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Poetry Daniel Isaac Lucy
Daniel Isaac Lucy is a 20 year old student at the University He has been writing poetry for 4 years. Some of his favorite contemporary poets include Heather McHugh (he admires
her use of
Then Saint Sa‘ns For Bill Edlebeck II I I stand naked now in your city, where I am a visitor. I stand naked in your apartment, in your shower, the cramped, tiled stall with its plastic Twister curtain (the game that ties you up in knots), eccentric but endearing and too painfully obvious a metaphor to miss. I stand naked and think of your love of architecture—how your arms fly about when you point certain buildings out—your Eero Saarinens, and those designed by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rhoe, whose motto was "God is into details." The buildings you would embrace, could you get your arms around them entire. Their symmetry unnerves me, it hurts me, the way each floor tile matches line for line each wall panel, each light fixture, each door frame, each window, outside and in. They are meticulous structures, stone and marble poetry, forms that you know by heart the way I know Quatrains, Sestinas, Villanelles. I love those skyscrapers as you do, but for a different reason. I love that they cover the sun. II Scars are a mixed blessing, if blessing at all. They mean I am healthy. They mean my inner workings are still working, and my body
is rebuilding itself with new, mismatched skin of a different, pinker color, each a tiny restoration project. Is it truly the thought that counts, though, if the gift is painful? Is it enough to say they meant well? Will that make such pain trivial; each reflection, each interrupted touch, each time I’ve had sex with my shirt still on, always in darkened rooms, curtained windows stopping the light of the moon. I can leave everything—all my possessions. My thoughts also, and their compulsive twitch. I can be vegetable. Still I will be in this body— this mess of poorly patched flesh. I can cover with layer after layer of white under-shirts, heavy sweaters, but I will feel the scars, feel them as the fairy-tale princess felt the pea that fateful night, even through the twentieth box spring. I will toss, turn, tear my hair. I will not rest, though you try to convince me that you don’t care; that I’m beautiful and you want to see me, all. III A tourist during the day I spent my time seeing things I could never see back home—that flat state where the ground is divided out by the acre, planted and tended systematically according to season; where the weather is almost bi-polar—always one extreme or other. Some days I walked alone through the crowds, snapping pictures I hoped would turn out. I felt beautiful being ignored, passing extravagantly ornamented shop windows, turning corners when I came to them without any forethought. I wanted a snapshot of everything all at once. I never even feared becoming
lost; I could see your building—your twin towers, your girls—in the skyline, the blockish man-made horizon, and find my way back. I was unpracticed at passing the homeless, and couldn’t help looking
near Marshall Fields who begged can you help me, can you help me? In ignoring her I felt my first twinge of guilty success. I cried later. IV In the evening we witnessed the orchestra. I fell in love with Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, then Rautavarra’s Violin Concerto—where every instrument present joined in short spurts of sound carefully composed to seem almost accidental. Then Saint Sa‘ns and the Organ Symphony that made you cry like a violin, and drum your fingers, and nod excitedly in time with the music. Then the conductor who jumped intermittently, as if startled by the beauty he alone controlled. Then the organ that shook the cavernous room, its pipes hidden behind the wall, like veins—pipes that pumped out notes like blood— linking and bringing it all together with booming finality. Then the crashing sea of applause where we stood clapping side by side, elbows bumping in a confused rhythm— a rhythm nonetheless. Then I knew I loved you.
Tornado Watch By late afternoon conditions were pronounced optimal—the syrupy air, the opposing winds, each intent on the other. A collision unasked, unavoidable, a bald sky gone passionate. Lightning pirouettes, thunder applauds. A violent romance, this storm, an atmospheric orgasm. Such winds always electrify. The prairie night turns furious and tropical as the funnel dances La Sylphide, a bellowing ballerina. The local siren wails like a colicky newborn.
* Channel 11 acts as instinct; a blonde instructs calmly what to do: garage the car, bring in the potted plants, bolt doors, avoid windows. Take shelter in the deepest part of your home, behind your bulkiest possessions, the heaviest things you own. If you have a basement, a basement will do, though its walls are musty as a lovebed. Seek the deep freeze in the far corner.
* Leave the wind to comb the trees over like thinning hair. Leave the rain to firecracker the empty streets. Leave the sky to hail its stones, being without sin. Stay in. Wait it out. Stay in. * Soon enough the sky will bleed its rainbow. Following such ferocity: inevitable indigo.
Implosion A quarter-century old eyesore and so destroyed. Your concrete veins smoked and convulsed a split-second before you collapsed inward. Quite the sight— even gutted—and people crowded at a safe distance to see you release. When you came down the debris of your last booming breath spread as far as it would. Your thunderous swan song shook the streets, as if to prove how colorless the skyline would be without you—how contained you actually were—one time, one time only— before your broken body dusted the streets, and people ran as they cheered—ran and cheered as you died. Just a building, whose only beauty was in its engineering. A building whose beauty was, as few men can claim, truly on the inside.
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