Christopher BakkenThree Poems
First Objects
… unstoried,
artless, unenhanced.
The
moment we set off on the ocean,
steering pine boxes with nothing but faith,
we
became ideas, the bas-relief
of an
army the gods set in motion,
hardened with an integument of gold.
Dandelion, limestone, free enterprise.
A
hurricane of glass beads and horseflies.
Things
we believed at the dreadful thresholds
of
canyons. All too grand. Steeple, chimney,
tower,
sky: erections proved our destiny
to
contract the size of the hemisphere.
We
might have stayed put, but couldn’t bear
the
sense that we were rising, calm as geese
caught
between the sights of a shotgun.
Eclogue (4)
You
managed to swell the conversation, plying
me
with grog and a platter of blue-throated mushrooms.
Then I
was awakened by the call of Silenus,
his
frantic dirge from Thrace refracted through the leaves
of a
pistachio tree—each branch smoldered
while
we stared, then blossomed into a swarm of eyes.
I was
awakened again, but didn’t hear you
wish
you lived far enough from the world, wish some
hermit
wisdom epigrammed the pages of your book.
But
you won’t write an anchorite’s healing Bible;
your
dreams spring from our common trenches of ash
and
graveyards greener than green has a right to be.
I was
awakened again, but didn’t hear you
since
all I heard fell open like a broken gate:
I was
dumbfounded by the hammering
clatter our lambs made when they plummeted to earth
--no
one else could bear to see the semaphoric
epic
they bleated out in their dying.
I was
awakened once more when the sky’s atlas
scrawled its noise on the basin of my skull and five
armies
marched between us, fighting over seeds
we
spit. Three distinct excuses made them shell
the
empty goat-pens, but I didn’t learn them.
Their
pyres singe the edges of our poetry.
Outside everywhere, we see as far as vultures,
what
history can’t, invent an anthem to survive.
Since
there’s nothing beyond the rise, past the verge
of our
vineyard, we invite nothing in, fix it
with
our cairns, with our tangled wire and fence posts,
and
allow ourselves the luxury of that lie.
Eclogue (5)
Now
the season comes when the birds fall,
their
migrations bewildered by missiles.
They
litter our lawns without saying a word.
Thus
every feverish apathetic
earns
cash to buy his suburban beer:
we all
must keep the country clean. So much
that
is common has become uncommon.
Our
pastures are supernaturally
green. The dirt itself is dying of health,
pleasing only the Emperor’s right eye.
From
where we sit, our view is all volcano,
spurting with impossible crudeness.
The
sacred bees, tired of mining essence
from
thyme, swarm the public statuary
to
vibrate the marble groin of Caesar.
Once,
the cattle stopped chewing when we sang;
insightful goats wobbled from the mountain,
spurred by Pan and the promise of acorns.
Now
that nature mocks us, we say farewell
to the
oracles and caryatids
in
favor of an awkward, backward bliss,
clip
the hedge between dissent and despair,
no
more unruly than a clutch of lambs,
yet
company, somehow, to the vulgar.
Our
distress is merely metaphysical,
we
often wish, an inconvenience
we
constitute, in spite of ourselves,
by
continuing stubbornly to live.
So we
pound out, with little sticks and stones,
the
lewdest music: singing with our mouths shut.
Christopher Bakken won the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry
for his first book, After Greece. His new poems have
appeared or are forthcoming in Raritan, Southwest Review,
Gettysburg Review, and The Atlanta Review. |