MUDLARK No. 1 (1995) ISSN 1081-3500 Copyright (c) MUDLARK 1995 Editor: William Slaughter E-Mail: mudlark@unf.edu URL: http://www.unf.edu/mudlark __________________________________________________ A DOZEN OF THE OTHER by DAVID SWOYER Contents The Midway A Portrait of Marriot Bradden The Visitor Came One Morning Beer as Religious Art Rime for a Chicago Cow Hardly To A Sheba Forest Song For a Friend Having His Tattoo Removed The Viewing Dying Near Easter, 1969 Collision The Beginning of a Frog's Chorus __________________________________________________ THE MIDWAY The circus trucks stretched out along the highway like a crystal rosary of headlights Animals in the rain bearing on their backs the dark prayers of side-show freaks, mechanical rides, and bingo tables Nameless animals creeping into the city to unpack their trained faces in a grove displaying their elixirs for the eye and nose, bleeding fingers and tongues, selling tickets to cotton-candy pardons In a breath of neon all the tales of clowns and lions scrawled on the walls of backstreet houses weren't marked like the tattooed woman Rose-titted, battle-butted woman cuddling her snakes (Once I saw the boa that lives in the large pocket of her pink satin dressing gown He eats the unraveling deer from the tie-belt end and pins back the stars of the frayed pocket lining to see out) At Chez de la Femme (like so many others we are all working together) my eyes tear at a stripper's diaphanous red silk Her jeweled g-string gleams making me squint I am fascinated by the art of exercised hips bumped and ground into shape worn smooth and shining as tumbled rocks I see your thoughts a barker's call "Step right up See the fantastic two-backed animal that dances all through life!" Sweat fingers my skin telling of other wet moments in your arena I am a jumping lion clawing at the firehoop you raise so well burning burning burning taunting me to growl and lunge through (What an act!) None of my words could match your finale your naked raw expression Not knowing anyone could sleep so still that night I dreamed of fakirs loving salt in the gash of memory A PORTRAIT OF MARRIOT BRADDEN Riding on a Pepsi truck from Christmas to Wauchula There are the memories of the dolls we loved on Oak Street and hamburgers I ate rare in their kitchens on cold nights Then the King's horses were unstabled and we rode like the dock fires to the rafters of the port sheds But we learned to love necessities with the Primitive Baptists though it was never twelve o'clock when we stopped by the roadside the yellow susans got pissed on And the old men with vinegar jugs stood there too laughing so hard they spit though it was never twelve o'clock when the mockingbirds caught up the gold straw from the strawberry fields I loved the rain-soaked backs of the hogs and motorcycles in Mulberry like noon with overlapped hands I reckon death is not kinder but spring hasn't bothered since THE VISITOR CAME ONE MORNING in the fog that hangs the morning with wet bedsheets stained and old on a thousand lines strung Over the harbor flew eight gray gulls hunting fish in the fog Gray gulls cursing the hour in black In black she came a queen carrying linen lavender-smelling From the door to the porch she came to leech my soul She layered impasto pleasantries sat with me and talked For it was love with seams sewn by a tailor In several places the cloth pierced with a single needle thread broken once and knotted But not much could be said the porch too damp to speak of arrogant sunfish streaking seas or brittle stars that wave the moon around five shaky arms And so Oh no I was brought home in a florist truck She laughed not knowing Why it was true between yellow mums and big very pink roses for a funeral that was postponed I was laid where I could hear begonias singing lullabies As she sat I got cramps from her onion soup and the leeches failed her Then when she had to leave she left by the window making heavy wrinkles in the shade The fog lifts off the cobblestones in the puddles yet the wise leave gifts at my door BEER AS RELIGIOUS ART Standing here I am a fountain signing the lawn with my fountain pen I am a fountain because of beer standing by the hedge Busch unto bush (amen) Beer has a will to make us all fountains a dream of wet parks A god turning men into dogs leg-lifter leg-sniffers letting piss fall letting lying dogs lay Yet I am different from the park statues I don't piss from my eyes or toes (though I may piss to my toes) I could not will not piss all day Marble-filled heads confuse plumbing and fixtures Beer knows them distinctly the shortest distances And a kindly god even if you don't make it even if your zipper sticks even if you soak your pants Don't worry Beer doesn't stain You could be soaked with rain (Is rain the urine of angels? Remember that when you run in the rain Close your mouth!) But watch for the cops The fullness of beer is beyond them They would have you burst or drown Now Oh Lord this emptiness is wonderful Without ballast I could float away Beware The eagle has flown the stars are out If you can't find me in the morning search the skies I am empty and complete RIME FOR A CHICAGO COW She had a difficult fire a three alarm blaze (that blasted siren) But when it was out I rolled up my hose glad to be a volunteer fireman HARDLY TO A SHEBA Oh, my love Let us meet in grocery stores behind the avocados behind the pumpernickel Let us meet in laundries I shall wash my dirty underwear with yours purging TIDE cleansing ALL Let us go to drive-ins You will know my love by my popcorn by my Musketeers I will float you in Coke clothe you in naugahyde Oh, my love What song of songs did Solomon know that, too, has not crept from me like tarantulas off banana stalks FOREST SONG (a poem on the necessity to practice voice) "Such love as the high gods know From whose eyes none can hide, May that never be mine, To war with a god-lover is not war, It is despair." Aeschylus, PROMETHEUS BOUND I watched you grow full of suspicions making guesses weigh more get too large A forest of tall-grown ghosts whispering their stories Lost in the trees Daphne, too, is not what she seems The birds that nest on her branches never suspect that she bark-covered refused the love of a god becoming virgin laurel You said I sing you know Oh, I know you sing like a bird, I bet but not for me not to me Then you walked away toward the trees, sprouting leaves. FOR A FRIEND HAVING HIS TATTOO REMOVED Many men have tattoos hearts with banners much like yours I hear tattoos are hard to get rid of hanging on arms like old girlfriends But yours has no flag to wave is blank No mother no rosey, or stella no fleshy commemorative I LOVE YOU to a one night stand as sailors are known to put even, on their chests Just waiting unclaimed without dedication (Oh, such a line to tell the girls I'll put your name there in the morning And laugh all night in what they gave) That's not like you wearing a heart too colorfully Already your arm must be lighter with it half gone Again naming love without decoration THE VIEWING (after leaving local draft board #25 and learning a close friend has died in Viet Nam) "Who dies now anywhere in the world, without cause dies in the world, looks at me." Rilke, SOLEMN HOUR Like the sand, silent and discrete I've met the clowns in the desert watching them choke old vultures with laughing somersaults and dig coarse tombs burying them face down on mirrors painted with flying swans making them stare with wide open eyes at their own imaginations and bald heads without preference Proud jackals eat salamanders and the stars over Egypt parading the carrion by the pyramids on black horses Dead eyes have stared at me snapping shut like steel traps biting into my live skin with cruel names I envy the scavengers being able to eat the dead and make it alive in themselves While the body is fresh even now I sow wheat deep rooting wheat on his grave to pray with the crows DYING NEAR EASTER, 1969 The stink of a fawn too small to get through winter killed by anti-burning snow not yet melted from the carcass Bones defrost from skin making double crosses After the cold war the killing heat the burning photographs of singed bodies in plastic bags heading for home piled in double crosses Jesus Christ was not a general in World War II but think how long Eisenhower was spared the miracle of death If a prophet were alive Today we would know no suffering in Biafra Whose black mothers surely love their children enough to miscarry The peace of Easter lilies force-bloomed as one sterile image white and august Like nuns in summer habits black and white are the pages I tear each day from the calendar and think of Chuang Tzu saying There is nothing older than a dead child COLLISION Friends friends coming to my room have smoke in their hair like hot wax the odor melts from their heads Someone has burned old newspapers with the leaves Outside my window the wind mixes the paragraphs in a new order Never read Dido's wish rises from this burncan behind a trailer park in Montana Aeneas is coming Aeneas is coming apart at the seams on the tailor's lap The load of ancestry carrying his father from Troy On my back, too I struggle for love with this clumsy Trojan The spinning needle cannot tighten around one thread of thought on the subject To build cities I have broken stones tasting their centers with wheels Looking for water I have shut out the light-- eating Leviathan with stanchions of meshed fingers solid in the bedrock Beneath all this matter of fact is the broken fire of bridges Bridges for the traffic of words threads over the water separating us like islands Fire carving up the back of night the spine of raw nerves cold against the walls of the hospital pale iris leaves As if somewhere above the roof will bloom large purple flowers of smoke when I come out When I come out I return to the bridges Burning with the idea that we can be strangers again THE BEGINNING OF A FROG'S CHORUS Flickering stars of fireflies In a cotton shirt pocket a warm spring night hazy with tree frogs coaxing each other by frog-brain in sticky-tongued air-sacs awakened for singing mating's open mouths catch one after another small stars In a meeting of platitudes know where the satyrs have gone before meaning meaning what they said The goat-footed men who loved the mad women who knew nothing but through wine and raw meat When focusing the sky as a robin's egg a sleeping god's face is outrageous in shrinking words There was The House of Atreus right off the road and we went in to have two or three beers until someone sang out I've eaten two or three sons in my life and I intend to eat a few more Maybe even serve some The fight began Some people are never satisfied to be thrown out in the night Don't shake your head When Venus is denied she rattles the back stairs smashing your face on each step Much like the rocks of the rock and roll solo One instrument is as good as another to push around for the rest of your unfinished business However be careful Love can roll backwards crushing your skull During a storm frogs can sing simply for the joy of water suddenly a plague of barking dogs kissing air begging honeyed bread the pastry of hell heaven hasn't the ingredients for The frogs shut their mouths at the closeness of fear The strongest urge moves one harmonica in the wind It goes off alone to cry in song Remember me, remember me Find communion in eating my tired stars __________________________________________________ A-NOTE David Swoyer is a painter as well as a poet. His paintings hang in both private and museum collections. For twenty-five years he has been a museum curator and presently works in that capacity at the Museum of Arts and Sciences (MOAS) in Daytona Beach, Florida. Swoyer is a Viet Nam veteran, "whose disability has not made him independently wealthy but has given him a higher regard for excursions to Canada." From "A Glitch in the Parable," a poem Swoyer has not yet abandoned: "The time that remains depends / on the distance left to fall." The DOZEN poems Swoyer has abandoned in MUDLARK No. 1 have their language lives in that remaining time. __________________________________________________ COPYRIGHT (C) MUDLARK 1995 All rights revert to the author upon publication. Texts distributed by MUDLARK may not be republished for profit in any form without express consent of the author and notification of the editor but may be freely circulated, among individuals, for personal use providing this copyright statement is included. 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