Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Baby
of a tiger in the jungle…perhaps.”–Bushido
In the orange overcast.
Hover like fronds.
A door slides open.
As a blade…
Lighter’s ornamental pearl.
Like a submarine
Means someday baby you’ll commune
What do you want me to do?
Doughy fist in the human grasp.
like balls of sheet music singing cusps
of snow, atavistic & keening.
Within each ivory pecan is a faded blond kazoo.
Storefront evangelists gasping proper
& faithful–sock swooping,
seeing the dead end of time:
The field was a lady young and fair
And died just groaning in despair.
Austere zither shadow-paints the mighty & meek,
in a jagged barrel up to the neck in salt.
Let the rains come down hard as a rail.
in their strict declamatory beams.
Let the cotton glomp together as a consolidation
of domination.
Snow launched for eleven fat ensembles.
A floating bridge dying like jasper & sugar.
Lukewarm night and morning appetite.
Radiant, unoccupied, & raspy the field was heard.
The tambourine rattles like a cloven hoof:
Your mother and father, fare you well,
Your wicked daughter is doomed to hell.
Within each white bulb is a white balloon:
sizzling filament clinches a fist of white.
A plant’s imprimatur as the pages unfold their map.
Within each ivory pecan is a faded blond kazoo.
We must love / we must love for the field
to care for us. In the field / in the field
we ought to trust.
The Devil’s headlamp stalks the red cells
in a mouse miles from itself—the yellow lens
is resinous, fat, dense as pearl firming-up
& renders its beam heavy with currents.
Into a dustbowl of annihilation the rotating head
seizes its empire of blood; a storm collapses each
mouse bone as the threnody of rain crushes the air.
Bat
Their music is a quiet submitted to order by darkness.
To translate their invisible wind is to sculpt a gastronomy
of the eye. They hang with their backs to the cave’s engine.
Each ungodly contralto splits the radio-beam into a blister.
Sucking a berry from its root, they are a single purple wing.
Do not tread in the sweeping arc where this puffing locomotive
swallows the engineered airstream. It is a silent calypso.
Bumblebee
They unfurl their jerseys from Mexico to Miami
in an anatomic miasma darkening their bunker.
They are darts of themselves, swallowing the porchlight
melting in the melon punch & fists of downpour.
Their stuffy plunking ignites a redline to the stucco ceiling.
Curling clockwise like a coaxing faucet
their fronds dust a car horn in a polyp concerto.
but the ill also flee from the healthy,
like a wasp dying from the cardboard house,
and this explains perfectly
the tunnel entrance, dripping
with water into the seeping floor.
Hold onto your possessions
with your teeth, said the prophet,
and death with its cherry blossom
and insomnia, will move on.
What is it like to be burned?
Do you simply move toward
pain or cling, with fever,
to your right not to live?
The mayor of Peoria
moaned like a pink cocoon,
the bed did creak,
and the candle’s nude tangoed on the walls.
The fire’s black wings and the yellow
bodies flutter above the filth
and I desire and look no one
in the eye, when I enter.
At the moment one’s torture begins,
one’s covenant
with other human beings is lost forever.