Jim’s Barn #5 Series, Pastel, by John Cummings
Monday Night Bashing
His collapsed esophagus
like a wrung tube sock
with a knot
and thirteen broken
ribs kindling
for the fire
in the defendants’ guts.
Who claim he’d flashed
a chipped-tooth pomegranate grin
as he bumped and pawed
his way through the local dive
and still waved farewell
with heel-bruised hands
when they left the club and thumped
across the bridge back into town.
By Wednesday his body rebroke
the surface of a quiet lake channel
bubbling up like a last
trace of gas
from the bottom
of a murky beer glass.
Note the settled blood
the fading rigor mortis
the final relaxation;
report the search of his pockets
finding a marble resembling
the eye of a trout,
the weighing down
of his lids with coins;
timestamp the arranged last ride.
Wander by
the abandoned easement
where wreckage washes up
to glimpse his abandoned cabin
flaking paint tilted
by termites
window frames lined
with glass shards
tall grass littered
with crushed cans cut
fishing line collected
among the water weeds.
____________________
David A. Goodrum
Review by Jared Pearce
The first simile really cranks-up the poem. From there the images roll us through: we don’t know who this guy is, but we know enough.
Review by Jane Ann Fuller
Any poem that starts, “His collapsed esophagus/like a wrung tube sock/with a knot,” promises to deliver language that lets the reader know exactly what’s happening in the physical realm (someone got punched darn hard in the throat, or strangled) and at the same time to provide a drama that hooks the reader, hard. I knew I was in the midst of a poem that was going to make me see something and so feel something. I was privy to a brutal event. I was eager to read on, to experience how the story, how the poem would work itself out.
What makes Goodrum’s poem so effective is its evocative language and its ability to not say too much. What’s left out of the poem resonates, but obviously, so does what’s there. The language is stirring without being histrionic. The speaker dissolves into the drama, so the tone is evenly paced, non-judgmental, but philosophical. At first the reader gets to experience the language of the drama, the “bashing” of a man’s body. Images stick, “chipped-tooth pomegranate grin,” “heel-bruised hands,” “bumped…pawed his way through,” the body that “[re-broke]/the surface of a quiet lake channel.” The brutality is almost lost in the beauty of the description. There’s more to the poem, however, than the drama. The engaged reader is rewarded with the subtleties beneath that drama.
Why do we care that a bar fight leaves a man we know little about, dead? Is the poem making political commentary on the scourge of too much drink? Or waste incurred at the hands of human brutality?—“and thirteen broken/ ribs kindling/for the fire/in the defendant’s guts.” Perhaps, but I think it’s more than that. For the man we barely know, except through the poetic dissection of his broken body, carried a marble in his pocket. And what type of man might bother to do that? Someone who believes in the guidance of a talisman or who longs after a childhood memory? Someone who takes comfort in the practice of meditation? We will never know, but the marble makes the man relatable, dimensional in a way that opens the reader’s heart a little and leaves us feeling that the destruction of this life, if not tragic, is at least relevant to us. The final images bring that home: “the abandoned easement/where wreckage washes up/to glimpse his abandoned cabin/flaking paint tilted/by termites//window frames lined/with glass shards/tall grass littered//with crushed cans cut/fishing line collected/among the water weeds.” The body, like the fishing line, was cut short, laid to waste, and who of us has not felt the significance of this kind of loss if not for our own lives, for the lives of those we have known and cared for deeply? Finally, the marble, “resembling the eye of a trout,” prompts me to say it is symbolic of the visionary. What the sight of a dead man might mean (whether his own seeing or his being the object of someone else’s), what that might portend, falls in our laps. For that reason, among others, this poem stays with me, and I feel I’m in the presence of something much larger than myself.
Review by Nathan E. Lewis
On first read, I think, “Goodrum needs help with his spacing bar.” Actually, I put off reading this poem for a few weeks, unwilling, subconsciously to deal with the spaces in the lines. My second thought is, “I’m not up on poetry trends, and so, I may learn something through investigating and vocalizing the spaces.” Boom! Gold.
The imagery is unique. My favorite – a marble in the pocket…the eye of the trout… coins on the corpse’ eyelids. I don’t know…perhaps my favorite is corpse bubbles in the lake…like gas bubbles in a glass of beer. Images of death can revert to overused language – buckets and passage across a river…Goodrum makes coins on the eyelids work as he couches this language in unique expression. He uses water imagery yet finds a new expression of it. Death is prominent in poetry as it is so common in our experience. Goodrum resists describing death at midnight and chooses to set the timing on Wednesday. We never know when death will strike.
The timing of this poem is what intrigues me – the spaces and the language.