Pages

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

poetry by Ray Succre





                                                                                                                                         

Where the air was lithe as teleost fish,                                                                                       

I was mercy, pity, peace, crushing on her, immediate,

a sessile flower rooted in the shoulder of a satellite,

and with hygienic disrepair, teeth the outside of an old mill. 



I looked to laugh,

I called up words

and on them was carried up into gelid rooms;

I was bruised by lights as from wrongness there

   (and niftiest inward where I’d cocked the springs,

    while under-swimming to pull down the sexies from hobs).



When her sweetheart worked, my neck split atop the pole,

head displumed and pegged, example to set off a cached wealth.



I looked to laugh,

I called up words,

and heard simply soft chuckles on every passing voice.




                                                                                                                           












His mouth speaks tirade but

the kaleidophone has split

all of his speech into slush.

“Are we starry sorry?”

I listen.  “No, no.  But I understand.”



This is the moment when I

get rid of him, though still

mention my urge to

sock his face back and look

for the candy

for forgetting to lift me

from a bar-den meet full of

meat still clinging to spun-out baboons.



His charm:  “Voila-  apology.”

My statement:  “I spent time with

one of the subtlest, then he

showed me his van.”



The earpiece fractures, then blooms.

Adam’s shrapnel enters my ear:

“Eve, you putrid stew of puke.”

I listen.  “Yes, yes.  And I understand.”



















Ovation





To live in a bottle of bay leaves, I lead a woman with morning hunger like yours

into sunrise.  On the leaves, drought to veins suffocated,

broken offshoots tortured for soup.



You say it is in a bowl, and raise your spoon to employ breakfast,

but it was at first a mule-bray flavor riding the water in a pot,

and it was first in measuring tins and spoons,

and it was first in bottles, a refrigerator, and behind the curtain in a skull.



She woke and was a swish of wet curtain for the shower.

Behind the hill the light eye lifted, dilating the library on 4th street,

lilting the fluent shapes of bus-stops, alighting on apes and stairwells and elbows.

            “You’re still awake?”

            “Couldn’t sleep.”

            “You’re making me soup?”

            “The Sun is coming up.  This one’s yours.”

           

The air is porous and catches against the mood of moon and October.

I serve with a bowl, bread.  Activity.

I have seen you, the public, after ladles, your eyes ironed and nostrils looming

for the thing of it; she is the same.

She is a woman of yours like a reel of film rolled out to expose every frame

of the scene.  She is very public once the Sun has risen.



Then, the Sun explodes with ovation, from the highest, sparse-treed line.

Her clean spoon, as though nothing is beyond it,

dips through the steam

of the coliseum.








Ray Succre












Not inhuman   shim-fed pose   upright and the candor:  What a meal.

All truncated to a test   the nocturnal violence.

All moments wait out respiration 

The peck of hungry homages   growth of peat   the peek of your birth

Quick utterance    hello saber, spin   gestate  

hand in hand, doll in doll, matryoshka

The 8th lady   lady Clairol   dumb lady eight

Mental bisque of cognition   stop yelling   pared body into hairy legs—

fiery   omen cyst in dementia— Picasso forest

Squander revoke your lot in Hell   the nocturnal tenors   saran toupees

harpies and gorgons spitfight and the get-out.



Epitaph:  You sat in a centaur’s hard dentures,

gnashed   white shrinking from nothing   incapacitating fucks

but orderly   posed   not inhuman.



Ray Succre



Bio:  Ray Succre is an undergraduate currently living on the southernOregon coast with his wife and son.  He has had poems published inAesthetica, Poets and Artists, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries.  His novels Tatterdemalion (2008)and Amphisbaena (2009), both through Cauliay, are widely available in print, and  Other Cruel Things (2009), an online collection of poetry, is available through Differentia Press. 


For inquiry, publication history, and information, visit me online:http://raysuccre.blogspot.com



No comments:

Post a Comment