Hugh Behm-Steinberg
4 poems
**
Where You Want To Go
The open you wrote. The long live with. The ship you float, the sails made out of you. Sailing at night, sailing at day in some new direction. You sleep listening to the shortwave radio. The wind pulses us, puts us back in your thoughts. Turn us and our boat. Our ending into short term memory. The small mice aboard the boat. The rope in coils, the tar, the men who shelter them, the mice, the rope, the tar. You shelter them in exchange for their secrets, they whisper with their mouse breath, rope breath, tar breath, the whisper in port accents they push you. This is how you get to where you want to go.
**
Funerary Concerns
How much, is wound, is winding, is a coffin to drink from, is a coffin to swim in, is the best house a medieval man would ever want, is the last house anyone gets, plush outsides, smooth interiors in which to pool into, be sure to request holes so time will work faster on you, spare you the humiliation of ancient Egyptians, whose bodies became Nova science specials and exhibits for schoolchildren in the Brooklyn museum. Drink from a very small cup as much as you like, sit at a table and ignore all the Vikings, at the end of time look down at where your body used to be, as they cram so many Christians into it.
**
Stature
What is a surface, what is left cancelled, who writes your letters of recommendation. Aside is good. Chairs, chairs made out of feathers, all kinds of you. As a town is a surface, is scarcely what it is. Then water it awhile, make it smell good. So that you’re a knot, and nobody’s going to untie you, you’re going to be known for your gold and orchards of thorn trees, kings will come to prize your thorns, their vipers will bite you and become Christians, the minister of silence will chew a piece of you, and towns named after you will swallow their daughters, the wheels of their parents will write you letters of recommendation.
**
Complete
My city is shaped like a herring, and today a young tree. Between branches wire, daily life, girders. The edges spread out into parts you might live in, highways and trainlines take you and bring you home by keeping you still while they push the places around, it’s convenient the way so much time is taken from you, as you are taken out of time like a city. Center which is worry, to worry, is to make a space in the center, honoring the body and the earth which is hollow, so the city is like a pancake cooking with many bubbles, the city is like rice covered with eyes so you know it’s complete, like the earth is complete or your body when it stops being hollow.
**
return to sawbuck 3.1
**
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and Sorcery (Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv). He teaches in the graduate writing program at California College of the Arts, where he is the faculty editor of Eleven Eleven.
**
Where You Want To Go
The open you wrote. The long live with. The ship you float, the sails made out of you. Sailing at night, sailing at day in some new direction. You sleep listening to the shortwave radio. The wind pulses us, puts us back in your thoughts. Turn us and our boat. Our ending into short term memory. The small mice aboard the boat. The rope in coils, the tar, the men who shelter them, the mice, the rope, the tar. You shelter them in exchange for their secrets, they whisper with their mouse breath, rope breath, tar breath, the whisper in port accents they push you. This is how you get to where you want to go.
**
Funerary Concerns
How much, is wound, is winding, is a coffin to drink from, is a coffin to swim in, is the best house a medieval man would ever want, is the last house anyone gets, plush outsides, smooth interiors in which to pool into, be sure to request holes so time will work faster on you, spare you the humiliation of ancient Egyptians, whose bodies became Nova science specials and exhibits for schoolchildren in the Brooklyn museum. Drink from a very small cup as much as you like, sit at a table and ignore all the Vikings, at the end of time look down at where your body used to be, as they cram so many Christians into it.
**
Stature
What is a surface, what is left cancelled, who writes your letters of recommendation. Aside is good. Chairs, chairs made out of feathers, all kinds of you. As a town is a surface, is scarcely what it is. Then water it awhile, make it smell good. So that you’re a knot, and nobody’s going to untie you, you’re going to be known for your gold and orchards of thorn trees, kings will come to prize your thorns, their vipers will bite you and become Christians, the minister of silence will chew a piece of you, and towns named after you will swallow their daughters, the wheels of their parents will write you letters of recommendation.
**
Complete
My city is shaped like a herring, and today a young tree. Between branches wire, daily life, girders. The edges spread out into parts you might live in, highways and trainlines take you and bring you home by keeping you still while they push the places around, it’s convenient the way so much time is taken from you, as you are taken out of time like a city. Center which is worry, to worry, is to make a space in the center, honoring the body and the earth which is hollow, so the city is like a pancake cooking with many bubbles, the city is like rice covered with eyes so you know it’s complete, like the earth is complete or your body when it stops being hollow.
**
return to sawbuck 3.1
**
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and Sorcery (Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv). He teaches in the graduate writing program at California College of the Arts, where he is the faculty editor of Eleven Eleven.
Labels: 3.1, hugh behm-steinberg
