"Gently Bent to Ease Us"
http://www.maverickmagazine.com/articles/8/1/Gently-Bent-to-Ease-Us-/Page1.html
Norman Dubie
Norman DUBIE was born in Barre, Vermont, and is the author of over twenty books, often assuming historical personae in his works. Dubie's poetry has been included in major journals of poetry including: The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts as well as the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. The latest of Dubie's twenty-three books are The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems 1967-2001 (2004), Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum (2004), and The Insomniac Liar of Topo (2007).By Norman Dubie
Published on 01/10/2009
The rain makers are orange and yellow, drums
Drawn with human skin
And a bone trumpet piercing everything--
These second growths
Of color above the high mustard fields of the peninsula.
A cold air in banners crying to the turquoise sky.
Drawn with human skin
And a bone trumpet piercing everything--
These second growths
Of color above the high mustard fields of the peninsula.
A cold air in banners crying to the turquoise sky.
--for Bill Knott
The rain makers are orange and yellow, drums
Drawn with human skin
And a bone trumpet piercing everything--
These second growths
Of color above the high mustard fields of the peninsula.
A cold air in banners crying to the turquoise sky.
And the poets die blowing
Flame through a heap of red twigs. The magician's
Words like waterfall beyond the saltmarsh
Making a bird nervously rise
Out of its poor delight in wild autumn mustard.
The red plane climbs through thunderheads
Dropping now to a bright city and its plateau. The mud
Of the Yucatan slowing the river.
Back in the thick growth oxen are farting
In gladness that the plane kicks its amethyst air
Carrying letters, beans and dark bricks of tea
Beyond the open abattoirs of sky burial
To the dead who are sweeping
Abstractions from the narrow twilight streets of the city.
Twins are painting the night leaf.
The jaguar like a union-boss shredding sheets of music
In his maw, gesturing to a striking orchestra
Of parakeets from Chile.
Mad Pescal, in a diary, said, "It is
All the literature of stone, where puzzlement
Alone buggers the scrawny merchants
Of a northern kingdom: groomed
For lice, they enter the ballcourt
In a ceremony of cold sandwiches."
There are no porches in the hanging gardens
So the ancestors will keep their places
Across the killing grounds
Where wind lifts ashes, powdering the sleeves of trees
like an archer who pulls the bowstring
Until it reaches a mole
With a white hair on his cheek.
The arrow streaks in bright parcels of arc
Above the planet, oxygen singing through gaping teeth,
The little sternum buried in our forehead
Strumming like the Inca on a water-logged packet-boat
Heaving past headwaters while crossing
The "t" in the trapezium of Orion
Dogstars like pulsing tin in a summer's heat
Decorate this horse opera of widening nebulae
Where the filthy costumes
Of a tenor fall at his feet and the young soprano
Beneath the ropes and colored sandbags
Lifts her naked legs -- her toenails painted
An iridescent green, they rest now
On the hairy chest of the tenor
Like the emerald gear of a long dead martyred king.
Copyright © Norman Dubie, 1999. All Rights Reserved.
Drawn with human skin
And a bone trumpet piercing everything--
These second growths
Of color above the high mustard fields of the peninsula.
A cold air in banners crying to the turquoise sky.
And the poets die blowing
Flame through a heap of red twigs. The magician's
Words like waterfall beyond the saltmarsh
Making a bird nervously rise
Out of its poor delight in wild autumn mustard.
The red plane climbs through thunderheads
Dropping now to a bright city and its plateau. The mud
Of the Yucatan slowing the river.
Back in the thick growth oxen are farting
In gladness that the plane kicks its amethyst air
Carrying letters, beans and dark bricks of tea
Beyond the open abattoirs of sky burial
To the dead who are sweeping
Abstractions from the narrow twilight streets of the city.
Twins are painting the night leaf.
The jaguar like a union-boss shredding sheets of music
In his maw, gesturing to a striking orchestra
Of parakeets from Chile.
Mad Pescal, in a diary, said, "It is
All the literature of stone, where puzzlement
Alone buggers the scrawny merchants
Of a northern kingdom: groomed
For lice, they enter the ballcourt
In a ceremony of cold sandwiches."
There are no porches in the hanging gardens
So the ancestors will keep their places
Across the killing grounds
Where wind lifts ashes, powdering the sleeves of trees
like an archer who pulls the bowstring
Until it reaches a mole
With a white hair on his cheek.
The arrow streaks in bright parcels of arc
Above the planet, oxygen singing through gaping teeth,
The little sternum buried in our forehead
Strumming like the Inca on a water-logged packet-boat
Heaving past headwaters while crossing
The "t" in the trapezium of Orion
Dogstars like pulsing tin in a summer's heat
Decorate this horse opera of widening nebulae
Where the filthy costumes
Of a tenor fall at his feet and the young soprano
Beneath the ropes and colored sandbags
Lifts her naked legs -- her toenails painted
An iridescent green, they rest now
On the hairy chest of the tenor
Like the emerald gear of a long dead martyred king.
Copyright © Norman Dubie, 1999. All Rights Reserved.