John Martone, two new serial poems: 'Gamma' & 'Juniperus Virginiana'
[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns). For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write. It’s with someone like John Martone, however, that this approach turns into a life long project, for which the following, newly made & often self published, can serve as a presentday, irrefutable witness. (J.R.)]
gamma
light in your handwriting’s loops
light in your body
~
the retina’s a sail
~
infrared
even as you lie there sleeping
~
a frequency
at which the body is see-thru
~
they hammer together
a wooden stairs
you read about photons
~
shouting vulgarities
a roofer stands in the light
~
it’s weeding or roofing these days & both
~
photons
the pea flower’s
whiteness
~
photons
you pick
pea pods
~
the wind’s direction today all those photons
~
in a photon
in the light
more light
~
wouldn’t mind
just being
photons
~
gamma rays
right thru
mirror
~
gamma ray burst lighting up all can’t see it
~
your body
this room
this room
full of light
~
radish plants
shot to seed overnight
you climb the roof
Juniperus virginiana
nothing to do
old man
red cedar
~
room enough
for me in you
red cedar
~
a brief nap
a red
cedar
~
people have two lungs — red cedar
~
nights
that interstellar form
red cedar
~
another
sleep walker
red cedar
~
come autumn
a cedar chest
full of bedding
~
having no one
the smell of a cedar hope chest
~
cedar tree
the soul is always something else
summer, 2013
Poems and poetics