Louis Cabri : Compartmentalized Comportments

 

 

 

“Orange” by Fizchev

 

Part 1

Character

“Shakespeare made us.” — Harold Bloom

He said ‘stand by’ — this
is

October, and implied:
Stand by, pomegranate, in

disa-
rray

of pickles . . .
and doesn’t

look at
all like Bottom, though

surely came rimshot
cymbal stand-

ups
from some kind, bottom of

another other, perhaps
cargo ship’s

bilge sailors scour.
Good bad movie.

Langston Hughes’s sailors? What have “beige sail-
ors with large noses” to

do with
him, they’d say. This is no sail-

or — agreed.
No ship’s Cap’n Awesome.

And, wait for it (. . . a few days . . .  just a few weeks . . .):
THAT SHIP SAIL

duh huh?!
Or — ?

Cut to b-
uttercups and birdsong.

Nor has he, the Times will
float, Bottom’s allergic way-

s — due crowd
condescension

at the least. Harold, then —
we get: What is he?

 

 

Part 2

i

The Sound of Jurisprudence

Secretary of the corpusculat ask, —
for the raisin pud-

Ding theory of das
Atom — is history — it’s not October anymore,

not in jurisprudence —
do juiced prunes dance?

Say it and you perf-
ormed it ’round

here still it’s
an offgas, these elections, and I’m a gust of this

electron-distant
door, through which the sound —

creep online:
juiced

prune danc-
e trying to be a

thing, one vide-
o anyway why

’s it up
to attract a child

“this video for you, I made
before going to work.”

 

ii

Video (videam, videor . . .)

So much for Miltonic effort.
In the famous opening lines, “disobedience, and the Fruit

of that Forbidden Tree. . . .
With loss of Eden,” he’s got dive-

rging vowels and consonants,
notes Reuven Tsur: “sounds of ‘forb-

idden’ and of ‘Ede-
n’ in-

cluded in [clued in
to — glue — ] ‘disobedience’,”

formative backg-
round for staid arg-

ument. A word is being blocked! while
don’t think of it, not that one

what word, think!
writing a poem, and . . .

nope, so / this way
to cognate

spelled p-e-r-v
stress on that first syllable,

 

iii

Discontinuum

Juiced Prune Dance Man,
“before going to work,” pale roundest face

above, where I’d’ve
wanted forming

background moon. Without edges or glea-
m, he’s no white plate.

Poe’s “chilling and killing”
no background mat-

eri-
al

either (and imagine backgrou-
nd checking

him) — literally
his sound con-

verges in foreground. The algorithm
result:

unfortunate — I don’t want
it ranking, and understand

now
why a great poet out of

character
— Bob Perelman: homage! —

would undo Milton’s gr-
ound next after Poe’s

to rid the alphabe-
t

of sound
reverberate reverberat-

ting,
minim-eyes-

zing
eve-

n
phetamor to isolate-

d
m-

omen-
ts, for mature ejaculation only.

 

 

 

Louis Cabri's poetry includes Hungry Slingshots and Posh Lust, both with New Star Books; Poetryworld, with CUE; and The Mood Embosser, Coach House Books. Poems from the same series as "Compartmentalized Comportments" appear at thetypescript.com and in the print poetry magazine out of Vancouver, Some #1. He teaches at the University of Windsor.