The Gate, Taos N.M. Series, Pastel,
by John Cummings
After Reading the Lines Suffering and / Ascendance
require the same work by Terrance Hayes
As in one who obsessively organizes and disorganizes her desk
until the medical, the financial documents
in plain sight the bright light of death holds its glow over each of
us and we get down on our knees we bend to it.
We slather. We salivate. We never enough. This tarry-tariff this
tax. All of it formal or informal either way we’re finished.
While outside the wind riffs through aspen leaves the light bounces
off does a little dance.
Sex ain’t love it’s only the brief quickening of blood, only one brace
of ducks and all of them hung dead by their feet.
___________________
Nancy Christopherson
Review by Jared Pearce
This poem surprises and delights me with the images—images that are fresh. I love the avalanche of images in the third couplet and the brace of ducks at the end (which takes me back to one of The Odyssey’s stunning scenes, but reimagined).
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
The death of a disco dancer / Well, it happens a lot ‘round here / And if you think peace is a common goal / That goes to show how little you know. The Smiths. Death of a disco dancer
Like a rope tugged by stallions in the polar opposite directions of order and disorder, gravity and centrifugal force, earth and heavens, sex and love, contraction and expansion, we are stuck inside an immobility that is all movement (and the only movement we know), stuck under a pressure that compresses us from all sides, edging towards the point of imploding. Poems like these are extremely valuable, as they call out life for what it is, shedding a light, a little dance on the so-called existence. We will read other poems in this issue centered on the matter of dealing with this pull and push, this only apparent contradictions in our journey. How do we unknot ourselves from all the false beliefs? To whom shall we lay this burden of dead game and dead answers? I think this poem captures the complexity of what being human means.
Review by J. S. Absher
The poem has striking phrasing, abetted by omission of conjugated “to be” in a couple of places I’d expect it, and omission of coordinating conjunction or punctuation between some clauses. The disorder in the syntax abets compression and perhaps reflects the state of mind of one disarranged by death. The final image is striking. It is saddening, but with an undercurrent of unexpected wit, calling to mind and charging with new meaning the expression “dead duck” in common language.