Mark Tardi, one of my favorite Polish American poets, has a new book of poems. If you've been following my blog, you'll know that this is the third time I'm featuring Mark's poems. I wrote about him in 2012 and again in 2013 when his book Airport Music came out (click on the links here to see those pieces and poems).
He's got a new book out from the great Dalkey Archive Press called Circus of Trust (available at Amazon). The poems are stronger and more moving than ever.
Here are a couple:
Prologue
The roadsides
favor promiscuity, snow
clenched to
nights, hoarsely chromium,
forming a grin
inside a crack. In sleep
They’ll pursue you: no bandit lapping the
fence,
no slim digit
hovering over the viewshed. I’m
waiting for my
legs to catch up with my hand.
I’m waiting for that resigned way of
Saturday.
An altered
paradise, not epitome or ruminant,
a paradise born
inside out, ceramic. It’s a question of
polo or humanity,
how technology is winning our hearts.
I know my bones
and your hair, yes, how the eye
drowns in cold
probability. The entire structure
must be subtracted
from harm’s way. Folded
Among the
constellations, ghost flat.
You’re right when you say the day
continues
to torment me. I
don’t know whether to
shit or go
blind, if sin were
only a matter of physics.
That chalk village
cut by amber nets, not an answer,
not a question.
All tenses and inflections, bloodless,
buried in lead
regardless of appetite.
I’m glad there are no rules, just the extent to which
we can describe
what is lean or not lean. The tumult
and pulse, the
interior light of things, from which
Most of us would
shrink.
from Attribution Error
Sometimes you have to start with a series of
misunderstandings
brief stain to dark clarity
a jab, a simple burst of air
toward the invisible middle
like tripping between the pigeons and the cats
like demolished logic
because it’s always winter in Chicago
it’ll be dark in forty-five minutes
you’re here to enjoy
the contradictions
the continuous and familiar fact
like how economists have predicted seven of
the last three downturns
like trading a claw hammer for a kiss
For the oldest cinema in the world, for its secrets
whatever variable distances, itinerant longings
more guano for my artifacting
________________________
________________________
There are no harmless motives, thinking
detached from all consequence,
it was guttered and channeled and sluices
like a gnarled moccasin or
some squat ungainly bird
the ligaments could have been flypaper revolving in
slow spirals
Gone are quinsy, glanders, and farcy
menstrual blood prettied with rosewater
________________________
________________________
You don’t have to step on
a body to carry
death on your shoes, gesticulant and aimless,
each day a relentless emptying out
the whorl expanding in itself
as if a tickle of electricity in mute chorus
as if left trembling with success
a
skin of persuasion and habit, weather-worn
bound
to a different set of restrictions
folding again into the murk beyond
between a
gulf and a toilet
____________
Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago and he earned his MFA from Brown University. His publications include the books The Circus of Trust (just out from Dalkey Archive Press), Airport music, and Euclid Shudders. He guest-edited an issue of the literary journal Aufgabe devoted to contemporary Polish poetry and poetics and has translated poetry from the Polish by Kacper Bartczak, Miron Białoszewski, Monika Mosiewicz, and Przemysław Owczarek. A former Fulbright scholar, he lives with his family in a village in central Poland and is on faculty at the University of Łódź.
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