MICHAEL
QUATTRONE
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Michael Quattrone’s poems are impressively various. Some younger
poets paint themselves into a corner, following one mentor or school without
having sampled enough of the field. Quattrone is his
own man, and the proof is that his poems embrace such a wide range of impulses,
forms, tones, and subjects. He may derive one poem from a newspaper article,
another from the elaboration of a trope, a third from the structure of an
inventory. He is a poet of “existential paranoia” but in
another mood he is lustily high-spirited, and he can also write unabashedly
about the love of a father for his young daughter. The form is suitable to the
occasion, as the elegy for John Berryman (“
--David Lehman
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self-portrait
A rhinoceros in a
rose garden, I ruminate, take no steps.
I bow my horn before the bees and tolerate the birds who
perch, enjoy the company. I eye the
action, pound the ground, chew air, snore loudly and sleep on my feet. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes winds blow. I thank them, take credit, or forget. I want a cigarette, but fear embarrassment. I am a rhinoceros: no smoke, no fire. I stare toward winter.
Fleas begin to eat
my hide. I twitch my tail,
flutter my ears, blink, swallow, smile.
My laugh thunders. My eyes water. I
weigh options. I weigh several
tons. I could charge the beds, stampede,
escape, leave blood-petals, dust clouds, frying pan
prints. I worry about the future.
I indulge in
fantasy. At times I adorn myself with
tusks. The earth hardens beneath
me. It rains, I repel water. I have back pain, I grimace. There is a song stuck in my head. I stopped singing it. I hate that song.
Rose bushes sway
like clouds, bob like buoys, blush like daughters, slump
like rhinos. They effervesce at
dawn. My lids fly at half-mast. Suspicions? Paranoia? Lethargy? Defeat? I thrive here. I try to slough off self-pity. Ever seen a rhinoceros yawn? Stretch?
I do not move in
moonlight or try to tiptoe. I bathe in obscurity, wish someone would notice, bring in a
helicopter. Winter hastens. The earth churns up a stepping stone. Patience works. Evolution: all that follows is a
weight-bearing exercise, a physics experiment.
Balance, a demand for grace.
I will return to
the roses. It’s inevitable. Next year I might learn to jump or grow
feathers, who knows? I am familiar with
myself by now. Also, I surprise
myself. There is something to be said
for each. And there is something to be
said for roses.
three
The way the rain
makes dark objects shine,
and other methods of
evoking love and loss.
The way light casts
invisible beams, not like
the rafters of a barn,
dark wood exposed,
but like a honey
colored pane seen only
when reflected by the floating
dust or smoke.
The way absence can
undo the face. Smoke
from a cigarette wafts
in your eyes that way—
the same way onions
seep their juice inside
your brain and coax its
citrus from your ducts.
These are the ways
I am finding to love you
and fear, already at
the beginning, your loss.
The way you slipped
into this world through a cut,
the way I will cut
myself out of it to tell the tale.
The way I do not
know what everything means,
or even most of
it. None, in fact. No word
or tune, no shade of any
color. The way I wish
I could explain
before it grows too late the shifts
I cannot explain
before it’s too, too late. Later
even than I had
originally imagined when
it was not yet too
late. Before I recognized I
did not know what
everything meant. That way—
or how confusion can
seem shameful, bad;
or how badness eats
at us, we eat ourselves;
or how we do not
eat. How we grow hungry,
ever more hungry at the
thought of death.
The way the rain
makes dark objects glisten,
the way you slipped into
this world through a cut.
The way I will cut
myself out of it to tell the tale,
and other methods of
evoking love and fear.
The ways I am
casting your brain at the beginning,
the rafters of a barn,
the dice of a kitchen knife
the way I had
originally imagined. Or else the way
we long to lick dark
objects for their juices,
or eat the cigarette
of any color, coax its smoke
into the honey colored
light from your ducts—
or even most of it,
in fact, dark wood exposed
before it wafts
away. Not like a word, an onion,
an invisible cut
reflected by the floating dust.
These are the ways
I am finding to love you,
or how confusion can
seem shameful, bad.
The way your brain
knows everything I mean.
underground conversation
from The New York Times
A hundred cell phones bloom,
A hundred
honeysuckle throats
Sing out: sap
sprung from one
Hundred
retractable stamens.
It is the season of
protest.
A hundred cell phones bloom,
And Chinese take to
the streets.
Americans stay home:
the pursed
Tulips of
And colorful, as
bright as bulbs
Buried
in median sod.
A hundred cell phones bloom
To riot, pollinate
Red China,
Make the
International Noise.
The march of April
is the rage:
Witness
Revolution, the
conspiracy of
Violet, her
subversive cohorts
Mobilized.
A hundred cell phones bloom,
Unchoked by government
plants.
Not plucked out at
the roots,
Not nipped in buds,
they inflame!
The public buzz
will burn a secret
Ring around the
modern world.
Will we remember this?
The generation when
we all
Carried flowers in
our pockets,
In
our holsters.
Jim Yardley contributed reporting
for this
article.
Inventory
Twelve dark woods—
aspen, yellow, Italian,
willow . . . ;
One hundred small black birds in flight;
The usual shuffling of dawns & nights;
A sheaf of papers, postage stamps—
between pages four &
five, one dead
dragonfly;
Several paths, some taken, some untrod—
many narrow, forked
and winding;
& the moon a-makin’
all
those pretty phases down
on us;
Three or four crashed cars; A nation full
of adolescents,
ill-equipped and unrequited;
A miscellany of old objects—
lots the size of fists;
& other relics—one Greek urn, an
albatross,
the fossil of a cat, a
pretty shield,
some mind-forged
manacles
from across the pond
(rusted, strong);
Volumes; Volumes untranslated
&
A single jar, ambiguous & round;
Also,
a fish, or sixty-six;
Fifty swaddled infants, none alike—
sleeping, crying, cold or hungry,
bedded down upon four dozen
wildflower nests, most wet with dew;
Some scores of riflemen, their faces
charred—
anesthetized by
pirates’ casks of rum;
The pirate ship on which the rum was run—
including sails & miles of rope
and a busty figurehead, to promise hope;
One signet ring that once was worn with
pride—
some shallow scratches on its underside;
One Bible & one
printing press.
A thousand thousand
leaves—
of paper, grass and also
trees,
goodbyes . . . ;
No memories, but tarnished mirrors—
harmoniously framed;
An orgone box; A power saw; A shotgun;
Tack and saddle, battle leggings—
in fact an armory entire,
transcontinental, old & new,
most origins unknown;
Bamboo shoots & river reeds;
Scrollwork from dead dynasties;
The Pyramids; The
Holy Grail;
Five million television sets—
no black-&-whites;
One pail of seashells; Shovelfuls of sand;
Water—more than can
conceivably be measured
by the mind of man;
A buzzing fly; A
coffin lid; One can of worms;
Two katydids; A
colander & Forty mice;
Existential paranoia; Tuneless instruments;
Orchestral staves—
composed in minor & in
major keys;
Eighty tons of eggshells, not one egg;
Two plastic models of the brain and heart;
Enough roses to choke a large rhinoceros to
death;
A large rhinoceros, possibly dying;
One rubber chicken; One
red herring;
Ten modern works of art on auto parts;
A gramophone, a telegraph, a metronome;
An epitaph carved nicely on a stone—
these things &
others here,
left unrecorded by
constraint of space,
may be reclaimed at the
eleventh hour:
knock twice upon the
window, once the ground,
go quickly then &
silently
around the back &
there the door
will open unexpectedly
below the floor;
your identity will be
confirmed,
the thing you lost,
expediently found
and so returned—
Proof
of ownership shall be required.
Memo
is my poem about the
hemorrhoids a fortunate happenstance or do
you fib when you say
you admire gentle ass-poetics on a leash of
these burgundy flounder
truffles I daily bind with straps of fuscia taffeta
to the holistic
fundamentalist trinity of my cock
and balls? or were you joshua-ing
me you jerichobean jerk-off reference-
maker—gone in a hazel
misted orbit round the weathered friends of planetoid
erstwhile—psychoanalysis sodomizes all my soft fleshy particles of faith in
ten doses of the best
blue-blooded amphetamine-stapled gas relief medication as in the battle
of a dirty dozen bioflavors in the sweetness of your cherry shaped from the
outside anyway mouth
when I repeatedly say
the reveries of the rich are for the foolish enough to believe them for
instance camel dung was
supposed to be a healing remedy for desert herpes pustules
affordable less than my rent
however ‘nice’ it was of my grandmother to die a little early
in a building that
allows me to lecture on pet-care ethics every thursday
in the entryway by the mailboxes
I meant to qualify simplex f above and
below I will continue to qualify until you tell me yes
the aquarium octopi have
wrung you free of megatons of self-pity and the relentless
despising of others to the
point of near self-publication and licking of my own peach fuzzy
nipples in as gratuitous a
manner as any head cheerleader could muster evidently airborne?
can you radiate the
rational assessment of incestuous efficiency from beneath such perspiration
you pigeon feathered
motherfucker? or not?
my shrinkologist
knows the difference between
what I want and what
I’m actually able to accomplish as long as I mentally keep translucent
suspender pincers fastened
to my fascinating scrotum sack prosthetic and designed by class
advisors to the elephant’s
ace-bandage security team—they know me from way back
when in forgone
conclusive egotism I hopped into a centrifuge to perm my pubes
since then I’ve embarked
on fragmented episodes of post-ecological haberdashery
financed by a large bird
named Pad Thai fuck the decree about proper nouns however capitalistic
who refuses to speak
to me in sign language inscribed on the fossilized egg you devoured
piecemeal in lieu of
scrambling the satellite radio waves forever lost like pigs in space
cordoned off by
contemptible authorities on nougat plundering the way I like it
soft and creamy with a spanking
triggered by riotous laughter of phantasmagoric pointillism
o no I’m late for my
legacy waxing salon accompanied by philologism
canapés
deserving rife beacon
sucking on primetime network subjugation game show reality
—Just a note to let you know . . . you
died.
& folks are calling it a suicide.
As if your Daddy’d triggered it in you,
or else the booze’d beckoned down below
the bridge. Not
John Allyn’s
body: the
where who found yours
(decades older
than he was when he got yours),—
Your toy, your dream, your restlessness . .
. YOUR THOUGHT
made pockets & the
plane buckt.
What got
you, eh? Boy outside OK, Pussycat
your tongue, & that
Learin’ Fool your berry mind? (O,
Henry moans!)
—Thass a dance to
beat the bandleader, Mr. Bones.
Pal, Henry’s screwing his courage to the drinking place
—Ought he be wiser
sticking, staying so? —Why
the bleak face?
Farewell thou crumpled sheet, dark ink upon
it—
Fie!
Fie ‘Epistemology of loss’ (Ha! ha!) & songs!
—Sir Bones:
De life’s a longish sonnet.
Daughter
Daughter, at the
end
of your fifteenth day
I fall
(more in love with
you)
asleep. You float up
above me, light and like
a
paper ether cone . . .
Come back, come
back, you
naughty little ballooner!
It’s your bedtime now.
Late One Night
Which is more
delightful or embarrassing—
that on the threshold
of my kitchen
I thought I saw this shadow cast—
my penis hanging on
the wall across from me
before I realized that I
was dressed—
or that I
subsequently looked to see
what the shadow really
was and found
it was the goosenecked faucet of my sink—
with a spraying nozzle
fastened on
the end?