from Unusual Woods
Demure as a switchblade, I retract nothing
in the two-way mirror of my twitching eyeball.
We'll talk
over my footnotes until the pretty flowers
bring flowers. One morning,
the dream crawled out from the attic
into a great scroll of smoke
because a historian has got to eat, write history,
and eat again.
Nodding off at the edge of his deathbed,
lit by the lamp,
he'd like to go upstairs and
shoot you with an antiquated pistol by mistake.
My hair blown back by hope
and teased by failure,
I want to do math
the way bricks do math.
I want to hold up mirrors to gods
by the baker's dozen.
Knowledge becomes a layer,
means a look, a seesaw to better,
to finish for a kiss,
to lean on the fall of your hair
my thumb and forefinger;
like the rain
pooling gain by plurality.
Between Stalin and Hitler,
Stalin was the worse of two crooners.
But then, innocence was never cheap
leaning on a fence
welcoming in the clouds.
Stalin tiptoeing nights,
Hitler leapfrogging days.
My turn, I cry!
Diving thru train tunnels;
follow me, they cry, disappearing
just to show off how they can.
I follow them with a pail of water
on my head.
Back in Romania, I knew a gypsy boy named God who carved words in his inner thigh
with barbed wire teeth running from the securitate. God’s gypsy mother
would shiver and recite our fortune after black coffee. She would read the grainy residue
and describe the velvety foot of the devil, however invisible
to our eyes. Off the clock, she would sigh to herself about how much smarter
and more handsome her son was than other sons. Once,
my father accidently stepped on the foot of an invisible devil. God’s mother was not shy.
She cried the devil’s part. As night fell, the gypsy woman slept
in our dim dining room lit by the streetlight’s beam
punched odd by the curtains. The moonlight is not worth mentioning.
She changed right in front of us, wiggling her wrinkly breasts for us
to giggle at. She kissed the head of my penis. I remember wanting to urinate in her mouth.
But how could I?
for Kent Johnson
The past sounds its own air-raid sirens;
we need bread and milk and bullets.
Clear as pen ink cuts out,
I sing from a pivot.
The little leaves land as usual,
weatherworn
while ice cubes melt
inside the darkness of your mouth.
Why do you throw stones
at tanks?
Why does the wind slice a line between us?
On the rainy walkway
a snail crunched beneath my step.
The clouds above are trying on the moonlight
just for size. Halfhearted
piles of slick bodies sip in the soft light. Wait,
I know those faraway crickets
that just won't leave me alone. My thumbprint
on your lips, mouthfuls of each other
for the record.
Tho long winter,
no first snow tonight.
During those tea-drenched and pitted days,
each one is riven
with the other’s whereabouts.
How my muscles tremble after we make love.
A secular cantata on how the moon is aging
makes the tyrant weep.
It is so hard to tell few from fewer.
A peril digging in the cellar dark ices my window
and settles in the cleft.
A nightmare haunches beneath the icicles,
king-size over the chapel tower,
goes thunk in the wishing hour.
Birds peck off the violet at first light.
Come easy, martyr easy.
I swab my ammunition pouch to steady the hand:
Echo to shell, echo to soak, echo to speaker.
I am pious as the keep on a winter's night, o lord,
when it is cold and when it is dark.
for James Liddy
Lorine, your faceless dolls await Louis.
In that roadless-dark
the milliner hanged herself. The museum photos
fade to black at suppertime.
Black Hawk blood soaking in peninsula light,
northern country quiet
riding down the river trees
drinking in reflection.
Drink and drink of it.
In the pilgrim photo
you are all elbows and voiceover.
Under the passing dressmaker,
I miss you. I carry the longing with me.
(crowded) in the nearness before this time, a great city fell
while night made footfalls (crowded)
coiling about the fire steam funneled up
the crooked tree (crowded)
a sort of whistle: never sleep thru dusk (crowded)
under false acacia
wiry, we slept out the night (crowded)
warming our bones by the smokestack
our silver faces etched over with (crowded) lightning
weather plunged,
the faceless drama gone,
in the faint fog after an eclipse
our wings smoldered in that crowded meadow
for Paul Celan
Your father died of typhus, they shot your mother
by rounded lamplight as mortuary dominoes
were calling out an august winter,
your name after dark
little by little
as in a far away mirror.
We all die alone, charred as wildlife pelts.
At night, lightning flashes its teeth
over the Seine.
When the whole city is asleep,
I look over the edge
and I feel
unworthy to cultivate the tongue-black waters.
for Maurice Kilwein Guevara
A dash sparrows in to sip a little water
from the water-fountain.
The fountain bird tweets: You're going
to remember everything you see.
I'm going to forget.
Can you tell the time of day
by how high
I hike my skirts
near the Spanish arcades? Photo snaps.
Our voices
at the bottom of the fountain
glimmer
next to the secrets they keep keeping.
(turn) in the fast darkness of ancient forests,
shadows cross our dreaming faces (turn)
in the movies, an oak tree is always more there
after it’s gone (turn)
this way, a saw emphasizes one thing (turn)
formalwear, night fog rolling in
dressing the silver-blown accessories
(turn) in the morning,
when the rain goes to work,
the cemetery trees shade the cemetery dead
and spiders (turn) play the harps of corners
when the wind sighs, weathercocks turn
to look for a reason (turn)
These poems are taken from the book, Unusual Woods (BlazeVox Books, 2010)
Gene Tanta was born in Timisoara, Romania and lived there until 1984, when his family immigrated to the United States. Since then, he has lived in DeKalb, Iowa City, New York, Oaxaca City, Iasi, Milwaukee, and Chicago. He is a poet, visual artist, and translator of contemporary Romanian poetry. His two poetry books are Unusual Woods and Pastoral Emergency: both are excerpted from in this issue of Almost Island. Tanta earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 2000 and his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009 with literary specialization in twentieth-century American poetry and the European avant-garde. His journal publications include: EPOCH, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Laurel Review. Tanta also has had two collaborative poems with Reginald Shepherd anthologized in Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Currently, he is working on two anthologies while teaching post-graduate creative writing online for UC Berkeley Extension.