Showing posts with label Mark DuCharme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark DuCharme. Show all posts

Thursday, August 8, 2024

GAS Featured Poet: Mark DuCharme


Mark DuCharme’s sixth full-length book of poetry, Here, Which Is Also a Place, was published in 2022 by Unlikely Books.  That same year, his chapbook Scorpion Letters was published by Ethel.  Other recent publications include his work of poet’s theater, We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Filmpublished by The Operating System. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Spinozablue, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary.  A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.


Report

                                for Nik Arnoldi



The report isn’t worth songbirds

Who line the nude amphitheater

Whenever field mice play

The zither with a maddening tongue

That can only be attributed to frog populations in

Upper-Lower Tennessee

Where we once snorkeled

In love with the field mice there

Who scoffed at our youthful schadenfreude

At the pleasure that we took in being near the sea

Where death is a birth hostel

& It’s known that bats enliven plants

By thrifty locution

Of which these psalms are just one more

Deteriorating example


So begins the urtext of a quiet walk on the beach

Where hummingbirds balk at zesty consiglieri

Thrust out of windows at important motels

Stealing lemons with a spiffy rejoinder

That none of our grandfathers ever even sang

O lemon box, lemon box, lemon box!

It’s true, I eat dungarees

& Paint the wind blue

But still, you shouldn’t follow me to that icy motel

Unto which I’ll soon heave

Buckets of shovels & jewels

For the dereliction of the newly homed


Call me Jimbo

My dissertation is on mass murder in post-American speech

In a Memphis you’ve already heard

Declare birth frozen

A clarion call of rusted eggshells

That you fire up in mea culpa speech, grinding down

Like laminated wasps

Until I eat paper

Or swell, an inspector general on the lam

Yes, I believe I can get you some

Just don’t call again

Until you weep

At guns’ savage paint






Of What Fence Is This Nuance?



Land vast like life

A frog misprision

Expletive unknown distance

Out of date once, stoppered plenty

A plenary ash to false zero

In the hurt brought to wrong here


Hymns of plenty

Awake vacant fuel

Like a list of bugs

The birth of an oddball for sure


In breath of riverine sentences

Who decide what you feel

By crowd’s distant memory

Of a thing you wore a dozen times before


Sing, in tangible mention

What you don’t offer, you also don’t reveal

Sing, like something’s very wrong

In a tune of birth sugar


Of thirst, until you wear

The time with flowers printed


Who cranked up the breakaway dancers?

Songs are a wind of paint

Behold the hump-fisted businessman

Magically consoled

In song’s winnowing haste


Thank you for the cares we’ve flamed

Like a signal or furtive calm

A rally of every

Love ever made






Forsythia with Bird Attached



Do songs make breath illegal

In the hilt of the fire of the door?

As a child, I befriended an ostrich

With kind eyes. The moon slumped knowingly.

Other agents blustered at the doldrums. It was noon in

Cincinnati, & I coughed pert dictums,

Monkey psalms in breath of splay. Inelegant sidewinder addenda.

The feral puzzler chinked as we all grieved.

Birds rustled far away. If you make time for the glint of

Angular days, what strangled mention

Does wildness keen? What variance

Is suggested by the newels of your jugged hems?

Are we vested with the commonplace which only silence understands?

Awake tune in a birth riddle.

Bury love at striking. Once, you held

Linnets at a fledge of distance that rocks could not command.

Lonely as a fragrance, a trace:

Skein, mask, paper. The color of the the chapbook’s cover

Seeming to invite wine to be spilled on it. A husk of jewels

Standing in a cask of yo-yo agreement. The lamp is down, to unearth these letters

Cold moons will not divide.


If the moon is strung in sentences,

Would you feel denatured? Perhaps, as geophysical boundaries

Are also parts of grief.

& I, who are next to you, as coffins & profiles

Through which we hint at darker matter, swerving.

We have decided to render thought anew, for example,

In its thick, natural raveling

Which, like birth, holds no hint of plot,

A scheme of numbers & variables that no one seems to want to hide.


By the way, I don’t mean to backtrack, but

Gramaryes hold the thought of winter in the death of sunless trees,

At horizons where death’s outweighed by the speed of numbers & bees

That I don’t dare repeat with the lights on.

Had I known you, I would have phoned

In fritillary homes that were not bombed recently.

Think of death as a variable. Evade

Plant guardians who rarely phone,

Though like you, I crave broken recitals—

The stuff of ear & bone.






An Autodidact Goes to the Riverbank for Tea



Samples in the breath trouble

Reveal your intimate name to geese, who look on, disinterestedly,

Stoking the season’s terrible pants.

“Whom have I come to fulfill, then, & what

Denials should I issue them?” Whether falling down in paint

Or a filmed state of rushing, notice

Portents in the breath I found. The eye

Is unverified. It’s having ‘film trouble’

In the glossy trees. When you dabble

In a lore of forlorn saints, be wise, be free,

Brutish as a primitive archivist housewife

With great burnt-out trucks. The devil smiles here,


At an instant of cloud memory, for he knows

There are no chickens, but that hide

In lustrous shadows

Awaiting moon’s instruction. A critical mass of bolt theory

Fails to enliven the hovel of your smile. Grace notes of the miserly, libertine

Zealots draw out the penances of fool

Hummers, twice removed,

Who sell breath like a song they made.


The corporate handler smiles, in gentle lockdown.

“Let’s do lunch like an urn of grapes,” he purrs.

Plastic is the keynote of the speech of haunted men

Who hold no ladders while the moon hides

Woefully, behind her cloud. This is not to say that speech

Isn’t performative, at times, if you’re still looked after

With only seconds left

To hide.






Ode



If I am a vehicle,

Where’s your mouth? Who sells fruit in winter?

Was Rimbaud frightened of his own speech?

Need we be frightened too

In an era of already normalized stifling?


The heat-birds are shifting to nowhere

Normal like the birth the sun implodes,

Like yesterday’s blue paint landfills,

A hem where the sun doesn’t cry out, or try.

If you try to be drenched, be landfills of once before.


Consult bird voices

In guns’ savage paint

Then awaken a euphony heap of throngs or ukuleles

Toward whom the best kisses haven’t even begun

In an era of calm rosaries


& Chalk-painted consultants

Lest we swoon, or starve

Under cold boardwalks, with noon’s violence grazing

That the moon would still not grace, or glance

With a kiss, except for other lovers, now defiled.


But I wake to you, in your lost sense of time’s elegance

At least until your sense of birth comes free

As what we thought was truth— a lucky try

Now, at breath’s elegance. Knowledge is friable,

Kissed by checked-out rock stars (are there any rock stars left?).


Then all is paper?

Or the stuff of paper-ish houses, in the holy birth city’s

Glass factories? Obey your dumbness.

What else is left, but ashcans in the triggered

Birth of fading houses, with breath no longer free?