THOMAS LUX
SELECTED POEMS
After starting out as a neo-surrealist American poet in the 1970s, Thomas Lux ‘drifted away from surrealism and the arbitrariness of all that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui. The later Lux writes more directly in response to more familiar but no less strange human experience, creating a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant. Like Billy Collins, he prefers his poetry to be called not ‘accessible’ but ‘hospitable’ to readers. He uses humour or satire ‘to help combat the darkness…to make the reader laugh – and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humour.’
Each of Lux’s multi-faceted poems is self-contained, whether it is musing or ranting, lamenting or lambasting, first person personal or first person universal. ‘Usually, the speaker of my poems is a little agitated,’ says Lux, ‘a little smart-ass, a little angry, satirical, despairing. Or, sometimes he’s goofy, somewhat elegiac, full of praise and gratitude.’
‘The latest collection of dazzlers from one of the few poets writing today who fills me with envy. Lux is such an antidote to the post-confessional poetry that’s all about your broken heart… He’s interested in history, geology, oceanography. His poems are based on the world, though I’m sure he’s writing about himself’ – Billy Collins.
‘Simultaneously funny, sad, ironic, compassionate, mocking and spiritual. There is such emotional and tonal range…yet a definite common-sense, serio-comic down-to-earthiness lurks throughout the collection as if implying that we humans should know better, be above all the nonsense to which we seem endlessly addicted’ – Sally Molini, Cerise Press.
COVER IMAGE
Radioactive Cats © 1980 Sandy Skoglund
THOMAS LUX
SELECTED
POEMS
1982-2012
…but in what is
ours, here, let
justice be primary
when we sing,
my dear.
HAYDEN CARRUTH
to the most remote cell in the big toe.
SHERWIN B. NULAND
The general was busy with the ant farm
in his head.
CHARLES SIMIC
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
from HALF PROMISED LAND (1986)
The Milkman and His Son
The Thirst of Turtles
At the Far End of a Long Wharf
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy
The Night So Bright a Squirrel Reads
It Must Be the Monk in Me
The Dark Comes on in Blocks, in Cubes
Wife Hits Moose
The Swimming Pool
from THE DROWNED RIVER (1990)
Backyard Swingset
Old Man Shoveling Snow
Cellar Stairs
So You Put the Dog to Sleep
Traveling Exhibit of Torture Instruments
Walt Whitman’s Brain Dropped on Laboratory Floor
Bodo
Floating Baby Paintings
The Garden
Upon Seeing an Ultrasound Photo of an Unborn Child
A Little Tooth
Great Advances in Vanity
from SPLIT HORIZON (1994)
The People of the Other Village
An Horatian Notion
The Neighborhood of Make-Believe
Amiel’s Leg
Frankly, I Don’t Care
Endive
The Driver Ant
Kalashnikov
Money
The Big Picture
Grim Town in a Steep Valley
River Blindness (Onchocerciasis)
History Books
Shaving the Graveyard
Pecked to Death by Swans
Autobiographical
Emily’s Mom
‘Mr John Keats Five Feet Tall’ Sails Away
‘I Love You Sweatheart’
from NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (1997)
Refrigerator, 1957
Criss Cross Apple Sauce
The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently
This Space Available
Commercial Leech Farming Today
A Small Tin Parrot Pin
from THE STREET OF CLOCKS (2001)
Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires
The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball
Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City
Bonehead
In the Bedroom Above the Embalming Room
Thomas the Broken-Mouthed
The Handsome Swamp
Grain Burning Far Away
The Doldrum Fracture Zone
The Poison Shirt
A Bird, Whose Wingtips Were on Fire,
Slimehead (Hoplostethus atlanticus)
Salve
Regarding (Most) Songs
A Library of Skulls
The Fish-Strewn Fields
Unlike, for Example, the Sound of a Riptooth Saw
Cordon Sanitaire
The Language Animal
Pencil Box Shaped Like a Gun
The Corner of Paris and Porter
The Bandage Factory
from THE CRADLE PLACE (2004)
Say You’re Breathing
Dry Bite
Debate Regarding the Permissibility of Eating Mermaids
Rather
The American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association
To Help the Monkey Cross the River,
The Devil’s Beef Tub
Boatloads of Mummies
The Magma Chamber
Guide for the Perpetually Perplexed
The Year the Locust Hath Eaten
Burned Forests and Horses’ Bones
Myope
To Plow and Plant the Seashore
Goofer-Dust
The Ice Worm’s Life
Hospitality and Revenge
Breakbone Fever
Monkey Butter
Can’t Sleep the Clowns Will Eat Me
Render, Render
from GOD PARTICLES (2008)
Behind the Horseman Sits Black Care,
The Hungry Gap-Time,
Hitler’s Slippers
Sleep’s Ambulance
Lump of Sugar on an Anthill
Stink Eye:
The Lead Hour
The First Song
The General Law of Oblivion,
Midmorning,
The Republic of Anesthesia
Man Pedaling Next to His Bicycle
Her Hat, That Party on Her Head
God Particles
Their Feet Shall Slide in Due Time
Invective
Jesus’ Baby Teeth
How Difficult
Apology to My Neighbors for Beheading Their Duck
The Joy-Bringer
The Happy Majority
Cliffs Shining with Rain
The Shooting Zoo
Mole Emerging from Trench Wall, Verdun, 1916
The Grand Climacteric
Sex After Funerals
Autobiographophobia
Blue Vistas Glued
Sugar Spoon
A Clearing, a Meadow, in Deep Forest
from CHILD MADE OF SAND (2012)
The Moths Who Come in the Night to Drink Our Tears
You and Your Ilk
Nietzsche Throws His Arms Around the Neck of a Dray Horse
A Frozen Ball of Rattlesnakes
The Queen of Truth
A Delivery of Dung
Elegy
Every Time Someone Masturbates God Kills a Kitten
West Shining Tree
&nbs
p; Rue de la Vieille Lanterne
Like Tiny Baby Jesus, in Velour Pants, Sliding Down Your Throat (A Belgian Euphemism)
Not the Same Kind of Mud as in ‘Two Tramps in Mud Time’
Why
The Riverine Farmers
Bricks Sinking in Deep Water
Dead Horse
Outline for My Memoir
INDEX
About the Author
Copyright
FROM
Half Promised Land
(1986)
The Milkman and His Son
(for my father)
For a year he’d collect
the milk bottles – those cracked, chipped,
or with the label’s blue
scene of a farm
fading. In winter
they’d load the boxes on a sled
and drag them to the dump
which was lovely then: a white sheet
drawn up, like a joke, over
the face of a sleeper.
As they lob the bottles in
the son begs a trick
and the milkman obliges: tossing
one bottle in a high arc,
he shatters it in midair
splints of glass
falling.… Again
and again, and damned
if that milkman,
that easy slinger
on the dump’s edge (as the drifted
junk tips its hats
of snow), damned if he didn’t
hit almost half! Not bad.
Along with gentleness,
and the sane bewilderment
of understanding nothing cruel,
it was a thing he did best.
The Thirst of Turtles
How parched, how marrow-dust dry
they must get on their long surface and undersea
journeys – huge stuffed husks,
imperturbable swimmers grazing
jellyfish abutting the bruised
waters’ pasture. How thirsty
a sixty-day swim, how graceful
the winching back to one unforgotten
shore. Plub, plub, sleepless
the hull’s inner workings, their tails
motorless rudderings; deep,
deep their thirst and need. One hundred,
one hundred and twenty: how long they live
in their thirst, propelling
the great bloody steaks of their bodies,
dreaming, anticipating alert,
single-purposed oblivions: sweet
sweet turtle-sex – which excites
the lonely watches of sailors – sometimes days
joined in wave-riding rapture on the surface
of the depths. And still more thirsty
afterward, how alone later (currents
having taken) – righted, relentless,
back on course, collision, with centuries,
with a shore: solitary, speechless,
utterly buoyant, as unethereal
as cabbage. How thirsty these
both wise and clumsy, like us, feeding
in ever-widening or diminishing circles,
outward and inward, dropping
great oily tears, killing themselves
to beat a big hole in dirt,
burying something, then retreating
heavily on their own tracks, like rails,
reaching forward to the sea.
At the Far End of a Long Wharf
At the far end of a long wharf
a deaf child, while fishing, hauls in
a large eel and – not
because it is ugly – she bashes its brains
out of eeldom on the hot
planks – whamp, whamp, whamp, a sound
she does not hear. It’s the distance
and the heat that abstracts
the image for me. She also does not hear,
nor do I, the splash the eel makes
when she tosses it in her bucket,
nor do we hear the new bait
pierced by the clean hook, nor
its lowering into the water again.
Nobody could. I watch her
all afternoon until, catching nothing
else, she walks the wharf toward
me, her cousin, thinking
with a thousand fingers. Pointing
at our boat she tells me
to drag it to the water. She wants me to row
her out to the deep lanes of fish.
Poetry is a menial task.
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy
For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentlessly they fall
into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long
and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown – but
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,
a reward for not loving
the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,
rats) creatures, if
you believe these things, then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.
And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors
and escort them
be assured that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up
again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld
of your socks, and that even –
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams –
they may tell the others
in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s
that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.
The Night So Bright a Squirrel Reads
The night so bright a squirrel reads
a novel on his branch
without clicking on his lamp.
You know you’re in a forest – the stars,
the moon blaring
off the white birch.… You could walk
out with your wife
into the forest, toward the fields beyond,
you could walk apart from her,
and still see her. It’s so bright
you need not talk nor fear
that particular sticky abrasion you get
by walking into pine trees. You find
a lucidity in this darkness.
Your wife is here – three or four
trees away – you recognise her profile,
and you do not think she is anyone else,
here with you, a hundred
or so yards now from a field where,
in an hour or so, you might see
dawn’s first deer browsing, or an owl,
soaring home after the shift he loves,
a fat sack of field mice under his wing.
It Must Be the Monk in Me
It must be the monk in me,
or the teenage girl. That’s why I’m always off
somewhere in my mind with something
stupid (like a monk) or spiritual
(like a teenage girl). Sometimes, there’s vision,
by reason of faith, in glimpses, or else,
and more often, a lovely blank, a hunger
like Moses’ hunger when with his fingernails
he scraped the boulders of their meager lichen
and then fiercely sucking them.… It’s a way
of living on the earth – to be away
from it part of the time. They say
it begins in childhood: your dog
gets runned over, your father
puts a knife to your mother’s throat.…
But those things only make you crazy
and don’t account for scanning,
or actually mapping, a galaxy inside. I believe
it happens before birth, and has to do,
naturally, with Mom. Not with what she eats,
or does, or even thinks – but with what she doesn’t
think, or want to: the knot of you growing larger
and, therefore, growing away.
The Dark Comes on in Blocks, in Cubes
The dark comes on in blocks, in cubes,
in cubics of black measured
perfectly, perfectly
filled. It’s subtle and it’s not,
depending on your point of view.
You can measure it best in a forest,
or in a grassy lowland, or in any place
where your lamp is the only lamp and you can turn it off.
To describe it the usual adjectives
of the gray/black genre will not do. It’s not light,
nor is it the absence of light, but
oh, it’s sweet, sweet like ink
dropped in sugar, necessary and invisible
like drafts of oxygen. Absolutely,
in squares, in its containers of space,
the darkness arrives – as daily
as bread, as sad as a haymow
going over and over a stubble field,
as routine as guards
climbing to gun towers
along penitentiary walls, clicking
on their searchlights
against it.
Wife Hits Moose
Sometime around dusk moose lifts
his heavy, primordial jaw, dripping, from pondwater
and, without psychic struggle,
decides the day, for him, is done: time
to go somewhere else. Meanwhile, wife
drives one of those roads that cut straight north,