Bout

Jack Galmitz

BoutCopyright © Jack GalmitzImPressNew York, New York

Bout

Wild Horses(for Marilyn Monroe)

I finally found a bookI could read more than once.It was all empty pages;the cover cardboard white;no title, no author.The paper was coarseso I could see it was pulp.The glue that held it togetherhad the look of horses’ hooves.It was the saddest book.

Don’t WorryFor Anu Janes

This is not a poem.No one reads poems.This is talking likeyou knowunfinished sentencesprompts, callssometimes a sound out loud or out of place it won’t tax youwith sophisticated usageof languagethey’re wordsharmful, helpfullike people who use themwhatever, you knowlike gossip at a cornerbetween two old friendswho stab each otherbehind their backs, like that.What did you expect -more than the news? Some hidden wisdomFrom an unknown tomb.

For George Crumb

The sea without people. The sky a darkening blue with darker blues within it. Above the greenblack sea the light off the horizon where children dead dream. The sand becoming red brown to the striking circular sound of violas plucked by efficacious fingers. This is frozen time. Slow meaningful gestures- a Noh play- a toy piano. A gust of wind that no bird brings to this briny shore. They say time enters somehow, but without people I don't see how. The surf is a line of white at the edge of the sand like an oboe gone mad at the breaking of the sea, the rough changes of the sky, the blackening sand; but without a man. Flutes I think are final or nays. Maybe time collapses this day. Maybe the sea has memories- shades of sand, mole crabs, people dunking inside, boats churning motors,

a drowning. Maybe time collapses like a temple ruin, covered with vines choked slowly soon. Forming is the next breaker, the foam and further out another, then another.

Upon a Time

She had tattoos of stars colored in luminous white on her breasts, along her back, near her tailbone, around her belly and down.When we turned off the lights, she shone enough so that we could make love under their light.We were the nut and bolt that riveted held the universe up.

I was a stargazer, a star chaser, a star cataloguer.She was shiny paper and I an inkjet.We made art.It was not for sale.It was for life.When people said I should keep my feet on the earth,I thought they must walk on all fours.What else is there but the silhouette of a womanAnd the burning brilliance of the stars to clutch.

To the Black Hole:

I’m afraid I don’t know who else to write to.The fire is brightest where the sun holds its hands.Where I was born is a long way from here.I’ll never get back there.A baritone voice booms in a language I don’t speak.Is home everywhere. It cannot be. It’s a mass ora revel of forest dwellers worshipping death.I’m not prejudiced. I sing along. Help me.The chorus gets louder and the trees tremble,drop their leaves, pull up their roots, and run like deer.I run with them. I fall in quicksand. I sink. I’m beingpulled in. When only my head is above the murkI begin to see I never did exist. It was a twist,my brain, the revolt of neurons.All the same help me. Help me.Nothing else is is there

With Birth

I scoop up the ocean& place it in a glass ball& put in my pants' pocketto look at when I'm blue.I photograph the nightentirely with a wide view cameraand put it in my shirt pocketfor a similar purpose.You'd think a manwith such riches would feel joyful;I worry I'll be searched by the policeand have to explain how I came by all this

THE WIND

The wind parts the last red leaves from the tree to the grass.A newspaper saturated with last night’s rain I can see through three pages.I hear my neighbor beyond the fence; I recognize his footsteps. He mutters something about cats or skunks when he moves the pail for garbage.Car wheels on the wet street I don’t turn my head. A mother with a car full of children she transports to school before work.The clock is a bell calling worshippers home.I hear distance in a dog’s bark. A stranger passing a house when it doesn’t stop.On the street a couple stops. They’re conjoined twins. The man snaps open a small leather box. The woman’s face a fox. It’s a silent movie. I guess the script they’re reciting.The kettle whistles. I listen to the shuffle of my slippers on the carpet. The sound of pouring water in the potted cup in soothing. So is the steam. The Chinese tea leaves are floating. It’s hot to hold, but I manage.Then, the indistinguishable sounds of construction. A pounding, drilling, a bulldozer tearing up soil and stones and the swivel and dropping it into a truck. Lumber being dumped?I take some pills to take a nap. Lately, there’s a pattern to it. I’m somewhere I’ve never been and the trains and roads that take me home are no longer there.There’s animals, too. Much larger than usual. Huge. They’ve done no harm, but their disproportionate size terrifies.Since my wife is gone, I live with white noise.

All That’s Left

A conflagrationput out by a gob of spitso ended desirousness except on t.v. orin movies of skinwhere it carried onlike the shades in lethe – an afterlife,an unfocused lightcaptured outlinesagainst a screen,and so it was for mein age – the refusalto quit – there beingnothing else

On a Collage

When we awoke & realized we were not alone we were more alone.They say there was an age when we lived without considering things, and then we could see that the stems of plants and trees were like our spines, the spewing waterfall the moisture on our lips, the grass, the moss and shrubs our hairy arms, legs, sexual parts.With this knowledge we learned to make a teepee that had no flat lines and the wind would not bring it down, lodges, and even pagodas, and now we build towering buildings of glass and steel that reflect the sky, the clouds, sometimes birds scurrying home, we made blankets, clothes, fences for animals, mostly horses, and in the end borders.It comes to this: a line divides. Everything is on either side.The line that joins two points, the line that makes creation, the line that draws resemblances is also that which makes conflict and strife: while two things unlike are potentially joined, there is an upper and under where there is a line and with movement comes everything. There’s no way around it.So, while we know that a human is like us, we begin to practice distinction: African scarification used distinct symbols for different tribes, and American Indians used paint on their faces and ponies to make them something other than human, fierce, the mask of a god.Yet, the rifles that shot lead in a straight line lead to the Trail of Tears, reservations, loss of traditions, alcoholism, and the snapping of the soul of nature to those who still lived in it as in the sacred.

Coast to Coast

I dipped myselfin your blood and bruise.Now I don’t know what to do.You were five,in a body cast, abandoned,abused by a male nurse on his roundsand you froze, couldn’t move;CRY OUT. I don’t know what to do.Now you feel trapped-you were alone and unable to move-you were abandoned and in a castthat covered you but notthrough; I would have beena steel valve that let nothing through for you.Think of it economically:It reoccurred over, over& you froze remember, each time in the future,hoping it would be removedby another or by you(that’s how us traumatized figure).You like collage? I do.You and I became drunkards, addicts, hoping to end the repetition:we didn’t know each other:but we both liked jazz,SOwe’ll glue it togetheron backdrop paperin the centerGiotto’s L'Ascension,in the right corner a still

from Snake Pit of Olivia de Havillandand Dr. Kik dancing together.In the left maybe a newspaper clippingof the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper about the big bang theory.Then beside the center, the yellowed newspaper clippingOf the United Nations adoptingthe Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Would that be all right?War broke out thenbetween Palestinians and Jewsand we weren’t born so we couldn’t choose.What should we do?We can combine the elementswith fine black lines and small black globesand add in empty spaces lines crossing a pointlike faint stars, the Jean Miro liked to do.You can become a psychoanalyst:that’s right for youand write the memoirs of yourmultiple suicide attempts and rapes that were renewed;I’ll become a poet, a micropoet, and write about you.What else is there to do?You’ll stay on the West Coastand I’ll stay on the Eastand what we share will uniteThe United States or maybe just a few.

The Riggings

I went downas water goes downto seek my levelto stop staring at the skyas if moons and stars were mightyand the shrubs and rocks were wary.

I went downto find herher eyes so blueI fell in and beganto swim with fins and gillsand wouldn’t come outuntil she pushed me outin time and I was hungupside down and slappedon the bottom and cried.

When we marriedand I was told I could kiss the bride,we were already wrapped in one another’s arms,for we had known each other since the beginningof time that comes to pick you upwhen you fall down.

In a Bird Cage

A man singing or chanting;people exchanging names;sundry sounds unrelated:sounds of trafficnothing but actionsculpted in spaceremain a moment;the sound of trees,walls, quarries, quarters,beggars, night, me,amplified cacti, a feather,water striderrandomlymoving -New York Citywas not built as a cagebut as an aviary

Until I Became the Rain

I was once young & walkeddown Bleecker Street and West Fourthin Greenwich Villagewhen the locust trees were yellowin the dark & the red brick buildingfacades were the color of a heart.In the penumbra of lovethe street lamps tossedmen and womencamped on chairs round tablesin the outdoor cafeslike an assembly of gods.I followed the moonin its blue abandonacross the fire-escapes and roofstilted precariously like loverswho had had a few,over the clock tower of the Womens’House of Detention,where voices calledto the darkness below“hold me darling, don’t let me go.”Out into the battered garbage candoorways of the immigrant poor,naked light bulbs on in the dingy halls,children crawling under sagging beds,love in ruinsthe streets shuttered in morning dew;nobody there save cats the size of jaguarsguarding the stone slab steps.

Then and therein a surfeit of loveI became the rain.

Once Upon A Time

I went to Auschwitz to seewhat I would find;I went by train, naturally,and was reminded of a displayat P.S. 1 that Yoko Ono put upof a boxcar on trackswith a soundtrack inside of people’smoans and cries repeated as the sun shined.We huddled in the Polish coldunder that famous metal sign that saidWork Makes One Freethat had been stolen recentlyand then recovered and re-soldered on.The courtyard was bare of 1.3 million women and children and menwho had perished there: mostly Jews, Poles,Gypsies, Sinti, Jehovah Witnesses and Soviet POWs.There the towers stood where guards had stoodwith rifles and the great swiveling lights that lit the groundslike a soccer field for killing that counted as a point.In one of the room are thousands of shoes and eyeglasses,suitcases of those chosen to go: I’m sure they missed their thingswhen they exchanged them for uniforms; that I know.And there’s hair in one case- 98 feet long- of those who were killedor died from starvation, disease, or overwork.The gas chamber looks so ordinary, like a stripped brick room,where anything could be done, a pottery-shop, for instance,or a barbershop would do.Hundreds of thousands were told to take showersand out came cyanide from pellets through punctured holes.And the crematorium ovens, cold and cleaned, looked like they oncecooks things in, instead of incinerating people.Now the grounds are covered with the ashes of the dead,so you can’t be too careful because they’re wherever you step.

The Shoe Repairman

I did not kill god.I was busy that day,working at my traderepairing worn or torn shoes. I worked the entireday they made him draga cross through the way of pain.I was nobody. Evenmy wife disobeyed and my son, well,he had little use for me.I had enough trouble already;my own people threatenedto stone me if I didn’t keepthe Sabbath day.I had to work mending shoes,so my family could eat and haveclothes. Please leave us alone.And if you don't mindbring me some shoes.

How it Happened

Why worryyou’re an afterthoughtof a spring nightyour father spreadyour mother like a folded paper sheetcaught in a sudden raina drop of ink spilledtook a shape spreadremained

If

If only you had lefttaken your thingsbanged shut the doorinstead of being therenot talking anymore

The Frame

Is order maintained by margins are theythe borders withoutwhich words would goon forever and includeeverything known and unknown to us - in this hourof withering, blooming -are they the framethat gives the impressionof an end and a storyunfolding inside whetherdimensional or otherwisecould it be the devicewe needed lest we drifted off into shapelessnessand infinity

The cube of glassin that velvet caseis an ice palacenothing lessif you knowJoseph Cornellas I do.

Long Ago

The cold and the waterfall embraced as I came upon this place unaware beforethat such things existed: that the rushingfall of white water on the perpendicularrock wall could stop suddenly and remainperpetually motionless. It was a giftoffered to me by friends who had foundit in New Paltz and thought I would enjoy it.Snow bent the branches, there was rime on the grass,and we exchanged looks and laughed.It was like entering the woodsand encountering bronze cast animalsor listening to the songs of mechanical birdshidden in the treetops.

Long Ago

With a friend long agowe drove to Lake Ontarioand I heard for the first timeSamuel Barber’s Adagio.The road, the sky, the woods,the small ponds on either sidewere merely a part. It swept everythingalong within it.

We arrived and parked in town,looked around, ate lunch,and then went through the parkto the edge of the lake. ThereI saw what was by far as closeas the world came to the adagio:the crested waves had frozenbefore their break and remainedthat way perpetually. I had never seensuch a scene where such a large body of waterand its current could stop like in a dream.

White and green the frozen waves stood.Beyond was the flat and frozen lakeextending immobile for miles.And alone out there was a man on a chairwith a small fishing pole dipped in a drilledhole and he remained as silent and patientas a Mohawk Indian. On the way home, we listened againto Barber’s Adagio and it was as freshas if I had never heard it.

On the tipof the crescent moonhang your coatelse enter the subwayat 8 AMand exit the subwayat 6 PMnone the betterfor use

When my mother was deadI thought the nightmares and tormentsOf being captive to her would end.Instead, once she left the earth,she took up residence in my headand her voice only got harsher.