NEW HAMPSHIRE SKETCHES 1 With my famous knife I scrape the rough spots on the underside of a fungus and find tiny white grubs. 2 Disorganized, a bunch of blackbirds hop through the undergrowth, pausing on branches, and, making small noises, fly off between trees. 4 Thinking about words, I look up. One red leaf on a tree between me and the mountain. 5 Dancing to the music strong legs broad hips small breasts slender short-waisted, Or in another guise. She wears a dress or nothing bluejeans or panties. She rises from water and beckons. 6 The bluejay flies on translucent feathers. 7 Bearish as I am, I stumble into the brush and gorge on blackberries. 8 Naked. Beside the pond. Frogs plop in. 9 Close to frost last night today more flies than before and bolder, as if reprieved. 10 Unconcerned, watching bees in the goldenrod. 11 However, because someone might come I don't flex my muscles. Even as I clean the grass particles off my penis I wonder how I would look. 12 Does she come to me now across the pond like wind or a dragonfly? I imagine her dressed in cirrus clouds, older for once, my age. Even my quietness breeds company, a crowd of women, and a hollow space inside me where they live, dancing at present. 13 A tiny spider on my hand. I look away, and it's gone. Then it's back. 14 Hundreds of insects within an inch of the water meeting their reflections and parting, over and over. 15 There is a leaf on the pond with a drop of water on it, shining. 16 Shadow of an aster on the page. 17 Only from certain angles can I see the red leaf, and only when, pleased, I stretch at my desk. So, it becomes a reward. 18 Last night, talking about graduate school, which I never finished, and the good fortune of an acquaintance there with whom I never made contact, secretly wanting her, she was so delicate (I remember her ankles and slender feet and her lady-like manner, at the time myself sweaty, needy, married) and when I came back to my studio in the woods I was afraid, and heard noises and carried my knife when I went to check. 19 And now I find out that her haughtiness was fear, like me unhappy under the mask of felicity. But I also know that danger is the lady's attribute and that I also want what I can't have. 20 At my desk eating lunch I can't see the red leaf no matter how I stretch. 21 Who should bound in but Heidi, complete with goats, smiling, ringlets bouncing. Only later do I look for her. 22 A man dances with his sly-eyed daughter. 23 I cut birchwood at the core the smell of apples. 24 There was a frost last night. Today, no matches, I blow a flame from last night's embers. Feeling ill, I drink bourbon and tea in bed, soften hash and light my pipe with a brand, like the arabs. Sweet birchwood warms me. 25 Close to the fire I spread my ass-cheeks for the warmth. 26 Wolves and rodents in the fire. 27 In the library a bust of Dante, backlit, stares inwards. 28 Gray sky, faint lines of cloud, old panes adding their own lines. 29 In her mother's house white persian carpets before the couch on which we undressed each other in this same light. 30 A hotdog so fabricated that as one side cooks the skin contracts, turning it. 31 As you lean forward, the dark valley between your breasts. 32 After the rain the lead raven calls to the others. 33 Cows and snowmobiles grazing together. 34 Boarding the plane. A day like a runny nose. 36 After days of rain, the pond higher. No one has been here. Blackberries. As evening comes birds and squirrels and bees. Sun reflects on water, and water on leaves. Trees across the pond already yellow and red. 37 A patch of sunlight on the floor of the pine forest that I can't take home with me. 38 Behind me on the path sun at eye level, dazzling. I think, like a flying saucer. 39 I stop to write, kneel down. In front of me a mossy log. In its hollow the mushrooms called fairy-rings. 40 The sun almost invisible a point in the forest, a distant angel. 41 I wake up whistling the Waldstein. Later, in my studio, after hours of writing, the Chopin berceuse, hugging myself, thinking of Joan and Carlos. 42 In the tarmac a swastika made of tire tracks. 43 A shy 14 year old brings my soda and glances back as she enters the kitchen. Seeing me watching, she slumps, dragging her feet in embarrassment. 44 The hallway has no wall at one end and opens over a height though from where I stand fifty feet back at the wide place that may be the crossing of another hall all I can see is blue sky with clouds moving past, as if driven by an autumn wind. Sometimes there is sound, but not now, and the hall is very cold. 45 I whistle the berceuse again and remember that I was feeling like a child. 46 There, bathed in color, floating on the organ's vibrations while the others sing, she looks at you across the crowd and your heart breaks and heals itself over and over. 47 Suddenly a noise like pebbles. I look up there are brown hoppers all over the place from the sere leaves of last week's asters. 48 I brush a fly away. Fly off, and be a flake of sunlight. 49 In the night sky a perfect billiard shot.  |
| Mark
Weiss’ publications include five books and chapbooks of poetry: Letter
to Maxine (Heron Press, 1974), Intimate Wilderness (New Rivers Press,
1976), A Block Print by Kuniyoshi (Four Zoas Nighthouse Press, 1994),
Fieldnotes (Junction Press, 1995) and Figures: 32 Poems (Chax Press,
2002). He edited (with Harry Polkinhorn) Across the Line/Al otro lado:
The Poetry of Baja California, and edited and translated “The New Cuban
Poetry,” a fifty-page special section of Poetry International VI
(2002). Forthcoming are, as editor, The Whole Island/La isla en peso:
Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (2005), and, as editor and translator,
Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer (2004), (with Harry
Polkinhorn) Luis Cortés Bargalló's booklength poem To the
Unconquerable Shore/Al margen indomable, Selected Poems of
Gastón Baquero, and Selected Poems of Raúl
Hernández Novás. He is editor and publisher of Junction
Press. |