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 Film, published 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Out of date once, stoppered plenty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?
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