Poetry
from the "Apple Anyone" Sonnets
Apple Anyone 1
Shall I portray you as a blazing afternoon?
The freaking almanac didn’t forecast amber rain.
Wind whipped to shreds ballyhooed Doppler readings
As your typhoon tongue lashed my latest wants.
So the sun’s golden boasts are bested by bullying clouds,
each of our arsenals costing us our alchemy.
Yet no cloud shall dim my love’s manic barbs.
Neither will my eyes become gauze, or ghouls;
no Nothingness shall brag of drowning me in Styx .
A single whiff from the carafe of years suggests there is more
to speech, a crocus thrusts at the barbarian of description.
As long as it’s a carob for a carob, a copt for a copt, bedouins
lead us far into an arch-alcohol we’re the ones to ferment.
almanac typhoon arsenal alchemy gauze ghoul carafe
crocus barbarian carob Copt Bedouin alcohol
Apple Anyone 6
To go on in an ideology that is patrolled by admirals
all praised to the hilt, each awarded triple scoops of sherbet,
sugars gushing in banana and lime, or to grab up pails against
a whole Mediterranean of pain, and by opposing, drain it?
The road to Baghdad : it is an orgasm religiously sought.
To slow my brain and by night to say we stopped all that:
a saffroned vulture scuffs the dirt it lands in until every man
looks inward, acknowledging his own mulatto ground
and the thousand gauzy masks our bodies are mom to.
To slow my brain – to slow my brain!
And during that slowing to succumb to a new fantasy,
a woman with corneas like coffee beans, a coiled mortality
uncoiling, amalgam, not amalgam, that is not a jackal -
avocabulary, a calamity, and at last, a casualty list.
admiral sherbet sugar banana lime Baghdad saffron
mulatto gauze cornea coffee amalgam
A note on “Apple Anyone” sonnets: the key words in this series are all English words derived from Arabic, or words suspected of being of such derivation. The “list” of words at the end of each poem thus becomes a sounding of that music of interdependency. There is no clash of civilizations.
Contributor
Leonard SchwartzLeonard Schwartz is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Tower of Diverse Shores (Talisman House, 2003), Words before the Articulate: New and Selected Poems (Talisman House), Gnostic Blessing (Goats and Compasses), Meditation (Cloud House), Objects of Thought, Attempts at Speech (Gnosis Press) and, most recently, Ear and Ethos (Talisman House, 2005). He is also the author of a collection of essays A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Essays on Poetics 1987-1997 (Spuyten Duyvil).
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Forecast Form
By Gervais MarshMARCH 2023 | ArtSeen
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s to Today weaves a far richer conversation that explores a multitude of distinct voices.
Coleman Collins with Brief Histories
MARCH 2023 | Critics Page
A recent late afternoon. A brightly lit space, three white walls, plywood lined floor, afternoon sun streaming through the large windows looking down on busy afternoon traffic in New York. Off-center a large table with three half-empty cups of tea. Stage left, an upright old wardrobe faces out, with one drawer pulled halfway out, a small painting of an ear is lying within a mound of rice grains.
The Rain Gardens Project
River Rail Puerto Rico | River Rail
The Institute for Socio-Ecological Research documents the collaborative work of rain gardens in Ponce.
Accumulation
By Gillian JakabNOV 2022 | Dance
Trisha Brown’s Accumulation is set to the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band,” a song that itself is expressly referential to its bluegrass and Americana influences. This piece, along with two (Spanish Dance, 1973 and Line Up, 1976) set to Bob Dylan’s version of the Gordon Lightfoot tune “Early Mornin’ Rain,” stands stark against the rest of Brown’s early work of the 1960s and ’70s: a silent, site-specific era.
