Mark Cunningham
3 poems
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Grasshopper Sparrow
In Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Circus: Trapeze Artist, the woman sits in mid-air, no cables in her raised hands. Then comes the twentieth century: Francis Bacon’s Pope sits in his chair, but he is falling, falling like a tongue through the sound of his own scream. Two business-suited yuppies fight, no sound track, as if behind corporate plate glass, no ground under them, in Robert Longo’s painting. Then ours: two or three financial analysts drop past smoke and gleaming windows. Wait, that’s a photograph. I know I’m a pure-bred American, because in high school one my goals was to slam dunk a basketball. In the gym of the local college, I set a wooden box on the court, climbed on, jumped. I didn’t see the ball go through the hoop, but I felt my palms wrap over the rim, I heard the net ripple. Only Tracey saw me do it. No video. No points. Then we walked off the court. This was in Morehead, Kentucky. One last thing: I’m afraid of snakes, so I’m no snake handler, and I’ve never tasted strychnine. Often, though, to get ready for the day, I still eat Pop-Tarts. They’ve been known to catch fire in the toaster, the jelly burning like napalm.
**
White-Tailed Pitar
Now I understand the slapstick and the dignity of Franz Kline saying, I had to paint the white, too. I can wash away without regret the grime of work and waste under my fingernails. Now I’ve made peace with the grit-charred snow along the road four days after the storm, and with ghosts. After working in a hotel whose laundry room used to be the city morgue, I can linger in any room and just enjoy the coolness. I’ve moved beyond Poltergeist: now I can go back to my first love, not the shows I’ve seen, but the black and white fuzz of an empty channel that I’d turn on when I was five or six and I woke up at night too alone.
**
Lapland Longspar
Wheat stalks flatten, grass shoots bend, unbroken and still growing, into patterns. One, shaped something like a large key, shows the four forces: weak force, strong force, electromagnetism, gravity. Another: a graviton released from a spinning disk. Joan and I would trace these on each other’s stomachs, in each other’s hair. My favorite was an arc of pressed circles, each circle smaller as the line curved out and then back down toward the axis. But crop circles last for only a little while, and I no longer know where Joan lives. Messages such as these can be hard to pick out form the static swarming a traffic jam or reaching for your fork, but Joan and I found a form of happiness that I’ve never seen recorded, so I thought I’d better do it. There must be thousands of others out there that no one has contacted yet.
**
return to Sawbuck 1.6
**
Mark Cunningham's poems have appeared recently in Dusie, Alice Blue, and Elimae. He has two chapbooks, one at Mudlark (2002) and one at Right Hand Pointing (2006). Tarpaulin Sky Press will be bringing out a book tentatively titled Body Language, which will be a sort of diptych containing two separate collections: Body (on parts of the body) and Primer (on numbers and letters).
**
Grasshopper Sparrow
In Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Circus: Trapeze Artist, the woman sits in mid-air, no cables in her raised hands. Then comes the twentieth century: Francis Bacon’s Pope sits in his chair, but he is falling, falling like a tongue through the sound of his own scream. Two business-suited yuppies fight, no sound track, as if behind corporate plate glass, no ground under them, in Robert Longo’s painting. Then ours: two or three financial analysts drop past smoke and gleaming windows. Wait, that’s a photograph. I know I’m a pure-bred American, because in high school one my goals was to slam dunk a basketball. In the gym of the local college, I set a wooden box on the court, climbed on, jumped. I didn’t see the ball go through the hoop, but I felt my palms wrap over the rim, I heard the net ripple. Only Tracey saw me do it. No video. No points. Then we walked off the court. This was in Morehead, Kentucky. One last thing: I’m afraid of snakes, so I’m no snake handler, and I’ve never tasted strychnine. Often, though, to get ready for the day, I still eat Pop-Tarts. They’ve been known to catch fire in the toaster, the jelly burning like napalm.
**
White-Tailed Pitar
Now I understand the slapstick and the dignity of Franz Kline saying, I had to paint the white, too. I can wash away without regret the grime of work and waste under my fingernails. Now I’ve made peace with the grit-charred snow along the road four days after the storm, and with ghosts. After working in a hotel whose laundry room used to be the city morgue, I can linger in any room and just enjoy the coolness. I’ve moved beyond Poltergeist: now I can go back to my first love, not the shows I’ve seen, but the black and white fuzz of an empty channel that I’d turn on when I was five or six and I woke up at night too alone.
**
Lapland Longspar
Wheat stalks flatten, grass shoots bend, unbroken and still growing, into patterns. One, shaped something like a large key, shows the four forces: weak force, strong force, electromagnetism, gravity. Another: a graviton released from a spinning disk. Joan and I would trace these on each other’s stomachs, in each other’s hair. My favorite was an arc of pressed circles, each circle smaller as the line curved out and then back down toward the axis. But crop circles last for only a little while, and I no longer know where Joan lives. Messages such as these can be hard to pick out form the static swarming a traffic jam or reaching for your fork, but Joan and I found a form of happiness that I’ve never seen recorded, so I thought I’d better do it. There must be thousands of others out there that no one has contacted yet.
**
return to Sawbuck 1.6
**
Mark Cunningham's poems have appeared recently in Dusie, Alice Blue, and Elimae. He has two chapbooks, one at Mudlark (2002) and one at Right Hand Pointing (2006). Tarpaulin Sky Press will be bringing out a book tentatively titled Body Language, which will be a sort of diptych containing two separate collections: Body (on parts of the body) and Primer (on numbers and letters).
