Bruce Smith

Dear Experience

I waited for you.  I stopped and waited and you never …

Experience means spirited away from danger.  Ex – periculum, away

from the perilous.  Danger is theater if you live complicitly here,

life if you live ardently there, over there, Behind the Shelf, said Dickinson. 

A discourse only for the dexterous, the well-versed is what it has become. 

The discourse for the adept and expert, like jazz.  You

in your knowing clothes like a lover.  With your lips and teeth.

Your Face/Would put out Jesus’, said Dickinson.  I waited in another century

with the suffragettes.  I called it my legacy, my memory, my summer, my dark money,

my music, my ecstasy.  I demanded to be treated as a political prisoner.

So much of the discourse is dangerous.  Deeds not words, the suffragettes said. 

So much of the discourse is sweetness and strangeness and lavishness

seeking shape or shape seeking…  I waited to ambush oneness. 

From behind the shelf, I waited while you saturated sight. 

I lived here, perilously, in someone else’s desire.  I smashed windows

and attacked paintings.  I took down the cricket pavilion.  I threw myself

under the King’s horse.  What’s the opposite of archive? 

Mayfly, flame, lyric, the jilted X-ed out nouns, the scourging of Palestine.

The discourse only for the masters is what it has become. 

For the rest, smoke, and gas that smelled like cut grass.  Votes for Women

burnt into the grass of golf courses.  The rest of us waiting in the residue

of looking and feeling.  I waited To shut the Other’s Gaze down – .

I waited for gravity, clemency.  Pericolo in Italian, danger, hazard of empire

and its decline, we take samples of though measuring the body burden.

Low levels of spirit, low levels of squandering, unsuspected pleasure

in the residuals, seeing your face, touching a sordid excellence, said Dickinson.

Dear Linda

A soul formed by small amounts of female anger over time.

My mother, the Marine.  Lucille Clifton, the claims clerk.

A whip of white paint across the portrait of the master.

And large amounts of blue which makes an adolescent sadness.

Sadness is the wrong word, more a murmur from the fetal heartbeat –

like wind in the trees, arterial rumble, valve sound – something like

a muted radio repeating the news, mostly everyone loves someone’s repeating,

Stein said, mostly everyone then comes to know then the being

of someone by loving the repeating in them.  News or songs with a small

string section or the jankiness of a guitar, two honeyed chords

and a death wish.  A soul formed by her music or by ignoring,

evading her music.  Soul is the wrong word, more inner noise,

more recurring storms, genetic codes, and firearms, my mother,

the Marine knew the sound of a safety being released,

and Lucille Clifton knew the catalog of woes and afflictions,

told through a small window: the bankrupt odes.  Linda, writing

is haunting as Boston is haunting.  It wants darlings, wants needle work,

forgiveness, fumes, snow, wages.   Some other self is aspiring

as it is dying.  How can you jump all those white creatures

and remain the same?  No sleep ‘til Oakland where Somalian Irish boys

speak Irish, colonization plaid, a new chord.  Notes held, a sound

that accompanies the female singers and the law that is broken

by their singing and the doors that are open to large amounts of blue

and a whip of white paint across the portrait of the master.