Poetry
Three
Dead Air
The one with facial hair, if a man
doesn’t talk with American accent, he can’t
be hired for pay as radio talk show
commentator, and hence, caught between two
negations, might not understand the reason words
are pronounced with pursed lips, ridge of teeth.
International language of smiles bares teeth.
He fails to understand rapid chatter,
only halfway through the first word of title
in coming attractions when full-length feature
ends, movie-goers leaving theater,
crunching noise as stepping on popcorn floor.
Riveting drama was engrossing thriller.
Every time the coffee cup runs empty,
as it must, to go to refill the ceramic
interrupts sending important message,
sculpting a lacuna in the text.
So, coffee craving stops communication.
So, a walk around the block brings new ideas,
images of green leaves on stem ascending
to a star-burst of color. To see it
in the mind, no flower in sight, a pleasure
the Eurocentric mind abandoned, looking
for plot structure in an aphid shearing leaf,
antennae wobbly, a drop of dew.
Synopsis
pictorial smudge
of figure,
peacock tail under circumflex of a rainbow,
translated from French using a dictionary
where complicating love makes lust more poetic,
Joseph coat of many colors philosophy Joseph
distilled into stigma
Moveable parts—
the next morning, I finished the incomplete sentence
—rubbing against pastel hues,
deriving my individuality from
the ancient past,
unchained but still as still as that flat lake
geese migrate back to
every time the sun in the sky
reincarnates a petroglyph of the sun etched in a rock
magenta aureole around beet nipple
lactating ichor
Poem with Robert Creeley Epigraph
1
griffins clasp serpentine scrolls in their
beaks, like carrion that spell out a luminous
spot on a lunar halo’s always realist
tondo: the iconographic flowers, lower
left, in both the MoMA coffee table book of
art reproductions and in the park
off West 58th Street,
are somehow neutral, Maoist, absorbent, in their
perverse, bejeweled sexuality. Their Martian War
of the Worlds organs sponge up bright solar
flares, pale paraselenae, rutting
long distance on Procrustean winds, mating
rituals spawning a moon dog semantics, IMHO
2
Or else
the glass table top on which it sits
so isolates this meager action
—Robert Creeley, “Two Kids”
generic flowers in
both imitation Lalique vase and in
the poet William Carlos Williams’ somewhat awful poem, “The
Yellow Flower,” are untitled.
—The flowers are untitled, but legible:
no known antidote for—sick kiss.
—Ceramic coffee mug precarious at the blunt
edge of the rhomboid glass table top, unstable
in a fallen world where the heaviness of
things unhinges them into trap doors, pulls
them downward from precipice
toward pagination in bottom margin
Contributor
Jeffrey JullichJEFFREY JULLICH has two books published: Thine Instead Thank (Harry Tankoos Books, 2007) and Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis (Litmus Press, 2010). He has been published in a variety of literary journals, including Fence, New American Writing, and Poetry; and audio recordings and videos of him reading from his poetry are included on the Poetry Foundation website and Youtube. Videos of American Lit: The Hawthorne-Melville Correspondence, an opera whose libretto he wrote, are also available on Youtube.