive sand

And no more rattle

In his smoker’s cough

Our Family

Has been here a long time

Stilted houses rise above and around his crimes

Mud-foot children cracking corn

And with every sigh

The thick air opens and heaves for us

Oppressive rain

---

Patent leather, brand new

Heart and heels plunged in mud

Hot, sticky oil sucked from river banks

The bled-out feeling when clean is absent

And all you feel

And all you do

Tastes raw on her tongue

---

Who is he, who wishes to be among the oak

A cousin from home

A new baron, in the trees

Who fondles fruitless soil

To reunite with his mother, Earth.

Oh how he had missed her

---

Soft and green embrace,

Flecks of gold

Smeared across a face

Even the fishermen here are warm

In the summer they yell in tongues

Gills fluttering

With the mossy musk of beer and worms on their breath

And sure as hell, plenty of moonshine hidden in their tents

Once children cracking corn

Whose mothers and fathers

And aunts and cousins

Have been here for as long a time

As any could recall

Old and young, the dead too,

The bog sticks to our cracks and corners

Barncat

Teeth, pork, beef,

Chicken ‘n sheep.

Fingertips of swallow’s tongue,

Like arrows in the wood,

Crackling, crunching.

Ancient musty human smell,

Like mustard and pig shit

And one limping barn cat

---

Mud and flies

Or flying mud?

Grandma’s rough hand once wrapped round

This metal rod,

And in the right light,

When all the dust is stirred from the floor

You can see her fingerprints.

Heady grunts inform,

And fill her spirit again,

Like a paper puppet

---

My perfume is the river

The stones, the cold,

For paper I use a rose

And smear its red prose

What other outline could my

Sunken silhouette ask for?

Potpourri, of dried ashes and leaves

With curly fingers,

Peel back April’s cruel chill,

Oh yes, some say April is the cruelest month,

But I say some are wrong,

And April is only cruel

To those not yet born.

---

Woe is to the old patrician

Which are cursed to lose, as the world gains.

Whose iron-wrought factory farms,

Lack any and all

Cozy, dusty, charm,

And only the weeds,

And piles of dead leaves,

Are allowed to flaunt,

The colors of bones.

Life

Poem by Jean Follain

Translated by Daniel Kushnir

A boy is born

In a brilliant pasture

In a half century

He is nothing

But the corpse of a soldier

And it was him

That we saw appear,

Lying on the ground,

A sac full of apples,

Two or three of which roll,

Off the edge of a world

Where birds sing

At the threshold of oblivion

Age of Fish

Ancient tower tombstone

Rising from the shore

Crag-house, whose cough fills the sky

With a hundred million bristled spores

We found your bones

As they were

And how odd a grandfather you are

To the lichens on the bark

We had many questions

Do ants remember?

Those who pulp fat oaken roots

Must have once built their homes

Under shady caps

Was the sky still blue then?

Or did those spores and

Four hundred or more millions years

Dye it this way

Was the earth once in love

With the fungal trees in her hair?

Browns and greys, and fatal white

Did they keep their vines tangled

Stretched across or under soil

Blind fingertips, lover’s mic cables

Always reaching out, like those in cedar boxes

Under granite, can never do

How porous things must have been then

Severe yellow tusks

Like redwood spears

As prosperous as dandelions

Clipped from history

Like ugly toenails

We were not yet born

When they grew old and died

If the mountains shrunk

Would we deny them too?