Mark Weiss
from 'A Suite of Dances,' a new gathering
XIV. Sings Forth
The bride of god wants it, now,
on her own terms.
We breed cattle
for the final predator.
There is always something to ask. This-or-that-ness or
this-or-that-less-ness.
A set of rituals as a boat in waves.
Assume the air around it,
assume the season and the path,
assume trees, and what they hide.
Assume
the common hungers,
the children’s terror and resignation,
no matter how fantastic the costumes. Look:
tattered banners on every lamp post, the fiesta done
before we got here.
dust
wind drift
sea wrack
duff
litter
foam
verdigris
rust
waste
shit loam manure guano landfill rubbish
The magic child cannot whither or stale,
etc.
In the sweet,
across the river,
in the beautiful,
atop the cloud, in the great
sun chariot, there will be
no tooth
decay, no
baldness, no
eczema, no age, no
hunger, no dying children.
Wind,
all of us, just
bags of it.
Rumble of thunder to the south
five hours to dawn.
A transparent epiphany.
A whole pointy presence
here in Brobdingnag.
An idea of food in the plate’s arrangement.
Sic transit, the victor of Waterloo remembered
for a pair of boots.
FORTUNE COOKIES
Perhaps you have eaten your last meal.
With age you may pass to another fetish.
WINTER
The goddess
glides the canals in a pink scarf.
Who could deny her?
LONG ROAD
Think of the hard times your feet have seen
and where they’ve been.
PARIS DECIDES
Prettiness depends on what’s to bribe,
even the goddesses for sale.
HELEN
She is the daughter of a swan.
In the cleft, and cleaves it.
She is the daughter of a swan.
A tree in the cleft.
She is the daughter of a swan.
STRAWBERRY BLOND
You will be loved by many
for the color of your hair, just that.
And isn’t it a mystery.
Think of the body as a tube
with undulant appendages
propelling it
through a viscous medium.
The neighbor’s captive bird
whistles behind the wall.
Small kindnesses left to the old.
“They haven’t been in the bar for weeks.
‘Hey Eddie!’ they call from across the street.”
Still the mind.
Within the poem
a glacial echo.
PRIVATE THOUGHT IN THIS PUBLIC
SPACE
Something about her casualness of dress.
“Have a bite of trilobite,
my dear.”
And twirls her hair
and strokes and twirls it,
sees the scar
and wonders at his story.
Because sometimes a snapshot’s all there is.
The difference between a loan
and alone, rent
and rented.
Below deck I find the horizon.
Distance, the prow of a boat among islands.
Closely observed,
each bone different.
No pause for dreams.
“Let’s play gynecologist,”
I say.
A straight line,
regardless of obstacles,
devouring the landscape.
Dressed,
coiffed,
for who she is
or would be thought to be.
“I named my daughter Malady,”
Milady Malady, la maudite,
he named her. “Thrive,”
he told her, “strive, wive, swive,
dive.”
Eating and breeding
breeding and eating
survival of me and mine.
“I am,” he said, “the later
gator, the wily croc
o
dile.”
A Suite of Dances
Mark Weiss
Shearsman Books 2021, 204 pages, $25, ISBN 978-1848617476
Writes Patrick Pritchett of the new book’s triumphs: “Pound once observed ‘that music begins to atrophy when it gets too far from the dance, that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.’” In A Suite of Dances, Mark Weiss brings poetry and the dance back together in intricate, delightful measures. The rhythms and tone of these sly, sinuous poems jolt the reader awake with unexpected, offbeat aphorisms, jokes, and moves of improvisatory nimbleness and agile grace that always stick the landing.
“Pulsing with wit, bravado, vulgarity, pathos, whimsy, and replete with that rarest of pleasures in contemporary poetry: the sheer surge of song, these dances ripple with a music that moves freely through the range of English lyric. The bass note of melancholy anchors them in a tradition of reflective loss and revival that is, finally, reaffirming, since, as Williams put it, ‘we know nothing and can know nothing / but / the dance.’”
An earlier section of A Suite of Dances appeared previously in Poems and Poetics.
Poems and poetics