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Bob Perelman
Bob Perelman is the author of 14 poetry collections, including JACK AND JILL IN TROY, IFLIFE, Virtual Reality, The First World and Ten to One: Selected Poems. He collaborated with his wife, the painter Francie Shaw, on Playing Bodies. His latest critical book is Modernism the Morning After. He taught at UPenn for 25 years and now lives in Berkeley.
poems from Jack and Jill in Troy
Classic Sunrise
Red-nosed dawn arose
-- but it had been worth it!
All those gulps and gasps
had made the edges
of her eyes so sharp
that now when she finally
did heave herself up out of
the tossing sea
barely into
the eggshell sky
temples throbbing
-- that goes without saying
without saying without saying --
she could see
all that was not her,
see the immortal not-self
perfectly, as in a spotless mirror.
The Keep
Jack and Jill went up the hill
to the windy keep of Troy.
This was long before
apnea set in and all our woe.
The keep is where
you keep things,
things of value,
cataloged carefully,
no matter whose they used to be,
which eventually makes for
provenance problems
up and down the hill,
big ones, little itches
dogging you
into every enclave,
nagging like a summer cold
when you’re not young,
when someone’s got
what’s yours, has it,
up on the windy keep,
up whatever, the thought roots
and won’t be budged:
that certain someone
is getting decimated,
him and all his glittering connections.
Divine Laughter
The gods’ inexhaustible laughter is an Iliad formula, a minor one, but with a modicum of hits in
later centuries. It’s an idea that works in different ways, some of them nice. The gods laughing
inexhaustibly: eternity is happy, a “their eyes, their glittering eyes, / are gay” kind of thing,
hinting at how life can arise from matter, or providing an early glimpse of unlimited energy,
perpetual laughter betokening some inexhaustible amusement arising from the weave of existence.
But there’s also a tier-sensitive take where, OK, the gods are up there in the skyboxes, laughing at
the tragic hijinx below, while we’re down here subject to all they find so amusing. The gods like
gamers with endless free lives and us Super Marios, Ms. Pacmans, tokens striving and dying to
hold their attention.
However we hear “laughing inexhaustibly,” the word “inexhaustibly” suggests the laughter is
always happening. But it only happens twice in Homer, both times at the pratfall of a fellow god.
First time is at the end of Book 1 of the Iliad, when Zeus and Hera are quarreling at the banquet. Suddenly
limping tech-god Hephaistos intervenes, triggering the first outburst of inexhaustible
laughter.
They didn’t stop,
it was that funny
seeing Hephaistos
stumble out there
taking over the wine-pouring
himself, so funny him
hobbling around,
clubfeet and all,
pouring the perfect wine,
clowning and abasing
to defuse the situation
with the Big Man threatening
some really grotesque things,
the wife’s eyes
wide as dinner plates.
So quick distract Big Man’s
troubled mind,
grab the wine, stump around
and keep pouring,
keep them laughing,
which will kill
two birds with one stone:
1) it keeps things on the rails
and 2) caters to the divine class,
who so enjoy being served.
At Emma's Grave
1
They say the mind
can keep sense alive
about seven seconds
and that we can register at most
seven things, coins, pebbles, apples,
or six, five
almost nothing.
2
Maybe that's why
we invented the present
as a place to live, to keep the things we do know,
know so exactly, keep them exactly, keep
everything, keep what we know
near, at hand, alive in our minds:
Emma.
3
It's hard to remember
what the light looked like then,
what it was saying in such detail,
hard to count the blackbirds in that pie,
the extra-special one, four and twenty they said,
but we only see the released flock, the single flying mass,
each one the first and only birth.
4
Such a small set of seconds to put everything in,
since not everything is here that we love,
which makes it impossible not to want
that small set to have been utterly different,
the flock to have swooped right,
not left up back, to have landed
in any other tree.
5
Not the look of the light,
clear, vertical, soft, childlike,
or whatever our seven seconds say,
but how fast we’ve already seen
what is here, and what is not,
that's what makes the seven seconds
so hard.
6
What we see
makes us not remember
what it looked like
just a second ago
now all different
with us at a loss
with that stone there.
7
It is our privilege alone to disappear,
to never forget that we do,
never forget to set down
what must be set down
so that it not be forgotten,
not be lost in all this time:
Emma.
Acknowlegment
Some of these words
have appeared in the following places:
my mind, tongue, ear and files,
and in the minds, tongues, ears and files
of loved ones, friends, acquaintances,
the wide world I’ve heard
and not heard,
flyers on the sidewalk,
billboards lit and peeling,
oceanic screens and private polling places,
any other mouth the ideal location
to hear these words
transing, flaunting, sniffing, standing at attention,
beaten into twitchy sameness,
moodily bowing to the monotonies
of the convinced lash.
The bodies of these words
stretched out seemingly endless but animated
like the green hills lining the freeways
in New Jersey or Indiana,
half-mile hills thirty feet high
you glide by
and out the windshield,
suddenly there’s the dull stub
of a small smokestack,
a little grey tube stuck
in the middle of this next elongated green lump,
and then not long after,
another one slides behind,
each tube expressing
its own signature output
of the slowly cooking plastic
and fatigued newsprint
secreted beneath the undulating
green hills offgassing
the invisible news,
our sacred intoxicant.
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