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Cancer loves the long bone,
the femur and the fibula,
the humerus and ulna,
the greyhound’ s sleek physique,
a calumet, ribboned with fur
and eddies of dust churned to a smoke,
the sweet slenderness of that languorous
lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk
of  Spiegelau stemware, its bowl
bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy,
a reed, a wand, the violin’ s bow —
loves the generous line of  your lanky limbs,
the distance between points A and D,
epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end

First the bad boots
give up their strength, then the toes lift
their anchors. The ankle
bones are broken,
and so on, until the bladder lets go, without
shame, and the genital
organ washes away, the ovum
and her fertile signals. A proxy pain
stands in for the larger
intangible.

Last night
tossed in
my bed
the sound of the rain turned me
around,
a leaf
in a dried gully
from side to
side,
the sound of the rain took me
apart, opened to what is it?
breath caught in memory of
a deep sweetness

This season for us, the Jews —
a season of candles,
one more
on the seven-branched candlestick for
the seven days of the week,
but let it be seven
in the sense of luck in dice,
seven of the stars in
the constellations:
Orion, Aldebaran in the sky

Take a statement, the same as yesterday’ s dictation:
Lately pain has been there waiting when I awake.
Creative despair and failure have made their patient.
Anyway, I’ m afraid I have nothing to say.
Those crazy phrases I desecrated the paper
With against the grain... Taste has turned away her face
Temporarily, like a hasty, ill-paid waitress

A Caledonian megalith.
A tinted bather from Cape Ann.
The 1937 kith
and kin of a Kentuckian
beside their Model T sedan.
The Celts. Who set me this arith-
metic of icons? Who began
by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zith-
erpicking rhinestone charlatan.
He tries to be American.

Self-hatred? No, no dear: that seems inflated —
chagrin: the shame you feel when friends withdraw
for reasons they leave tactfully unstated,
leaving you to guess at your faux pas

From all you did and didn’ t say for ages,
as in some vast congressional report,
your sin, at last, is lost among the pages;
a snow of detail cuts inquiry short.

In downtown windows where late sunlight glares,
you see yourself, as if you’ d never met.
Who is this rumpled lookalike who wears
a blouse like yours, the armpits dark with sweat?

They billow from a hillside in Cha’ am.
Together, they are more than plural:
the planet’ s darkest song, a tongue,
a serpent muscling air apart,
a dire banner come unfurled,
a river flowing wholly from
the old, mute mountain’ s desperate heart,
the last confession of the world.

Geof Huth

More About Visual Poetry >>

II. iv

I am writing this poem
about the 1965 massacre
of Indonesians by Indonesians

which in an article ten years later
I could not publish
except in Nottingham England with

a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since
himself been murdered
no one will say by whom but I will guess