two boys at a rest stop
one cowboy, one indian-
also there
a mother’s
burning
car
and the mother herself
flipping open
a pocket knife
oh place, you are not
my first
language
but
it was men
created
machines
that they could tell
those machines
the little
they knew, and it was god
found god, and it was your father
that with his father
while in
their astronaut
poverties
took shyness
from a gun
no knife in the dog of absence. not a scratch on wind’s throat. winged things that belong to the tooth in your shoulder. lipstick. the unhummed ribs of your wrist.
let in them
a thunder, a counter
of breads
and sabbaths, an infant
struck
by owl
upon my double
being seen
I am set
to self
destruct
I am no sadder
than twin, no sadder
than dog…
my wrist
is nothing’s
neck
/ his stomach
attended
like church
what
will I never
see
lost
arachnid, a triangle
drawn
by others-
my legs make me lonely.
dream, put me down.
I try, but can’t make my bed. mom says maybe I’m grief. after coming back to touch me, she wishes herself a bird.
I hope she eats.
–
then
I had a word for marble that wasn’t marble. both were swallowed.
–
thirst is not the same as forgetting to drink. god talks up his handicapped friend.
the first person to use these steps went down these steps. violence is the new past. I see a dove and think god will never know who it was ate his crushed light bulb. I betray my ear. the seashell of the stomach.
Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly
Darren C. Demaree, poems
8th House Publishing, 2016
~
review by Barton Smock
~
‘Covered in the inscriptions of bizarre
timing…’ – from A Violent Sound in Almost Every Place #104
‘If today is the day
to walk towards
the sad, diverted
questions…’ – from All the Birds Are Leaving #35
Darren C. Demaree is a poet who carries in him a gentle tirelessness. He seems, by the worried exuberance of his verse, to want to know where he is that he might calm the distance in others. Audience is the loneliness he’s assigned himself. He recently signed a book of his for me and added: in Ohio in 2017. That book was, is, Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly. It is a book of both homage and future. A frantically pastoral book that moves as if each carousel horse could have a mind of its own while entertaining the idea that discovery may be on its second marriage. These poems achieve a tension that oddly is not reached by what the author withholds, but by what the author seeks. Into what does one engrave the gospel of change?
The book is made of three humanist parts representing Birth (A Violent Sound in Almost Every Place), Life (We Are Arrows), and Death (All the Birds Are Leaving).
The first, A Violent Sound in Almost Every Place, reads as an occupation of places otherworldly in the way it holds aloft the local…
‘…sure night of this
republic,
…I
wait for the room
of the room
to hold
a wider table
for our loose need’ – from #17
‘…Naked
in late morning,
each flapping wing
means something
tremendous
to a man
looking for any sign
or invitation
to be a creature.’ – from #75
…and in the way it possesses the acolyte.
‘…It is every
second of heaven, except
for your need to hear
your name said by God.’ – from #22
‘...I can hear
my body all the time,
now.’ – from #28
The second, We Are Arrows, seems narrated by a straggling, curious invader.
‘…I want, at times, to know we are not
precious to each other, and I want to know
that this feeling is misleading me to a
recoverable place. ‘ – from #17
‘Unfenced, we have imagined wrongly that every
cornfield contains a proper ghost.’ – from #20
‘…If in the middle, the surrounding starts to
panic you, then love, I suppose, could be an
oven as well.’ – from #152
The third, All the Birds Are Leaving, asks the crooked whole of a person to make a map of her upward gaze.
‘…I want to know
what happens when
warmth is never known
& then sneaks into the bath
of human experience
like a toe & then a body’ – from #8
‘Our hope is the best
forgetting.’ – #14
‘…We cannot
fly forever because of our
hammering want
to touch each other.’ – from #28
Entry, re-entry, and exodus…this book covers sacred ground. It is ambitious but not breathless, and believes in, and makes one worship beneath, its endeavor to put alienation out of reach. Demaree’s script hungers in the linear but does not starve the jigsaw. If we acknowledge the light at the end of the tunnel, we must also return to the shadow said light puts there.
~
book is here: http://8thhousepublishing.com/8thHouseStore/many-full-hands-applauding-inelegantly.html
kingsoftrain 