BackIssueArchive

inter\face 13

Spring/Summer 1997

Featured in this issue of inter\face

* Marc Awodey

* Allegra Rivett Sloman

* Benjamin H. Henry

* Tad Richards

* Benjamin Fisher

inter\face is:

art

-ma

Lyrics trapped in silicon, begging to be sung.

-bf

Marc Awodey

The Poet's Morning

1.
Morning is knotted into stone tracery again
and upon this long count of living and dying
daylight ushers rags of warming wind
over flattened grasses gone yellow, gone brown,
  once green.
The moon sleeps beside illusive stars
away in the curvaceous crib of a variegated
  west.
Finches chatter like bowl backed mandolins
in groups of two and three, yet unseen 
   on branches 
as daylight ushers rags of warming wind.

Around the clapboards and plaster walls 
   of my house, 
autumn reins an empty eyed Sun,
as between the quivers of a few attached leaves
finches chatter like bowl backed mandolins
or some other staccato voiced instrument.
Every noun echoes as one of many
while the most preferential nouns are 
   usually misplaced,
when autumn reins an empty eyed Sun
over cascading empires of forgotten names.

2.
In my side yard garden orchids thrive,
Some are lavender some are white like 
   fresh pearls;
our captive sun smiles on fruitful lives
but the fruit of flowers is only useless color.
Wretched vines constrict garden gate
who can whisper the shibboleth 
   that is their name?
Finches' tiny beaks are sharp as knives
their shrill notes pierce warm days with ease.
A senile sun smiles on fruitful lives
and the fruit of song birds is 
   inarticulate flight.

When daylight falls beyond prying witness,
night's apostrophe is addressed 
   to the ears of bats
and finches' beaks glint sharp as knives
secreted under the wooden fingers 
   of woven nests.
No one living may see jade stars progress
in flocks of self-absorbed constellations.

When daylight falls beyond prying witness
this world becomes a mighty onyx beyond 
   the mind.
Untold miles of cloud engulf tall sky
riddled with cruel hints about unknowable
  things.
No one living may see jade stars progress.
Blind yet without bat ears in our
  catastrophes,
knowing that by a blind moon is heaven blessed,
understanding that she is as blind as is 
   our own dust;
untold miles of cloud engulf tall sky.

3.
Every night we imitate the blindness of death,
as wretched vines constrict garden gate
without minding the inconveniences of day and
  night,
knowing that by a blind moon is heaven blessed.
Forgetful, as planets reconnoiter its automatic
  dawn;
the sun appears to smile on fruitful lives.

Each name is of so narrow a consequence
under ten thousand languages rich with names
every noun echoes as one of many
the remembered, the lost, the forgotten, and
  the almost forgotten.
Words will again fade as breaths have done
in faltering pools of burning paper
   and last words.
Each name is of so narrow a consequence,
that on this morning in the hues of 
   a fruitful west,
our moon sleeps beside illusive stars.
She does not talk coherently in her gathered
  sleep,
in words bound to fade as living breaths have
  done,
morning's fall must be patiently endured, 
   for here
morning is knotted into stone tracery again.

Hero Rhapsody

Heroes process in silent rows
wearing faces grooved into masks.
Etched inside a timeworn intaglio
is an unconscious V that is visceral.
Beneath tin armed clock martinets

manque figurines pirouette
each half hour as clockwork ticks
flourish to become as long as
the hammers that strike the harp
of an ebonized grand piano. Etched

inside a timeworn intaglio
are dotted paper rolls where voices
are preserved. Eyes fail on the face
of ambitions ill-suited to untangle
what is real from who is not.

Clockwork ticks and tocks grow,
under corrugated rooftops eighth-notes
beat home into a suburb of rapt
Perdition. Unable to hear over rain,
unable to read the staff; eyes fail

on the face of blind ambition driven
to desperation by the practiced
suffering of bejeweled prima donnas.
Sanity stinks like formaldehyde
poured through the saxophone shaped

plumbing of a Baroque funeral home
in the suburbs of Perdition.
There is no jubilee left in faith
or syncopation. Sanity stinks
like formaldehyde when pinned down

to be analyzed as if it were
a work of art.
Beneath tin armed clock martinets
wearing faces grooved into masks;
on the checkered floors of major

American cities
on a million unrolled scrolls
of brittle rhapsodies,
heroes process in silent rows.

The Six Seasons

Processing ghosts found a way home
by themselves, Anubis, or other myths
into caverns of onyx and anthracite.

They witnessed with expansive eyes;
in cradle of spring yellow shoots arose,
twixt summer and spring were woven nests

in summer a chlorophyll canopy closed
mid summer and autumn warm water condensed
in caverns of onyx and anthracite.

On faces that stand before shadows fall,
lanterns for the dead raise without light
almost undecipherable words and years.

In summer a chlorophyll canopy closed
to conceal villages of old dialect,
silent yards measuring ruinous night

and places where neighbors never more speak.
Lanterns for the dead raise without light
fences protecting amnesia.

Autumn leaves fell like a wing from grace
to mingle with newspaper, books, and grass
in silent yards measuring ruinous night.

Summer beyond summer is a precious curse.
In winter?s mean charge the whole world froze
in autumn leaves fell like a wing from grace

of cradle of spring yellow shoots arose
in winter?s mean charge the whole world froze
while in seasons of humble senselessness
processing ghosts found a way home.

Allegra Rivett Sloman

Air Writes

                    insink instinct 
hammer bones

intelligence is always hunting for a venue  .  not just a matter
of a phone call
               more like and less like various slides
and throbbing notes, modulated trills dancing off 
the oscilloscope, the spark gap is exactly right
for a lifetime performance

into it intuit
sharpen fangs

preparation leaves me bleak 
it's never saved me
knowing what comes next
has never saved me

into the evening to return a movie . and at least once each year,
a ritual returned to it's rightful, my body . the air

why am I wearing clothes
why in all this warmth, the sweet grey cloak of dusk
am I not standing naked to the elements

who are
for once
not conspiring to kill me
suck the air out of me
blind me and remind me
what a runt am I

spacial special
the boundaries delete

themselves, accompany each other, giggling
to yet another category concept mistake

excape wile you can

creep & fly
Ur
some combination

flow back into your beginnings like bad fx

or into your slice of the future hauling
my partial lobotomy

o edges
o proportions

hail and gangbuster . I draw the line
and it becomes a snake, a word, a limit
a runt from another idea's litter
vibrato, the particle that tags the wave
the wag that tells the tale of the dog

so far away

depart from all those lines 
live limitless

but on this side of my skin, the joke 
that inheres in every limitation rules
bones make rules
fangs take their censuses
air writes 


exigent tangent, this, for a

handiform critter in profile
enthroned among magazines 
haloed in a brittle backwash
of sodium light 

you sluggard, rise and be done
with words, this is my appeal to you
to silence me

wreathed in apt and mannerly constructions

posit a tacit elixir, present and still corked

put your face against the flower and breathe

unless allergic
histamine blowout
streaming eyes
eruptions, failing bronchi
over
reaction

dance with oncogenes, muddle medullae

whims and strings of arbitrary protein

but rise
&
borrow the protection of my skin
I can offer this     take shelter until 
this attack is over

then do something else.  My skin
is used to absences.
*
I live in a country in between visits to you.  It doesn't have a
name or a physical location.  It is a lost file on a crashed disk. 
Maybe one bite is missing.  Send my teeth and clothes to Forensics
when you're done.  It is not subject to examination, but one has to
try

for reasons of honour
or something that sounds just as good.

I live in a room full of your ideas.  Most of them are like
windows.  Some are more like shutters, but that's the way 
the analogy stretches.  

I live in a skin 
completely shed since you last touched it

dust mites breed 
where perception did

the body of god

this heaven scent flesh 
a sacrament, a ritual
to end uncertainty

who goes there in the dark?

survivors

that is all . what will I leave
but protein in a carbon shell?

you in the eerie neon glow
of a night light
tame fire, this atavistic prompting
commences stalking closure

here is a new tattoo
it reads, amid scrollwork:

Interpretation Centre for the Numinous

ain't that the luminous truth

you with godhead peering slyly out
from every pore
distill the essences
and know what they are for

a reconciliation for these warring voices
within and surrounding
bounding toward concrete

dust and rust . kicked up and blown
into my lungs . up into the Kootenays
to finally exhale

now, air

sniff the city
pernicious afterburn
of stone and metal
whirling with the hydrocarbons
and the odorless horror 
of common compounds

(always trying to plant a kiss
(on Truth's mouth, while the creature
(deerlike leaps away

renegade in ruins 

long slow cud
of indigestible idea

and drifting spin(e)wise to a new orientation.

The sun's begun again.  It never stops but it cycles.

Bless this blast.  Hallow this scurvy stain.  
Instead of skin, this intimation of a fleshly wall.
Charisma rats on Chaos.  Each name has a price.

Count into oblivion, or even further away.  Oblivion
is just as close or far as any whacking great idea,
infinity, the limit, that interesting play on words I
left lying in the bushes, around here somewhere.

Here was I, rapid forward and shake into your field of vision.
It's all over so fast, the flavour disappears
mysterious trail, invisible and dense as Hegel.

itinerant iterant

easy to be Tiresias

mendicant hierophant

smile for the ephemera machine

& air writes the epigraph

Benjamin H. Henry

from post-academic

  1. 

immobile, the flex of concentration
within recently expanded walls
movement yet jaundice for retribution

corners would regret or
        supply supple mutation
        events streamed and interwoven
        among acceptabilities the definitions of restraint
        mind worship in washed anxiety

clear the cravings
        provide plentitude
        spending power could illuminate
        television programming of quality
        discerns acceptable possibilities

how to choose
        which driving force to ignore
        disavow which finite
        rock busted
        sweet smells

popularity indicators predict sensation
        without touch

liquify the epi-centers of mental activity
accordian reached crescendo
annuity from another improvised investment

now compiling
        what interpreted
                pseudo-codes
                        natural-language

particular recepticles for cultural knowledge
passed given examination
        if not purloined
from holy hands of manual labor
blank and callous
        given wretched powers
gained sight of self
        built immunity.


2.

ordinance

completion in grace to write, waiting
machine moans processing instructions
        to express
        or approximate
        an original
        in lieu of creation
compromise the limited parts
assembly through steps
        recorded in earnest

Tad Richards

Tad Richards' poetry has appeared this year, or is scheduled to appear, in Phoebe, Plastic Tower, and Chiron Review. His songs have been recorded by Orleans and Fred Koller. He teaches at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY.

Considered Things

 Transmitting from the Catamount
Ski Area in South
Egremont, FM sound as clear
and jagged as icicles
thrown over the lip of her
roof, the runoff from
the gutter that's icepacked
useless--ice clouded
past transparent there,
then backed up granular and
opaque across the incline,
the warmth of woodstove rising
under it, till it drips
into pans she's placed below where
it gathers on the ceiling, All
Things Considered.

She's considered
truck drivers in India with
AIDS, the Clinton crime bill,
seven hundred thousand bucks
for the Senate chaplain; 
she considers friends squandered
to sudden outbursts of fury,
killer virus of tongue,
phone, fax, modem;
she's considered drugs and booze--too
much, this long winter, but she's
still here. She doesn't ski, 
drives her pickup to the 
tourist bars in Great 
Barrington and South 
Egremont, wonders
if her mom still prays for her.
Her voice is hard New England hick,
a voice to order boilermakers,
not lift tickets--did Frost speak
"Home Burial" in those tones? She's
too young to know. John Lennon
looks down from her wall; she
unlaces her boots, lays her
notebook back in the 
drawer, no heart
to write tonight; puts on
a Morrison tape, pours a shot.

Hermetic Poem

 There's a room without lint
  its doorknobs are conductors
  sensitive to what
  we are not told

There's a naked man inside
  his fingernails are eyelashes
  he's drawing a circle
  on the floor
  in his own pure urine
  he bisects the wall
  with a sharp line

The circle becomes molten gold
  the line is soon fire
  a horizontal flame

When the ends flicker up
  the doorknob
  is laced with blood filaments
  when they tip down
  it's the freckled blue
  of a robin's egg

Air

 After it was all settled, and the house was hers
alone, the windows lucent with her fragrance,
the panes lanced with the plumage of tropical birds,

the air began to gather in bunches around her;
bundles of air rebuffed her from the bedroom,
pulled breath away from her in the living room,

held it out for her to reclaim among the lilies,
delphiniums further along the garden walk,
heavy lilacs whose scent dragged her to the street.

She saw the house receding, the door with white
trim, the fugitive colors in the window;
it still occupied space, but the air blurred it.

She found that she was not sorry to see it go.
Now the world was hers, but within limits. 
She could get into wherever breath could surround her.

She began dropping in on friends, first around mealtime.
Afterwards, they would realize no one ever
saw her in the act of coming or going.

We're not sure where she went, either, those lost nights;
perhaps the house, at last, took pity on her,
made a close corridor of air, doorway to bed.

Maybe she had other options, though it's hard to see,
from this vantage point, what they might have been.
What are the resources of the dispossessed?

But at the next step, she was staying over,
on the couch, or in the bedroom of the oldest son,
or next to husbands, those off moments when wives

weren't using them: the bathroom, or TV,
retreating afterwards as if puffed back.
She knew her place was tenuous; she would never

allow them in too deep, or for too long.
She cosseted their pricks as if she, too,
was warm air firmed to cushion density.

When she slipped out from under them, they settled
like the ash of paper, down to their soft beds,
their clean sheets, their feather comforters.

Benjamin Fisher

What is Verbal Art?

Painting pictures on the mind's eye.

Drop of sweat blurring the ink on a ragged steno pad.

Sacrificing structure on the altar of creativity, 
And lapping at the juices on all fours.

Signing your soul away with a bloody finger.

Scraps from a mental ten course meal.

Can't shake a spear at Edgar, 
‘Cause Emily Dickenson leaves me slightly stoned.

Trying like all get out to do something a little different.

Better then having your wisdom teeth pulled.

Taking everything I've ever seen,
heard, felt, tasted, smelt, dreamed, and then some.
Throwing it all in a blender with the top off.
Adding just a pinch of fairy dust,
And half a pint of slightly rotten imagination.
Hitting PUREE, and then bringing friends over to see the God-Awful mess.

Not pretty, but it's all mine.

Or just words on paper.

Well you asked.

Hunting

Sell me your soul.
        Name your price.  Whatever you ask, it is not enough.
For such a jewel deity might give up Its throne and have no regrets.
Men would spill blood, their own or others, gladly.
Yet I think a single red rose might purchase this pearl beyond price.
This weed, comely to behold but still a parasite,
Can place a smile on that marmoreal visage to remain,
Forever engraved in my museum of memories.
I will enshrine this satin surrounded ivory crescent,
Beside every glance I ever stole,
Before I stepped up to offer my paltry present.
        Red for Lust, Rose for Love, Mind the Thorns.
        It's dead now, as your soul will become after I uproot it.
 
        What will grow in the void?
Be certain the new child's appetite knows no bounds.
Ripping new holes to feed Its growth,
The missborn garnishes Its supper with your sanity.
Don't worry, It doesn't like roses.
However the rabid ravager encaged in my mind may sleep for awhile,
Satiated after devouring such a tender young soul.
        Don't say I didn't worn you.

        Did I mention that this rose is only a down payment.
Lovely, delicate, concentric circles of color and rose colored light.
The blush of life still remains.
A small token of my passing, yet passionate, affections.
Moonlight walks along golden beaches,
Blood of grapes savored by candle light,
Promises bedded on silk sheets,
All these and more for the price of just one soul.

        I'll be gentle.
You won't feel a thing while I slowly suck it away.
Time will heal the wound,
And for a while you might even be able to fool yourself,
Into believing you don't miss it.
At least until the howling of the gulf,
Entwines with the keening of your devouring demon new born.

        Did I tell you It feeds on souls?
        Happy Hunting.