Black Eyes & Black Dogs

Yesterday I dropped a 15-lb steel bar on my eye. At such times, of course, one turns to poetry—first for the stream of invective, then for more measured reflection. Robert Lowell comes to mind:


EYE AND TOOTH
—Robert Lowell

My whole eye was sunset red,
the old cut comes throbbed,
I saw things darkly,
as through an unwashed goldfish globe.

I lay all day on my bed.
I chain-smoked through the night,
learning to flinch
at the flash of the matchlight.

Outside, the summer rain,
a simmer of rot and renewal,
fell in pinpricks.
Even new life is fuel.

My eyes throb.
Nothing can dislodge
the house with my first tooth
noosed in a knot in the doorknob.

Nothing can dislodge
the triangular blotch
of rot on the red roof,
a cedar hedge, or the shade of a hedge.

No ease from the eye
of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,
with reddish brown buffalo hair
on its shanks, one ascetic talon

clasping the abstract imperial sky.
It says:
an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth.

No ease for the boy at the keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women's white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.

Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on those waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.

__________________

Okay, I exaggerate. Thanks to the miracles of ice and anti-inflammatories, I don't even have a shiner, and I definitely didn't take to my bed. Too bad: I had trotted out all the cliches and lined them up on top of my computer. "You shoulda seen the other guy...!"

Still, let's celebrate the shiner. Send me a poem about black eyes—real or metaphorical, your own or someone else's—and I'll send you a copy of James DenBoer's new chapbook, Black Dog: An Unfinished Segue Between Two Seasons. A Black Dog for a black eye—seems like a good trade.

One more from Lowell:


I. MOTHER AND SON
—Robert Lowell

Meeting his mother makes him lose ten years,
Or is it twenty? Time, no doubt, has ears
That listen to the swallowed serpent, wound
Into its bowels, but he thinks no sound
Is possible before her, he thinks the past
Is settled. It is honest to hold fast
Merely to what one sees with one's own eyes
When the red velvet curves and haunches rise
To blot him from the pretty driftwood fire's
Facade of welcome. Then the son retires
Into the sack and selfhood of the boy
Who clawed through fallen houses of his Troy,
Homely and human only when the flames
Crackle in recollection. Nothing shames
Him more than this uncoiling, counterfeit
Body presented as an idol. It
Is something in a circus, big as life,
The painted dragon, a mother and a wife
With flat glass eyes pushed at him on a stick;
The human mover crawls to make them click.
The forehead of her father's portrait peels
With rosy dryness, and the schoolboy kneels
To ask the benediction of the hand,
Lifted as though to motion him to stand,
Dangling its watch-chain on the Holy Book—
A little golden snake that mouths a hook.

(from "Between the Porch and the Altar")

_______________________

Thanks, Bob!

—Medusa

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry and announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets.