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
edit
each drawing I do of my face is uglier than the last. god sends me hands I can’t use and prays for his hair. if I have a daughter, she is returning items to a small mirror. keep me if I don’t.
edit
it’s the day after jesus dies and father is a nightmare. I am the right size to change out his cigarette and I’m good at it. people in handcuffs pray over his legs.
father is a dream. a tree you notice in the dark- mom said that. mom says also that an ant’s heart is everywhere. everywhere in the ant.
jesus wants to be human. my brothers lift his body because my brothers do not yet know that neither will want to put it down. I mean to see them off but am rooted in what the future for a moment believes.
mother is not two people but she does go up and down the stairs as if she’s visiting two museums showing the same coffin. for every other step there’s a step that’s not. if my mouth at night is open, she sleeps outside in the ribs of a…
View original post 19 more words
some medicines / don’t work / how lonely
–
change diapers
else
you invent
evangelism
–
suicide, all those dates I didn’t
–
formless herself, she makes an image. animals
were the end
of god
dream is a boy dressed as his abuser sizing aquariums for the hand of a spider
the cricket
makes sense
because it looks
like silence
is doll
always
or never
sick
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
poems by Kaveh Akbar
Alice James Books, 2017
~
review by Barton Smock
~
It has been hard, of late, for me to read poetry because my son is getting older and his sickness, younger. I know my son is not his body, but his body is a crash course in logistical identity. I read Kaveh Akbar’s book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, with its fleeing of density and with its character-driven desertions, and found proof of place. It kept me from sleep’s rootless sideshow, and called to me from its phone booth made of wax. I wrote this note to myself after the first read-through: if blood spoke, or saw- have I ever seen so much person?
I will not quote from the book here, or give guidance from this point, as sharing is sometimes an erasing. I do not think my own appropriations…
View original post 124 more words
kingsoftrain 