Daniel Bosch
stanzas
**
from Rubble
October 2001-March 2003
Mortar sharp flatirons kissed goodnight
.........In nineteen forty, or in thirteen forty six
Dreams of an afterlife it spends held tight
.........By tons of brick.
Card tables crammed with Twin Towers tchotchkes,
.........The white blood cell halo of an infection,
Heal the sidewalks of lower Broadway
.........With transactions.
Monogrammed caps, t-shirts, cigarette lighters,
.........Chewing gum caddies, toe-socks—"F.D.N.Y"
Is a four-letter word. We merchandise
.........Ennui.
I shake a globe: I've always wanted to.
.........I never had the power: now, I’ve got it.
The seller eyes me. His crystal balls turn blue:
.........“You break it, you bought it."
I shake the globe. I'm the eye of a storm above
.........Victims and rescuers, nimble, nameless heroes
Memorialized—or trapped—in a blizzard of
.........Ground zeros.
My Thinkpad’s duct-taped to my window-sill—
.........And I keep an email terror-watch. I’ll rat on
Tom Ridge if I have to, and I’ll kill
.........For chaste Manhattan.
Rubble underfoot, it's hard to keep footing
.........The bill, to keep footing: our Birkenstock-shod
Brooks Brothers, born-again, are rooting
.........For the under god.
Troops rush in where angles fail to gel.
.........The Soviets, preoccupied, could never never lend
Afghani’s credit at a Crate and Barrel
.........Or Land’s End.
Kabul’s mujahideen-aged freedom fighters,
.........Singing, in Arabic, “We Shall Overcome,”
Kept Osip and the other Russian writers
.........Off their curriculum.
"Banana Republic"—once gringos would lose face
.........Faced with such consumption-without-borders.
Today we save on shipping when we place
.........New world orders.
Two-hundred and one-half years after the Bastille
.........Christmas eve finds Santa stuffing socks
With certified rubble: the Berlin Wall.
.........Democracy rocks.
A Pax Americana means pillows of wisdom
.........Like this: Good Arabs come in just two kinds—
"Self," and "Full." If we change lanes, or kingdoms,
.........Nobody minds.
In this corner, the concrete world’s opacity,
.........And in this, a Master’s in Business Administration.
The smackdown essay prompt: How is the O.P.E.C.
.........Like a gas station?
A thousand and one archangels of Allah
.........In souped-up S.U.V.s, could, at any minute,
Crash a hollow monument to the dollar
.........With people in it.
It follows that at E.Z. Driver Training,
.........Instructors will screen for fundamentalists
And turn in every student who’s complaining
.........She'll bomb the test.
The Homeland Security Handbook (preface by El-Al)
.........Has chapters on degrees of separation
Which argue that Bin Laden made a film
.........With Kevin Bacon.
Our sirens need new settings, like "Plausible"
.........And "Tentative." When our alarms say
No mission's impossible,
.........We're in harm's way.
My need to Fedex feels like a fetish.
.........Today's tight little package was a "rush."
The joy of shopping, direct from Uttar Pradesh,
.........Makes me blush.
Tribunals mean swift justice, silly!
.........It comes in tall, grande, and venti—
And for the export market, trial-sized. (We still
.........Have plenty.)
The W.T.O. c.c.'s the I.M.F.:
........."Our boys will fight and die for Two Day Air.
The future has arrived (in R.T.F.)
.........We'll take our share."
Heaven has no pre-set spending limits;
.........The Devil shops Old Navy, while in the image of man
Bush adds another camo' Admiral Nimitz
.........To his martial plan.
The rifle-bored sixteens of ol' Big Mo'
.........Once drew sharp beads on Tokyo's macadam.
But manned by J. Crew, will a smart bomb know
.........Daniel from Saddam?
With ships called H.O.P.E. and packages marked C.A.R.E.
.........And parenting "for just pennies a day,"
Our mouths meet our money precisely where
.........And how we pay.
Parents race past the park, eager to fork out.
.........Prodigies need prestige "Enrichment Nights,"
Preludes to the therapists who'll work out
.........Their appetites.
Through our picture window, a perforated brick,
.........Wrapped, like snapper, in the Village Voice,
Crashes, but the ransom note’s a slick
.........Subscription ploy.
"One man, one vote" is awfully hard to sell
.........Unless it comes with fiber optic cable
In Riyadh, women's suffrage waits until
.........We judge them able.
My a.m. clock radio with a high intensity
.........Lamp and a dedicated weather band
Stood for America, home of the free,
.........Made in Japan.
Evening. Late August, 1967.
.........A Harley Davidson trike's chrome spokes
Gleam in lamplight. With six or seven
.........Friends, my hippie brothers toke.
“Incoming!’ The hot roach of a joint, tossed
.........At the sight of my mom’s station
Wagon, arcs from the arc of my brothers’ "lost
.........Generation."
Gathered in the gloaming, hairy
.........In torn, patched denims,
His Janis Joplin girlfriends were much scarier
.........Than Eminem is.
High school dropouts with good teeth
.........And high I.Q.s waged intifada
And sang, under their breath,
........."O Canada."
Or bled into mud, so we were told,
.........Like Jim Ray Hart, shot passing ammunition,
Nineteen years old,
.........On his first "mission."
Afghan earth, straw, grey water from a well
.........In wooden buckets—no sign of a brigade.
Aquarius, the water-bearer, shuttles
.........Well for his age.
My coffee mug contains dark multitudes.
.........Brazilian robots weld our German bugs.
The third world cannot reasonably refuse
.........To sell us drugs.
Next time on The Airstrikes Road Show—
.........Taxpayer-funded reality T.V.—
Ten Empire-style G.I.s induce a faux
.........Antiquity.
November's cool: the oil that barrels in
.........Pumps up elected members. But Senate halls
Freeze up: they won't sing carols when
.........Viagra falls.
Democracy is temperate, but drops its leaves in
.........Strict accordance to eternal schemes;
God’s ordinance flags a proof of her belief in
.........Changing regimes.
To everything, a season. Is fall
.........In Kurdistan un saison d'enfer?
Day-glo leaflets precede autumnal
.........Literature.
“Collateral” means “running alongside,”
.........Or, in the case of certain F-16s,
“Canadians.” Semper Fi! Our fighter pilots fly
.........Amphetamines.
The world’s pain, condensed in little loaves,
.........Rises, but will not touch, the corrugated tin
Roof of a dug-in Afghan’s oven.
.........Hungry? Dig in.
The White House sends condolences—and bombs—
.........To friends of Condoleezza. She plays nice
With any one who won’t say “Uncle Tom’s
.........Converted Rice.”
Fickle “March” is a month and an order.
.........Today it follows “Peace,” maybe tomorrow
The nose of a gun. A lion, March murders.
.........A lamb—what follows?
Psst. Students are gathering. Pass the word—
.........But don’t bring video. We’re celebrating
Peace, hell yes, but wouldn’t want to hurt
.........Our credit ratings.
Snowflakes created at ungodly heights
.........Murmur the word ‘hexagon’ and fall.
The silent earth, dizzy, cold, and white,
.........Catches them all.
You say “Elegy,” I say “Eulogy”—
.........Let’s call it off. The point, translated,
Is: potahto liquor sells. Ideology’s
.........Been liquidated.
Blond Claudia Schiffer, her fly wide open,
.........Guesses from billboards while burkas file past
Observantly. Is it Islam we’re hoping
.........Is just a fad?
The first American to buy it from Iraqi
.........Fire is profiled on NPR.
A busload of nameless Syrians, less lucky,
.........Dies off the air.
Scissors cut paper. The rocks paper smothers,
.........Crushed into bricks and typecast as first stones,
Find walk-on parts oppressing untold others
.........In no-fly zones.
Glory hallelujah! This is vintage trampling
.........Of reason by wrath, but if Saddam escapes
A charge of treason won’t keep me from sampling
.........The sour grapes.
Two by fours measure
.........One and seven-eighths by
Three and three-quarters
.........But never lie.
Ricocheted reports of nail guns
.........Echoing across green hamlets’ acres
Pour concrete fiscal confidence
.........In players’ ears.
Truly, the shock that awes must come
.........When, watching one’s own statue topple,
ABC calls to offer you asylum
.........At Ted Koppel’s.
I wish the muse would pass me a hot tip!
.........I’m too deeply embedded
To test, empirically, rhymed gossip
.........That’s been vetted.
At poetry’s whetstone, dull axes of evil
.........Arc open-form sparks which fade to ash
Above the ramps our MFA Kneivels
.........Must jump for cash.
Our falcons aren’t deaf—it’s just our falconers.
.........Trained, from age 3, on Sega consoles
To believe they can shift the gyre into reverse
.........And save our souls.
America, birthplace of jazz and R&B,
.........The two-bit shave, the all-night washeteria,
And soul, once sang for freedom and for free.
.........Just like Siberia.
We don’t discriminate. Americans don’t have to
.........Rend our khakis or pull out our eyes.
It’s a free country! We’ll give the shaft to
.........Whoever’s buying.
Here poets drone, reduced to mere “voices”—
.........“Personal,” “distinct.” At verse’s re-christening
Critics fell silent about diction choices.
.........No one was listening.
My DVD revision of Love Story
.........Casts a poet as the scion who loves a girl
For telling him he needn’t say I’m sorry
.........About the world.
That was a close shave. My upturned sink’s the sky
.........And the sparrows that fly in spirals are just stubble
Tapped from the twin blades of a razor I
.........Bought with rubble.
Francois Villon apologized. He took
.........His raving back. He cried, he genuflected
Acrostically, and died. Only a book
.........Could resurrect him.
It’s only a book. If it falls, like a chunk of plaster,
.........An asbestos-coated hunk of concrete
Imagery, it won’t spell disaster
.........On the street.
I’m sorry as I can be
.........And still stay up late
Writing stanzas. Hand me
.........A brick? I need a paperweight.
**
return to sawbuck 1.x
**
Daniel Bosch directs the Writing Studio at Walnut Hill, an intensive arts training program for high school-aged writers in Natick, Massachusetts. His book Crucible was published by Handsel Books in 2002. More recently his poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Slate, Contemporary Poetry Review, and Literary Imagination.
**
from Rubble
October 2001-March 2003
Mortar sharp flatirons kissed goodnight
.........In nineteen forty, or in thirteen forty six
Dreams of an afterlife it spends held tight
.........By tons of brick.
Card tables crammed with Twin Towers tchotchkes,
.........The white blood cell halo of an infection,
Heal the sidewalks of lower Broadway
.........With transactions.
Monogrammed caps, t-shirts, cigarette lighters,
.........Chewing gum caddies, toe-socks—"F.D.N.Y"
Is a four-letter word. We merchandise
.........Ennui.
I shake a globe: I've always wanted to.
.........I never had the power: now, I’ve got it.
The seller eyes me. His crystal balls turn blue:
.........“You break it, you bought it."
I shake the globe. I'm the eye of a storm above
.........Victims and rescuers, nimble, nameless heroes
Memorialized—or trapped—in a blizzard of
.........Ground zeros.
My Thinkpad’s duct-taped to my window-sill—
.........And I keep an email terror-watch. I’ll rat on
Tom Ridge if I have to, and I’ll kill
.........For chaste Manhattan.
Rubble underfoot, it's hard to keep footing
.........The bill, to keep footing: our Birkenstock-shod
Brooks Brothers, born-again, are rooting
.........For the under god.
Troops rush in where angles fail to gel.
.........The Soviets, preoccupied, could never never lend
Afghani’s credit at a Crate and Barrel
.........Or Land’s End.
Kabul’s mujahideen-aged freedom fighters,
.........Singing, in Arabic, “We Shall Overcome,”
Kept Osip and the other Russian writers
.........Off their curriculum.
"Banana Republic"—once gringos would lose face
.........Faced with such consumption-without-borders.
Today we save on shipping when we place
.........New world orders.
Two-hundred and one-half years after the Bastille
.........Christmas eve finds Santa stuffing socks
With certified rubble: the Berlin Wall.
.........Democracy rocks.
A Pax Americana means pillows of wisdom
.........Like this: Good Arabs come in just two kinds—
"Self," and "Full." If we change lanes, or kingdoms,
.........Nobody minds.
In this corner, the concrete world’s opacity,
.........And in this, a Master’s in Business Administration.
The smackdown essay prompt: How is the O.P.E.C.
.........Like a gas station?
A thousand and one archangels of Allah
.........In souped-up S.U.V.s, could, at any minute,
Crash a hollow monument to the dollar
.........With people in it.
It follows that at E.Z. Driver Training,
.........Instructors will screen for fundamentalists
And turn in every student who’s complaining
.........She'll bomb the test.
The Homeland Security Handbook (preface by El-Al)
.........Has chapters on degrees of separation
Which argue that Bin Laden made a film
.........With Kevin Bacon.
Our sirens need new settings, like "Plausible"
.........And "Tentative." When our alarms say
No mission's impossible,
.........We're in harm's way.
My need to Fedex feels like a fetish.
.........Today's tight little package was a "rush."
The joy of shopping, direct from Uttar Pradesh,
.........Makes me blush.
Tribunals mean swift justice, silly!
.........It comes in tall, grande, and venti—
And for the export market, trial-sized. (We still
.........Have plenty.)
The W.T.O. c.c.'s the I.M.F.:
........."Our boys will fight and die for Two Day Air.
The future has arrived (in R.T.F.)
.........We'll take our share."
Heaven has no pre-set spending limits;
.........The Devil shops Old Navy, while in the image of man
Bush adds another camo' Admiral Nimitz
.........To his martial plan.
The rifle-bored sixteens of ol' Big Mo'
.........Once drew sharp beads on Tokyo's macadam.
But manned by J. Crew, will a smart bomb know
.........Daniel from Saddam?
With ships called H.O.P.E. and packages marked C.A.R.E.
.........And parenting "for just pennies a day,"
Our mouths meet our money precisely where
.........And how we pay.
Parents race past the park, eager to fork out.
.........Prodigies need prestige "Enrichment Nights,"
Preludes to the therapists who'll work out
.........Their appetites.
Through our picture window, a perforated brick,
.........Wrapped, like snapper, in the Village Voice,
Crashes, but the ransom note’s a slick
.........Subscription ploy.
"One man, one vote" is awfully hard to sell
.........Unless it comes with fiber optic cable
In Riyadh, women's suffrage waits until
.........We judge them able.
My a.m. clock radio with a high intensity
.........Lamp and a dedicated weather band
Stood for America, home of the free,
.........Made in Japan.
Evening. Late August, 1967.
.........A Harley Davidson trike's chrome spokes
Gleam in lamplight. With six or seven
.........Friends, my hippie brothers toke.
“Incoming!’ The hot roach of a joint, tossed
.........At the sight of my mom’s station
Wagon, arcs from the arc of my brothers’ "lost
.........Generation."
Gathered in the gloaming, hairy
.........In torn, patched denims,
His Janis Joplin girlfriends were much scarier
.........Than Eminem is.
High school dropouts with good teeth
.........And high I.Q.s waged intifada
And sang, under their breath,
........."O Canada."
Or bled into mud, so we were told,
.........Like Jim Ray Hart, shot passing ammunition,
Nineteen years old,
.........On his first "mission."
Afghan earth, straw, grey water from a well
.........In wooden buckets—no sign of a brigade.
Aquarius, the water-bearer, shuttles
.........Well for his age.
My coffee mug contains dark multitudes.
.........Brazilian robots weld our German bugs.
The third world cannot reasonably refuse
.........To sell us drugs.
Next time on The Airstrikes Road Show—
.........Taxpayer-funded reality T.V.—
Ten Empire-style G.I.s induce a faux
.........Antiquity.
November's cool: the oil that barrels in
.........Pumps up elected members. But Senate halls
Freeze up: they won't sing carols when
.........Viagra falls.
Democracy is temperate, but drops its leaves in
.........Strict accordance to eternal schemes;
God’s ordinance flags a proof of her belief in
.........Changing regimes.
To everything, a season. Is fall
.........In Kurdistan un saison d'enfer?
Day-glo leaflets precede autumnal
.........Literature.
“Collateral” means “running alongside,”
.........Or, in the case of certain F-16s,
“Canadians.” Semper Fi! Our fighter pilots fly
.........Amphetamines.
The world’s pain, condensed in little loaves,
.........Rises, but will not touch, the corrugated tin
Roof of a dug-in Afghan’s oven.
.........Hungry? Dig in.
The White House sends condolences—and bombs—
.........To friends of Condoleezza. She plays nice
With any one who won’t say “Uncle Tom’s
.........Converted Rice.”
Fickle “March” is a month and an order.
.........Today it follows “Peace,” maybe tomorrow
The nose of a gun. A lion, March murders.
.........A lamb—what follows?
Psst. Students are gathering. Pass the word—
.........But don’t bring video. We’re celebrating
Peace, hell yes, but wouldn’t want to hurt
.........Our credit ratings.
Snowflakes created at ungodly heights
.........Murmur the word ‘hexagon’ and fall.
The silent earth, dizzy, cold, and white,
.........Catches them all.
You say “Elegy,” I say “Eulogy”—
.........Let’s call it off. The point, translated,
Is: potahto liquor sells. Ideology’s
.........Been liquidated.
Blond Claudia Schiffer, her fly wide open,
.........Guesses from billboards while burkas file past
Observantly. Is it Islam we’re hoping
.........Is just a fad?
The first American to buy it from Iraqi
.........Fire is profiled on NPR.
A busload of nameless Syrians, less lucky,
.........Dies off the air.
Scissors cut paper. The rocks paper smothers,
.........Crushed into bricks and typecast as first stones,
Find walk-on parts oppressing untold others
.........In no-fly zones.
Glory hallelujah! This is vintage trampling
.........Of reason by wrath, but if Saddam escapes
A charge of treason won’t keep me from sampling
.........The sour grapes.
Two by fours measure
.........One and seven-eighths by
Three and three-quarters
.........But never lie.
Ricocheted reports of nail guns
.........Echoing across green hamlets’ acres
Pour concrete fiscal confidence
.........In players’ ears.
Truly, the shock that awes must come
.........When, watching one’s own statue topple,
ABC calls to offer you asylum
.........At Ted Koppel’s.
I wish the muse would pass me a hot tip!
.........I’m too deeply embedded
To test, empirically, rhymed gossip
.........That’s been vetted.
At poetry’s whetstone, dull axes of evil
.........Arc open-form sparks which fade to ash
Above the ramps our MFA Kneivels
.........Must jump for cash.
Our falcons aren’t deaf—it’s just our falconers.
.........Trained, from age 3, on Sega consoles
To believe they can shift the gyre into reverse
.........And save our souls.
America, birthplace of jazz and R&B,
.........The two-bit shave, the all-night washeteria,
And soul, once sang for freedom and for free.
.........Just like Siberia.
We don’t discriminate. Americans don’t have to
.........Rend our khakis or pull out our eyes.
It’s a free country! We’ll give the shaft to
.........Whoever’s buying.
Here poets drone, reduced to mere “voices”—
.........“Personal,” “distinct.” At verse’s re-christening
Critics fell silent about diction choices.
.........No one was listening.
My DVD revision of Love Story
.........Casts a poet as the scion who loves a girl
For telling him he needn’t say I’m sorry
.........About the world.
That was a close shave. My upturned sink’s the sky
.........And the sparrows that fly in spirals are just stubble
Tapped from the twin blades of a razor I
.........Bought with rubble.
Francois Villon apologized. He took
.........His raving back. He cried, he genuflected
Acrostically, and died. Only a book
.........Could resurrect him.
It’s only a book. If it falls, like a chunk of plaster,
.........An asbestos-coated hunk of concrete
Imagery, it won’t spell disaster
.........On the street.
I’m sorry as I can be
.........And still stay up late
Writing stanzas. Hand me
.........A brick? I need a paperweight.
**
return to sawbuck 1.x
**
Daniel Bosch directs the Writing Studio at Walnut Hill, an intensive arts training program for high school-aged writers in Natick, Massachusetts. His book Crucible was published by Handsel Books in 2002. More recently his poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Slate, Contemporary Poetry Review, and Literary Imagination.
