Next to Nothing
A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire
organism participates. — Charles Simic
I was just about to understand the graph
the sun through the blinds made on my desk,
when a cloud, as if to say Oh no you don’t!
dissolved it. I waited but it didn’t return.
Poems about poetry are pathetic, especially
given the blood in our cups we knock back,
consciously or not, to songs of celebration,
a sha nah nah shoo bop shoo bop we should have
long ago shoved off from into history. Still,
the music plays, as fools rush in, wear angels
as insignia and believe in lyric earworms
calling for further carnage. It’s everywhere,
even now, even here, with the dial at 10
for lack of what is found there, freedom
to try something new in even shorter supply
than back in the times of literal darkness and
the kind of reverie a log fire in a snug room
could induce: not a dream exactly, nor a plan,
but an imagined opening in the otherwise
tucked in horizon, a gate ajar, an invitation.
~
I Hear America Bitching
One Little Boy and one Fat Man and you’re an empire. Boom!
Now it’s spackle that crack, and that crack, and that one. Fuck it.
Wherever a passenger pigeon fell, a new word: diode, nuke,
transistor, corndog, sandhog, carburetor, goober, gizmo.
Even the money I haven’t printed yet has blood on it.
If anyone has ever felt invaded I would like to apologize.
When I’ve killed all the bad guys I will leave, I promise,
but I won’t stop the don’t-drop-the-soap jokes, so Abu Ghraib.
I had the cake. I ate it, too. Now fuck if I know what to do.
You think I’m made of money? You want to buy some guns?
~
To Nothingness Do Sink
I pulled onto gravel and parked the car,
ducked under the fence to the pasture,
my paperback Keats in my jeans’ back pocket,
grasshoppers ticking, beetles’ green shells
glinting, furred bees hanging in the heat.
What world was that? A mall’s there now,
empty; old people walk there mornings,
round and round to live a little longer.
Some changes orphan memory, erase all
indices: I left my life there to come back to,
in the shade of the single beech, the book
of a young man’s poems in my hands and
a green field radiant and buzzing in the sun.
Remembering the way is immaterial now.
~
To Make Much of Time
Scarshine and bluevein,
tanglehair and wart,
bonytoe and nerve pain,
rumblegut and fart;
skinnyfemur ankleknuckle,
horny yellow fingernail,
less tongue in the beltbuckle,
and a droopy little tail.
Ah, but nipplesweat, lipdown,
feversex and tongue!
Go on and mess around
while you’re still young.
~
Guardian
The fuck you lookin at? the angel said. You think
I was just your childhood’s imaginary friend?
I look like a sparkly Christmas card to you?
Look here: we both know there is something
you promised to do, and that you can’t recall it,
nor to whom you promised it so here’s a hint:
complaining wasn’t it. And quit it with the woe
untos: you don’t know jack. You didn’t see Jill fall.
Time leaks from the pretension that you did.
Your memory is shot, I’ll give you that, but
here’s another clue: the metaphors are worried
about the way you’ve taken what they offered.
Aw come on, try. You’ll be permanent soon,
forever no place soon enough. And then what?
~
Richard Hoffman is the author of five books of poetry: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of The Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, which received the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry, and his most recent, People Once Real. His other books include the memoirs, Half the House and Love & Fury; Interference and Other Stories, and the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists. Twice awarded a Pushcart Prize, he is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College and Nonfiction Editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. He can be found on Facebook at richard.hoffman.718, and on Instagram at hoffman9422. His website is richardhoffman.org.