Tuesday poem #60 : Geoffrey Nutter : Strength of Materials

What is your response to literature?

How about a stingray washed up on the shore

at dawn? And a big, raw ball of oil beside it?

When did you memorize the times tables?

And the meaning of multiplicative inverse,

the circumference of a steel band around the Earth?

Listen: the wind in a band is answering their summons.

And like your sister, studying the meteorological

paradigm, the eel-like stratagems, all

the deference paid to the paragons of arrogance,

the gold-plated locks, the volumes, dusted

with pollen of columbine, that present

the work of Bunyan, cast in the similitude

of a dream--you, perhaps, are like any man

who has just been afforded a few privileges

far surpassing your station without knowing it.

Even if you are perhaps immersed

in the strange dying blooms of the Octobrist,

the leaves, the golden plums of the spirit,

so too are you corporeal, and testing the strength

of materials, the rust preventative for pipes,

pistachio essence, pine syrup, pins for watches,

plant preservatives and the repairing of pivots,

oil of rose geranium, clouds, palaces, armies,

spectrums, prodigies, and other strange

prismatic objects through which we regard

this dark star we inhabit. It is after midnight.

My gentle-hearted friend, the sky is growing tame,

and gentler in the fading light. The crickets

are shrilling in the hedgerows under the bright

unnameable planets. It is nothing. It is merely

redemption, crisis, and coherence...

it is an ultimate, eventual coherence.

Geoffrey Nutter has published four books: A Summer Evening; Water's Leaves & Other Poems; Christopher Sunset; and most recently The Rose of January, published by Wave Books. He has taught poetry at Columbia, The New School, NYU, Poets House, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and currently runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in upper Manhattan.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #59 : Gil McElroy : Julian Day 2455179

I’ve washed her hair around

the lines & ratios of intensive care (the bonus of oxygen, the

drip of intravenous, the

arterial tap set deep

into her wrist)

 masked, gowned,

gloved

washed her hair around

a shattered shoulder, previous

Honest jobs

Facts finessed & cajoled

Gil McElroy is the author of four books of poetry, and numerous chapbooks, most recently Twentieth (above/ground press, 2013). In 2013, he was co-winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Ordinary Time: The Merton Lake Propers (Baseline Press, 2012). He has also published a collection of art criticism, and the non-fiction memoir Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War (Talonbooks, 2012). McElroy is also a visual artist and independent curator. He lives in the village of Colborne, Ontario on the shores of Lake Ontario with his wife Heather.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #58 : Kemeny Babineau : The Long Point Is

The long point is

lovely things have happened

look at the wind for instance

blooming in the trees or nodding

narrow necked flowers in the sun.

Where the waves are waving to the beach

the view is all horizon. We bend

or lay down as the sand wants,

and in further abeyance even fore-shorten ourselves

by immersing the body in the

landscape, where the late wave’s white curl

writes itself in forever falling over.

Such bubbles of laughter and the rising note in the wind

cause a recurring literature

of frothy scribble over chalcydon.

(Long Point, Ont. July 2009)

Kemeny Babineau lives in Mt Pleasant Ontario where he operates Laurel Reed Books and edits the occassional magazine The New Chief Tongue. His latest book is After the 6ix O'clock News published by Bookthug, and the chapbook After Progress published by above/ground press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #57 : Rachel Moritz : The shape of its body, the movement and the waveform

I left her in the kitchen, with a woman older than myself.

‘She’ll make a better mother,’
I knew such weight wasn’t finite.

The car purred away on gravel, and where she remained audible,
wind might break these trees.

Dense emporium. Gap, its not yet—

Rachel Moritz is the author of three chapbooks: Elementary Rituals, Night Sea, and The Winchester Monologues. Her poems have appeared in Aufgabe, Iowa Review, Typo, VOLT, We Are So Happy to Know Something, and other journals. She lives in Minneapolis, where she publishes a chaplet series from WinteRed Press and edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan