Friday, January 1, 2021

Steven Rood : Four poems

 

 

CONVERSATION AFTER THE BALLET

27 bones of hand, 3 of arm, 26 of foot, chains of small bones,
the remaining 94, and a vast flexuous musculature holding them—
all induced into flight.

Music & the body.
The job least likely to be replaced by Artificial Intelligence, I say to my friend,

is Principal Dancer with the Canadian National Ballet.
Nothing except the actual body

is a body.
Music lifts her.

She is saying that a computer program learned how Beethoven
was Beethoven.  Maybe, I say.

But can AI match a couple, hidden in Temescal Canyon,
moving smoothly under willows, circled by a hawk?  No, she agrees.

Can AI speak in the language of spring on the mountain?
No algorithm can prove a ripe gooseberry, a whispering flax, sun-detonated lilies.

Odors, qualities of light, rhythms now hidden beneath memory.
We are trading now, only in the way we can.

Emerging from stiffness, as one finds the grace in an arm.
She grew up in Calgary, studied in Russia, returned to Canada.

Matchless singularities.  We look so small at table. 

 

 

LAST THINGS CREATED ON THE EVE OF THE FIRST SABBATH

Mouth of the earth, punched into the sandstone cliff behind my house.
Mouth of a spring, gushing from Banias cave at the foot of Mount Hermon.
Mouth of the well, amid maples, and birch of Boscu’s farm.

The piled stone walls around his meadows.
Chewing mouth of the donkey, standing on three legs in Hubbard’s field,

with summer hay reaching up to its fetlocks.
A rainbow.  Scrambled eggs my grandmother fed me in her yellow kitchen.

The temples of imagination crafted from a substance that cuts
through iron, stone, diamond.

The story I wrote in my Senior year at Hollywood High School
of how I’d sneak into the bathroom on Sabbath Eve,

rub on the Old Spice After Shave, then return to table,
believing that no one could tell.  Mrs. Robinson’s note to me:

“You can be a poet.”
Some say also demons were created, the grave of Moses,

the Ram of Abraham, and tongs to lift out of the iron blast furnace a boy.


 

DYBBUK

Forty-carat blue diamond (with one crack),
still in its matrix of black rock.  Clear as blue air washed
in sparkling needle-clusters of pines. 
 

The man only partly finished the stone (rough meets polished)
which he keeps in a drawer, wrapped
in a handkerchief. 
 

He’s a specialist in cutting through what the eye can see
to the inclusions and flaws we live & spend a lifetime to realize.
He hammer-cleaves only when he wakes up deranged, and never on a Monday or Friday.
 

He disappears from himself for hours, which might be years in the desert,
where none of us admit we died of thirst long ago.
For this man, the mirage of a pool is nonetheless real. 

He knows at least this much:
Any stone that appears polished
must be cut precisely at the lines of its imperfection.  
 

 

MOORCHILD

Crawled through a hole in the fence, down
into the gully's wet throat to the willows and walnuts,
where he drank the creek’s amber odors.
 

He heard the kids on the hot playground
playing dodge ball, tether ball, foursquare, chase.
This boy was alone every lunch.
 

Did the teachers see him disappear, light as a seed
and beyond time as the bells rang?
Why did he start?  How did he fall into it?
 

No one saw and no one worried.
Green breath rose to him from ferns
sycamores extended their palms. 
 

Flycatchers and gnatcatchers
were Cherubim in the oaks.  Were Seraphim
on the sandstone.  Were Malachim in the wind. 
 

Every thirst in his throat
became his choice, even a vocation.
He belonged to moths and voles.
 

On his tight shoulders,
ease settled unfailingly,
glowing capes of moss. 
 

 

Steven Rood: Finalist 2019 National Poetry Series.  Book forthcoming from Omnidawn.