kate schapira
5 poems
**
Daybook of improved comfort
1. For warmth for thirst I go to people who have TVs. Who lean their heads together eat in a rush. The cell phone a thoroughgoing narcissist is my clock. Tumbling beef on TV gives way to bones in the center of a baseball diamond. Guilt is next.
2. Where do I go when I go, when I get the chance. I got a box for it. They come to complain the difficulty of getting sheets in Thailand, brought their own takeout, few words of Chinese. Redheaded daughter moves her lips. Whose lives were disrupted, the TV said.
3. Converted to anger how does it come out. Check your chains, your ass is in for it, and subsides. Privy to threats at the bargaining. No-man’s-land at close quarters. Are numbers real or whole tablature of who’s living in the computer, who’s dead.
4. On the following. A foray into pepper spray and accusation replaces digging out. Shift a beam. Return to the table. Turn on the earthquake. Interrupted how does it go over. The enemy has more metal. The phone rings.
5. Bring out extraneous letters my discharge of response. Tightly sealed shaker ask myself assure myself. Ignorance separated from mine, the TV blinks green pepper, a quality pillow, I blink. Remember to look up the definition of the word, “enemy.”
6. Be sure someone has my destination in mind. The world what’s wrong with you, fool without warning, asking like that. My life be not interrupted. Anger too small peapod rattle in passing. A chance to mention missing pictures moving without heat.
7. Scum of a month. Salt in a mouth. The traveler cedes priority to herself. In place watch another you can shake. I can’t help. Thinking I’d have bought fabric in a Thai market and put it a pettiness on the bed to expiate. To pay what I’d have done had I been.
**
In distress
Doesn’t matter who isn’t, only who is. All else is swamped. Those smooth-haired girls in it up to The Talk, which they’ve had, for all the good.
They are asleep—all of them, at all times. As you’re kinetic, so distress is all potential.
They take risks that grip you. Each pinpoint nerve a flaring crisis on the verge of every second, unlit but admissible biology calling your reflexes out. The kicks quicker than thought to bring a trembling vixen out of defeat. Distress is innocent before its rescue, as a bomb before it’s lit.
The world shortens to a dangling figure at the business end of a zoom lens. Make that a kaleidoscope, a question of who’ll be first with them: the hero or the ground. Which means failure. Which means death. Here, the one who fails is the one who’s left.
Death positions its thumbs under a jawbone. Sometimes you can beat it at chess, pull a swap, or outrun it, but it’s just doing its job, like gravity.
The day that may not come again for them if you do nothing will come again for you, more sinister than a bride. They’re veiled. Choose among them as you draw closer on whatever help you have—winged shoes, body armor, one of those cloaks—to your motivation. Conscious of their identical arms reaching whether or not you look: to whom are they hostage in that moment.
If you define yourself in saving them, what happens if you don’t? They’re draped and chained, they’re dangling from their own necessity. Not just their undoing in its nature, but yours too. This means you hate them a little as you work their wrists free. Their questions for you are cheap cuts, short shots, lunar processes that make you care less as they twitter and massage their fretful bones. As you belonged to their distress, so take it out of them, blackmailed, threatened, fated, accomplished. They have some explaining to do.
**
Tarasque
What persists, is it modern or ancient, the story of an encounter. Leaves, scales, dust, books, all are made of stone. In the version kids hear, there was only one. Or: there was only one reported.
The statue is or was in the Musée de l’Antiquité in Avignon. No one is looking. Anyone can touch it. Stone pits flesh against limitations because it doesn’t last as long, imitates, furthers, flatters its teeth, curly nostrils, noticeable erect cock between the back feet.
The monster: what is more.
Before the state, the language region. Before the quarry, the cedar forest. Would you have seen the moon moving. Would you have traveled by night to avoid the day-dry heat fearing, as you did, nothing, seeming secure under protection. Seeming enough, Saint Martha, as you come into the story.
When elements meet they begin to act. You brought a prayer book and a holy bottle. You brought authority, securely. The will to work performs itself, does what it says with serene confidence, looking down. Leaves scales: an identifier. Dust books: a command. Upon each other they perform stone actions, set, but this is hearsay. What the judge sentences you to is evidence.
After a whole year of hearsay between exertion and execution, they name the town, the version for grown-ups says, out of remorse, a language in which one says his or mine to invoke authority, to become penance, to back up with weapons.
Was he to you antiquity holding out? Marks of teeth on bones of safety? Baptize depictions, carvings; baptize whatever was there when you came. It was part of your job. You did it because you’d agreed to do everything like it. Nothing to discover, nothing to find out. The Luberon is like a plateau parts of which have sunken, not risen. The moon shone through its branches, the branches dry, everything not at its source dry. The experiment, if any, is in topography: it was unsafe to go into the wood, moon or no moon, but it was never safe. You became female and walked in alone. The stone animals were ranked on shelves. Some were old, some very old. Your fingertips tingled with use. No one was looking. Before that, there was no story.
The chaste saint, the tamer, beguiles and weakens. Righteousness is beguiled and weak, a conversion.
By naming the town, they claimed it for you, they took it over. Put the name to death in the square on that pale limestone. Who goes into the wood? Laborers. Couples looking to lie down. Bandits. Bad children. Hunters. Poor people. Rapists. Some villagers pasture their hogs, letting them loose on the narrower, silvery acorns. Who comes out of the wood?
In a dry climate, of all the things to do with water, who names? The name “tarasque” has been used by the French military as the common name for a towed (what did you lead it by) 20-mm anti-aircraft gun. They drag it out to the hillsides to practice killing each other. No one is calm.
Marthe, if the boys ask you to go into the wood, say you’re afraid of the tarasque. You either did or didn’t insist (regretfully) on the death of old fertility information. The virtue contained within it, the power vested. What do you do with a monster when you have him. When you catch him. When you kill him. When he is a monster. When he is young.
If the hero moved into the wood of her own will she would become a monster.
With holy water making a pattern, finding least resistance between scale and scale, you become tame. As if she had said, Hold still, remain in my hand. Quietly to the forest floor, a plain drip of properties. You never came home. You began to want what she wanted.
Knowing about the tarasque’s penis changes the way things usually do: as a monster that can’t change its nature. Is it a man who’d think a fair fight better, tooth to tooth? If all dream’s allegory the tarasque is or stands for. Who dreamed about you? Were they afraid of you? Monsters take longer. At the level of collection, someone passing through might remember: There were trees growing up through the streets. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. It was substance that passed into you, to nourish you.
The kids’ version isn’t sure, but it thinks the tarasque “had to be destroyed” although already rendered docile. Both versions agree or imply: “The tarasque offered no resistance, and died there.”
The true female, the monster hero, is not replaced, replaces. It is only better to be subdued by a woman or die if the only beings are men and monsters. Who became everyone’s tarasque, everyone’s distortion, who attended the execution?
Animal, you find you cannot swivel your eyes. How did she hear about you? What did she lead you by? Shiver, knowing. Monster and hero sing a dry duet where the toothmark, if it is a toothmark, is deep.
**
Post-mortem
The hero’s body lay on the grooved table. They filed by. Someone said, “Take what you want.” Birds took eyes, men sinews. The hyoid bone went for an amulet. Forcing the edges apart, there’s plenty left but he won’t renew himself, he can’t see himself.
Time eddies around the hero in his shrug of lionskin.
What did he die of? They probed for wounds or swellings. Birch trunks are whiter than seem possible, whiter than all but the oldest bones. People walking home in their uniforms swerved at the hero as if he were a cold spot.
A hero’s like a uniform that fills. As an empty stone square can fill, between the pump and the guards, with people or tanks. To hear a speech. To see a hero’s funeral, the conditional next step.
Do we want what we’re hungry for, what will keep, reduce our saddlebags, bring us luck, improve our nakedness, cover our children?
The wind tears down green leaves and green acorns.
Leftovers were jarred, subject to further staining and cross-sectioning. But is what makes him now what made him? A flat-footed assumption. A question with teeth in it. Cocktail of miracles steeping for later, when we need them.
**
In the future
(for Sam Kusnetz)
In the present the City of Las Vegas is paying
people to rip up their lawns. In the future my shoes
will get wet when the dew point is reached.
I’ll walk under the trees and think
of you in a very general way.
For all our desire to use business as a metaphor
we’re here a short time, speaking
words of exclusion and desparation. The cosmos grows
outside the hospital, the hospital like the center
of a merry-go-round, slowest.
Trouble remembering what happened this
morning suggests that time does travel
both ways, but badly. What’s that book
that describes the earth after all humans have died
and other questions: where will green and blue
come from, whose squall from under
red baby umbrella like a blown nasturtium will
demand a future of sunlight, of wet air
—We should be saying “our” about everything:
our calcium, our estradiol, our mercury
whether we’re proud or not. It’s not in fashion to feel
slightly hopeful and perfectible, but every
statement contains the implied, “up till now,”
the future so swaddled it’s hard
to tell—bandages or blankets.
Today it even seems possible.
**
return to sawbuck 3.2
**
Kate Schapira lives in Providence, RI, where she writes, teaches, makes chapbooks, and runs the Publicly Complex reading series. She's the author of Figure With Sunspots (Nasturtium Press, forthcoming 2009), The Love of Freak Millways and Tango Wax (Cy Gist Press, 2009), Case Fbdy. and The Painting (Rope-A-Dope Press, 2008) and Phoenix Memory (horse less press, 2007), and she's working on a collaborative poetic project called TOWN. She teaches nonfiction writing and poetry at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, and is helping to pilot an elementary-level Writers in the Schools Program.
**
Daybook of improved comfort
1. For warmth for thirst I go to people who have TVs. Who lean their heads together eat in a rush. The cell phone a thoroughgoing narcissist is my clock. Tumbling beef on TV gives way to bones in the center of a baseball diamond. Guilt is next.
2. Where do I go when I go, when I get the chance. I got a box for it. They come to complain the difficulty of getting sheets in Thailand, brought their own takeout, few words of Chinese. Redheaded daughter moves her lips. Whose lives were disrupted, the TV said.
3. Converted to anger how does it come out. Check your chains, your ass is in for it, and subsides. Privy to threats at the bargaining. No-man’s-land at close quarters. Are numbers real or whole tablature of who’s living in the computer, who’s dead.
4. On the following. A foray into pepper spray and accusation replaces digging out. Shift a beam. Return to the table. Turn on the earthquake. Interrupted how does it go over. The enemy has more metal. The phone rings.
5. Bring out extraneous letters my discharge of response. Tightly sealed shaker ask myself assure myself. Ignorance separated from mine, the TV blinks green pepper, a quality pillow, I blink. Remember to look up the definition of the word, “enemy.”
6. Be sure someone has my destination in mind. The world what’s wrong with you, fool without warning, asking like that. My life be not interrupted. Anger too small peapod rattle in passing. A chance to mention missing pictures moving without heat.
7. Scum of a month. Salt in a mouth. The traveler cedes priority to herself. In place watch another you can shake. I can’t help. Thinking I’d have bought fabric in a Thai market and put it a pettiness on the bed to expiate. To pay what I’d have done had I been.
**
In distress
Doesn’t matter who isn’t, only who is. All else is swamped. Those smooth-haired girls in it up to The Talk, which they’ve had, for all the good.
They are asleep—all of them, at all times. As you’re kinetic, so distress is all potential.
They take risks that grip you. Each pinpoint nerve a flaring crisis on the verge of every second, unlit but admissible biology calling your reflexes out. The kicks quicker than thought to bring a trembling vixen out of defeat. Distress is innocent before its rescue, as a bomb before it’s lit.
The world shortens to a dangling figure at the business end of a zoom lens. Make that a kaleidoscope, a question of who’ll be first with them: the hero or the ground. Which means failure. Which means death. Here, the one who fails is the one who’s left.
Death positions its thumbs under a jawbone. Sometimes you can beat it at chess, pull a swap, or outrun it, but it’s just doing its job, like gravity.
The day that may not come again for them if you do nothing will come again for you, more sinister than a bride. They’re veiled. Choose among them as you draw closer on whatever help you have—winged shoes, body armor, one of those cloaks—to your motivation. Conscious of their identical arms reaching whether or not you look: to whom are they hostage in that moment.
If you define yourself in saving them, what happens if you don’t? They’re draped and chained, they’re dangling from their own necessity. Not just their undoing in its nature, but yours too. This means you hate them a little as you work their wrists free. Their questions for you are cheap cuts, short shots, lunar processes that make you care less as they twitter and massage their fretful bones. As you belonged to their distress, so take it out of them, blackmailed, threatened, fated, accomplished. They have some explaining to do.
**
Tarasque
What persists, is it modern or ancient, the story of an encounter. Leaves, scales, dust, books, all are made of stone. In the version kids hear, there was only one. Or: there was only one reported.
The statue is or was in the Musée de l’Antiquité in Avignon. No one is looking. Anyone can touch it. Stone pits flesh against limitations because it doesn’t last as long, imitates, furthers, flatters its teeth, curly nostrils, noticeable erect cock between the back feet.
The monster: what is more.
Before the state, the language region. Before the quarry, the cedar forest. Would you have seen the moon moving. Would you have traveled by night to avoid the day-dry heat fearing, as you did, nothing, seeming secure under protection. Seeming enough, Saint Martha, as you come into the story.
When elements meet they begin to act. You brought a prayer book and a holy bottle. You brought authority, securely. The will to work performs itself, does what it says with serene confidence, looking down. Leaves scales: an identifier. Dust books: a command. Upon each other they perform stone actions, set, but this is hearsay. What the judge sentences you to is evidence.
After a whole year of hearsay between exertion and execution, they name the town, the version for grown-ups says, out of remorse, a language in which one says his or mine to invoke authority, to become penance, to back up with weapons.
Was he to you antiquity holding out? Marks of teeth on bones of safety? Baptize depictions, carvings; baptize whatever was there when you came. It was part of your job. You did it because you’d agreed to do everything like it. Nothing to discover, nothing to find out. The Luberon is like a plateau parts of which have sunken, not risen. The moon shone through its branches, the branches dry, everything not at its source dry. The experiment, if any, is in topography: it was unsafe to go into the wood, moon or no moon, but it was never safe. You became female and walked in alone. The stone animals were ranked on shelves. Some were old, some very old. Your fingertips tingled with use. No one was looking. Before that, there was no story.
The chaste saint, the tamer, beguiles and weakens. Righteousness is beguiled and weak, a conversion.
By naming the town, they claimed it for you, they took it over. Put the name to death in the square on that pale limestone. Who goes into the wood? Laborers. Couples looking to lie down. Bandits. Bad children. Hunters. Poor people. Rapists. Some villagers pasture their hogs, letting them loose on the narrower, silvery acorns. Who comes out of the wood?
In a dry climate, of all the things to do with water, who names? The name “tarasque” has been used by the French military as the common name for a towed (what did you lead it by) 20-mm anti-aircraft gun. They drag it out to the hillsides to practice killing each other. No one is calm.
Marthe, if the boys ask you to go into the wood, say you’re afraid of the tarasque. You either did or didn’t insist (regretfully) on the death of old fertility information. The virtue contained within it, the power vested. What do you do with a monster when you have him. When you catch him. When you kill him. When he is a monster. When he is young.
If the hero moved into the wood of her own will she would become a monster.
With holy water making a pattern, finding least resistance between scale and scale, you become tame. As if she had said, Hold still, remain in my hand. Quietly to the forest floor, a plain drip of properties. You never came home. You began to want what she wanted.
Knowing about the tarasque’s penis changes the way things usually do: as a monster that can’t change its nature. Is it a man who’d think a fair fight better, tooth to tooth? If all dream’s allegory the tarasque is or stands for. Who dreamed about you? Were they afraid of you? Monsters take longer. At the level of collection, someone passing through might remember: There were trees growing up through the streets. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. It was substance that passed into you, to nourish you.
The kids’ version isn’t sure, but it thinks the tarasque “had to be destroyed” although already rendered docile. Both versions agree or imply: “The tarasque offered no resistance, and died there.”
The true female, the monster hero, is not replaced, replaces. It is only better to be subdued by a woman or die if the only beings are men and monsters. Who became everyone’s tarasque, everyone’s distortion, who attended the execution?
Animal, you find you cannot swivel your eyes. How did she hear about you? What did she lead you by? Shiver, knowing. Monster and hero sing a dry duet where the toothmark, if it is a toothmark, is deep.
**
Post-mortem
The hero’s body lay on the grooved table. They filed by. Someone said, “Take what you want.” Birds took eyes, men sinews. The hyoid bone went for an amulet. Forcing the edges apart, there’s plenty left but he won’t renew himself, he can’t see himself.
Time eddies around the hero in his shrug of lionskin.
What did he die of? They probed for wounds or swellings. Birch trunks are whiter than seem possible, whiter than all but the oldest bones. People walking home in their uniforms swerved at the hero as if he were a cold spot.
A hero’s like a uniform that fills. As an empty stone square can fill, between the pump and the guards, with people or tanks. To hear a speech. To see a hero’s funeral, the conditional next step.
Do we want what we’re hungry for, what will keep, reduce our saddlebags, bring us luck, improve our nakedness, cover our children?
The wind tears down green leaves and green acorns.
Leftovers were jarred, subject to further staining and cross-sectioning. But is what makes him now what made him? A flat-footed assumption. A question with teeth in it. Cocktail of miracles steeping for later, when we need them.
**
In the future
(for Sam Kusnetz)
In the present the City of Las Vegas is paying
people to rip up their lawns. In the future my shoes
will get wet when the dew point is reached.
I’ll walk under the trees and think
of you in a very general way.
For all our desire to use business as a metaphor
we’re here a short time, speaking
words of exclusion and desparation. The cosmos grows
outside the hospital, the hospital like the center
of a merry-go-round, slowest.
Trouble remembering what happened this
morning suggests that time does travel
both ways, but badly. What’s that book
that describes the earth after all humans have died
and other questions: where will green and blue
come from, whose squall from under
red baby umbrella like a blown nasturtium will
demand a future of sunlight, of wet air
—We should be saying “our” about everything:
our calcium, our estradiol, our mercury
whether we’re proud or not. It’s not in fashion to feel
slightly hopeful and perfectible, but every
statement contains the implied, “up till now,”
the future so swaddled it’s hard
to tell—bandages or blankets.
Today it even seems possible.
**
return to sawbuck 3.2
**
Kate Schapira lives in Providence, RI, where she writes, teaches, makes chapbooks, and runs the Publicly Complex reading series. She's the author of Figure With Sunspots (Nasturtium Press, forthcoming 2009), The Love of Freak Millways and Tango Wax (Cy Gist Press, 2009), Case Fbdy. and The Painting (Rope-A-Dope Press, 2008) and Phoenix Memory (horse less press, 2007), and she's working on a collaborative poetic project called TOWN. She teaches nonfiction writing and poetry at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, and is helping to pilot an elementary-level Writers in the Schools Program.
Labels: 3.2, kate schapira
