Tuesday poem #125: Jennifer K Dick : CERN 59

I dreamt of little green Martians in Timbuktu, of Keplar’s mountains, of a Newtonian halo drawn over my skin using a pair of compasses[1]. I heard someone down the hall whisper “When we lean together our burning profiles shatter.” What I thought was that I had been slipped something by the R&D department, said “the black funerary urn between us” and toasted an imaginary Einstein. “Oh, nobody can work the negative spaces like you, kiddo.” Da Vinci was chained in a corner. Someone at CERN explained that otherwise he took off into the night. Many sightings had caused a kind of Templar-esque society to brew up in the villages nearby. “Can’t have that,” one of the secretaries by the front door buzzed. I squinted. I blinked. Da Vinci’s beard seemed to be growing longer by the second. I thought of embryos in the 8^th week making 250,000 new neurons every minute. Far off, in Canada, a poet wrote “Embossing tools etch patterns onto gilt.” Fair enough. But I figured I should cut out while I was ahead, in a kind of cumulous nimbus. Turning out the gate, I spotted something not unlike a cheap neon sign. “God Awaits” or was it “Awakes”? I hit the gas soaring into a new night, CERN only a spot on the horizon behind me.

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[1] Using some rearranged lines by Meira Cook, from the start and end of Wife of Saint Casaubon of the Long Silences at the Breakfast Table, online at: http://www.dusie.blogspot.ca/2014/04/tuesday-poem-56-meira-cook-wife-of.html

Jennifer K Dick resides in France but is from Iowa. She is the author of CIRCUITS (Corrupt, 2013), ENCLOSURES (BlazeVox eBook, 2007), FLUORESCENCE (University of GA Press, 2004), and 4 chapbooks: CONVERSION (Estepa editions, Paris, 2013) including art by Kate Van Houten, BETWIXT (Corrupt, 2012), Tracery (Dusie, 2012) and Retina/Rétine (Estepa, 2005). She is currently at work on a large prose poem project about the CERN. Jennifer also teaches at UHA in Mulhouse, France, curates the Ivy Writers reading series in Paris and the Ecrire l’Art mini-residency for French authors at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse. She is a poetry editor for VERSAL out of Amsterdam, writes book reviews for various places and a poetics column for Tears in the Fence (UK). For more, see her blog at: http://jenniferkdick.blogspot.fr/

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #56 : Méira Cook : Wife of Saint Casaubon of the Long Silences at the Breakfast Table

To draw a halo use a pair of compasses.

When we lean together our burning profiles shatter

the black funerary urn between us.

Oh, nobody can work the negative spaces

like you, kiddo.

Embossing tools etch patterns onto gilt.

Then there is all that chewing to get through.

Tea? you ask suddenly, offering the teapot.

Sunlight cuts to the bone, the toast roars

flee not tea. Blight, thunder, famine, blood.

Angels spin like toys inside their whirling hours.

Your slow cistern rage drains, drains, and fills up again,

as it does every winter morning.

And in the eastern sky an advertisement,

for the Constellation Mercy, clicks off.

Breakfast is the worst time for stigmata, the linens

a bloodbath. Thanks be Sister Hen for the bounty

of your eggs, Brother Frying Pan for your Teflon surface.

Kiddo, even the forks in their narrow kitchen drawers

dun themselves on your scribble scribble flesh.

Tap lightly with hammer to preserve gold leaf.

Your bait hands loaded on the tablecloth. Fill.

And your spit-polished shoes, and the spaces between

your short ribs. Fill is what a marriage does, the opposite

is drip, empty, overflow, repeat.

Double the radius of grudging agreement

to measure fidelity, kiddo, grievance, or the radiant ascent.

But I, I am lifted into that rigging of violence and air,

where history and the stars come out, begin to shine.

And your head nimbus buzzes like a cheap neon sign.

Méira Cook’s most recent book of poetry was A Walker in the City (Brick). Her novel, The House on Sugarbush Road (Enfield & Wizenty), won the McNally-Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award. She is currently working as the Writer-in-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan