Some you compare to a short selection of musical numbers
Some you never get over
Country Churches in Summer
. . . big empty room where dust collects
all week and you can hear the sparrows
in the gallberry scrub the air sheaved with particles
each a world in itself the divisions
that make this shakedown necessary in the first
place settling disparities like a baker’s agent sifting flour
through his pale hands the days in summer so long
god gets the idea nothing much goes on in this part of the county
and it takes all the might collected during the week
for the congregation to prove they still
love him best the afterimages of broken harness and love
faltering in the ditch of the heart impressed
and knocked around by hymns that crush
and reconstitute the formal body until the lord climbs off the floor
like a weary fighter sure he can go another round
the universal implementation and ready
proofs a notice for the living remnants in the pews
who huddle as their souls spring upwards like flowers or ponies
and those passing by out on the road hear them
and go on eased by music they didn’t realize they’d forgotten.
The Players
I get away among the other players
and practice my style which
includes a section
of close-packed
moans and a sudden electrified turn
you might not
expect
if you’ve never seen it before plus
a look of resolution
that dissolves so quickly
you might think it was
never there
in the first place. there’s a happiness
too you can see
through like a clear plastic
bag
filled with rainwater.
all the others are busy
practicing as well
and this is one of the good parts.
I watch
and pick up a few pointers
and baldly
universal
techniques that
are a hit everywhere
and I get after them. and you
too, I say to myself, you too are a hit.
Get Along, Get Along
what I brushed aside went around back
climbed the fence and got in with its unregulated
placement and dumb alteration
you could hear the loose
warbling all over the place
the constant upbraiding and low down
mimicry
and if it wasn’t too much to stand
I would’ve found out a few things
but by then I was in a state
bulking up for a run across the border
which I am deeply grateful for
this slide into a desert situation
where among the fruit stands and
closely parted evacuation routes you can settle
beside dry streams and hollows
where little houses keep watch across ransacked valleys
for the light that is rising somewhere else.
Buying the Fava Beans
. . . scattered about me
localized and irreverent, careless in manner, the charged bits,
the pressed
and folded collections
upright and directed in the undramatized parking lot
market where I ask
about the fava beans
among the constant vibration of select billions, effervescing
and completely
pinpointed like jet planes
silently
angling for fuel,
and the woman, an artist of
particles,
with sleek black hair made of light
and distribution,
says as she fills
a sack,
you have to peel them twice, once of the—fuzzy, yellow-green—
outer shell
and once of the—pale green—skin of the bean
itself, and I turn to the air
breezing lightly against my skin, a looser
gathering of particles
than the lean
and waver, the bluster
about me and about the momentarily
generous being
who speaks to me, and return,
as from a trip to Ceylon, dusty
and afraid of the night, and I too am part of this,
a collection
and slowly distributed
assortment—atoning for nothing, owing nothing—like
you—
shifting in the sunlight,
the one
who says it’s a little daunting
to the one who laughs lightly.
After the Wind Died Down
Lush summer
provoked into amplitude, the sense everyone has this year
of a tremendous dosage
just within reach, the boys on silver bikes
off for the big houses set in fields and girls in lemon yellow kerchiefs
trying to stabilize their position
on harmony. We used to walk for miles
just to be together for an hour. Butterbeans
and the muscadines came in at the same time each year.
Sour yellow plums like earbobs
hanging in bushes along the highway. We shaped
our answers to fit the questions, loose
and stirred up almost shining with our own version
for a dance. I say these things
in gratitude, moved by the old blistering
of happiness. The big-bellied trees
take nothing to heart. Day breaks into fragments,
each stamped with the name of a claimant.
Familiar bells ring with the same false solemnity
as always. Traipsing and pressing
our luck we come in off the streets as if from vast unsorted worlds.
Picture of the Situation
You don’t call it pain
you call it daylight
or the rough bark of some oak tree
or the rocks like broken steps at the edge of the woods
but it’s not pain
it’s not even sadness or anything
you’d set aside or comment on in the diary
you compulsively keep.
Fierce words break through arguments
you get into out in the driveway.
You could set the house
on fire and stand there in the yard still arguing
about how you failed to love her
properly and the fire wouldn’t affect you.
Now it’s all back in the shed, the
hopes and fabulous way of putting things,
some shed you keep a lock on.
You stand out in the yard
picking the pine sap off the car hood waiting for her
to finish whatever she’s
doing inside the house. You light a cigarette
and look at the match
and then you stand there with your head
thrown back. Whatever’s pressed up against you
presses so hard breath can’t get out. You can’t even scream.
By Mechanical Means
Splintery, spring pretends
to stall. Crafted, succinct,
bog hemp & new wild
olive tremble
and appear indistinguishable
from sandspur
and Spanish dagger. Flat
fingers of rain, the care taken
before we set out for supper,
your brother standing a long time gazing
across the pasture
coming up in white clover, a sense
of opportunity missed, swung round
again. The Redeemer, in the body
of a truck gardener, ambles by on his way to the john.
Antinomian heresies
shade toward the barn. Cypresses
shaky in the woods, the proposals of winged
sumac and maidencane taken in stride,
soft landings for briar and crotalaria
bloom. The tiniest is taken
care of. Conventions appraised
and disputes settled. Cow oak and dogwood
seem to push back, extrude
calculated systems of foamy white.
Rambler time. The earnestness
to this spot,
the usual phraseology
and cumbersome mechanics, a child
confessing a childish
crime, a gift carelessly given,
taken back. What’s
worked through or failed at
or lost reaches the edge of the barrow
where sorrel
and inkberry thrive, where we loiter,
hunchbacks and enfeebled moralists,
palsied, convulsive, marooned
in this life, willing to talk about it now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tin House, poetry.org, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, the New York Review of Books, Plume, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, Southwest Review, American Journal of Poetry, Five Points
To the editors and staff of the magazines that first published many of these poems, my thanks
ALSO BY CHARLIE SMITH
Poems
Jump Soul: New and Selected Poems
Word Comix
Women of America
Heroin and Other Poems
Before and After
The Palms
Indistinguishable from the Darkness
Red Roads
Novels
Ginny Gall
Men in Miami Hotels
Three Delays
Cheap Ticket to Heaven
Chimney Rock
The Lives of the Dead
Tinian*
Storyville*
Shine Hawk
Canaan
Crystal River*
*published in a collected edition entitled Crystal River
Copyright © 2020 by Charlie Smith
All rights reserved
First Edition
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Smith, Charlie, 1947– author.
Title: Demo : poems / Charlie Smith.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019050521 | ISBN 9781324005070 (paperback) | ISBN 9781324005100 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3569.M5163 D46 2020 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050521
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