|
ACE BOGGESS
". . . Like All Petitioners He Must Wait
-question posed by William S. BurrowsWaiting for a screwdriver, I sit at the counter sipping old coffee. In West Virginia, the law says no liquor sold before one o'clock on Sunday-no conflict with church or Mass. So I ask, Is it to keep the congregation sober, to draw worshipers from their other chapel of stained glasses, cigarettes & need, or to give the pious time for catching up? Minute hand moves like a traffic light: slow clicks, anticipation. I wait with coffee, my hands pale & cold against the mug, to hear the clinking ice cubes, bells waning in the temple of hard serenity. [545] "Are You the People, Or Am I the People,
-question from Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain Forgot they, that they alien from we, I, you, us.
[546] "Are You One of Those Dreaming Grocers You Write Of?" I'd strum each squash like a banjo, bang the mango-question posed by Jo-Ann Greene, drums & bongos made from cantaloupes. I'd write a serial on corn flakes while you waited, losing patience, for ellipses to elapse in my concentration so we might move the interview along. were I one . . . I explain, instead, how I've paraphrased Sartre's: society doesn't want a grocer who dreams because, to the extent he's a dreamer, he's less a grocer. "True of reporters," I say, implying, too, no banker who dreams, physician's fantasia, soldiers envisioning poetry at the front. Yet you, by asking, have set off Chuang Tzu in me: I'm suddenly a dreamer inverted, dreaming himself a grocer dulled to verse inherent in bubblegum, lip gloss, condoms, Coke- I double-bag the milk & ice cream, straining not to squash fresh buns & bread; then I take your dollars, count change as if a cashier made of clockwork, ever staccato in his rhythmic hands. [547] "What is Poetry Which Does Not Save Nations or People?" -question from Czeslaw Milosz's poem, "Dedication" tender aqua veins
[548] "Who Says Existentialists Aren't Happy?" -question presented in an e-mail byConsider the second Camus-no Algerian bluesman singing despair to the masses, that Camus more his Rambert than his Meursault who traveled to visit a mistress weekends, & when his being-for-others burned in him hotter than his being-toward-death. Though I never saw an image of his side-wife, eyes draw her with hair like embers over skin cool & pale as Paris autumn. How she purred with the erotic while his desperate digits charted thighs, swam salty oceans of her back. Her perfume, vanilla sweet as pipe tobacco, taught his groaning lips those happy notes rarest to him, more vibrant than what silence after symphonies his friend Jean-Paul described, so like every human death from life. [549] "How Would You Like Your Death?" -question found in Mahmoud Darwish'sServed with mystery: glance at constellations unrecorded, unfamiliar sun. None of the certainties answermen promise kneeling by a cancer patient's bed, squeezing his hand to impose a prayer. Spontaneity mixed with spectacle: head in a lion's mouth, car leaping fat ravine, politics awakening culture as the Tiananmen student standing ground before a tank, steel belts agrumble with his possible death, & for me, then, no sanctuary in a camera's lens. [550] "What is Your Concept of the Divine?" -question posed by Bob Myers following a poetry readingNot epidendrums' magma fingers; khaki stalks that carry water off the root. Root also, & topsoil: a nitrogen vault, extinctions of leaves, energy from decay. Wind that spits out hummingbirds & honeybees. First dark cloud, porpoise-shaped, splashing a mist of rain. Tectonic, tidal, & electromagnetic musculature on the global frame, pulsing & pulling parts closer to the whole: mountains unmoved by men & moving, men moving over ley invisible lines. Songs from the road women whisper on chapped lips slick with cherry medicine, Chapstick carried in a pocket like condoms or quarters. Love made with the Trojan; phone call made with the coin. This & meta-this: an infinite progression of connected quarks, themes, string theories & unexplained dark matter. The epidendrums' petals too, on second coming when their stain should seem less stirring, doesn't. Good God, no! [551] Ace Boggess is a widely published poet who resides in Huntington, West Virginia. Boggess graduated from Marshall University and received his law degree from West Virginia University. His published poetry chapbooks include Desire's Orchestra (TLD Press, 1998) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (highwire press, 2003). Boggess, having decided to devote himself to literary pursuits, does not practice law. |
