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
Dad is trying to load bullets into a flashlight. His tv show is having trouble sleeping. Sister opens the oven for a doll she thought would be taller. We like you but not when you’re lonely. The first groundhog calls to us horribly as if it knows there will soon be a woman who swallows a cigarette to see a broom catch fire. That my mother can sleep, a pea goes dark in the eye of a deer. I think of my son and how it’s not every child gets its sickness from god. I jump rope might I later move into the land of plague my acre of miracle and find for snowfall the farm machine that once cleared lambs from the formlessness of habit. There was a day I followed a sheep. There had been a party at a house next to other houses. I had been there. Probably, the sheep wasn’t real. I sent a big-wheel down one driveway and it crossed and went up another. It made like it was going to roll back, but didn’t. I kept my eye on the sheep, yard to yard. It seemed no one anywhere had ever been home. I borrowed a red ball, kicked it under a car and it stayed. I was surprised at how much this disappointed me. Some doors were open and the sheep would go in the front and out the back. In one of the houses, a piano was briefly played. The sheep came out and the playing stopped. I did not go into any of the houses. Either I would chin handles of lawnmowers or sit on the edges of dry pools and put my feet in without taking off my shoes. At one point I pretended to be on the phone and the sheep let some grass fall from its mouth. My stomach purred. A moving van idled. For my hunger, the sheep made good time. I watched it from the empty cab of the van. I turned on the heat. Those poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz, that castle. I wondered how many of the houses I’d passed had porn in them. I can tell you today they all did.
kingsoftrain 