It’s not so much that death takes, but that death doesn’t take everything. Still here is the hole we made in our ears to record a decoy’s breathing. Still here are the toys we shook to soundproof grief. And here still are the bones, thunder-fled and broken. If I say god, I mean only that a stickman gathered itself in time to impress a scarecrow. If I say them, they trace with chalk the dreamless stone.
In my wrist, the heartbeat hidden from me
by my ears.
–
Eye:
The first fossil of my blankness
–
God only takes suicides.
I live in the future with an animal known to predict nothing.
It runs out of food when I forget what it eats.
In my son’s eye an unnoticed lamb has forgotten which eye
gets a lamb
I’m in water up to my chin. No one looks at my body.
Huge thanks to all at Poetry at Sangam and especially to guest editor Sophia Naz for selecting six poems of mine for Volume VIII / Issue 5 (December 2020)
~
Sophia Naz:
Barton Smock is the poet about whom Kazim Ali said that “All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.” Barton’s poems are diaphanous enigmas and the fact that they defy logic and can’t be neatly boxed into this or that category is precisely their beauty. God appears a lot in Smock’s poetry, but he is always a lower case god, disconcertingly intimate. The saints and Sufis of yore would recognize Barton Smock as one of their ilk.
~
*The author photo is of me with my grandfather’s pipe…which means something to me for the right reasons. My last publication had a photo of me taken immediately after my grandmother’s graveside service. Such overlapping things are always from the future, it seems.
I don’t mind ending 2020 this way.
Read the poems, here
Death and god only ever had one argument.
Light and touch
compare skin.
The children ask How long?
Sadness
by the bee.
I wonder sometimes what god’s mother lost in that bet.
Sleep, darkness, etc.
Return is a number.
A number
a ghost
counting
its teeth.
A father, a child, and so on.
A hand
hand won’t
leave alone.
knowing I will soon go soft on spiders, my mother crushes an egg to keep it she says from choking and though it is not the same egg that we lost in a doorknob
I still feel in a silent film’s ambulance (as godless as a balloon animal
kingsoftrain 