Rochelle Owens: 'Beloved the Aardvark,' Part Two

[Rochelle Owens has been working over the last several decades on a corpus of poems in-series, while her later work, however refined, has maintained the unique power and pitch ascribed to her earlier poetry by Marjorie Perloff, among others; “Rochelle Owens’ writing ... is sui generis. She is, in many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities, and dense and clashing verbal surfaces recalling the long poems of Bruce Andrews and Ron Silliman. But Owens is angrier, more energetic, and more assertive than most of her Language counterparts, male and female, and she presents herself as curiously non-introspective.” Part One of Beloved the Aardvark can be found here on Poems and Poetics. (J.R.)]

 

Next to a wall

of concrete stands a man

covered with tattoos 

 

orange  yellow  green

astrological signs etched into

his skin  

 

tendons and nerves

drink color  his hand balled

into a fist

 

a fringe of drool

and blood circles the mouth

his lips move 

 

a secret tribal language

 

then he counts

the months in a year  his thumb

and forefinger moving

 

back and forth along a wall

 

‘who eat up my people as they

eat bread’

 

         *

 

Morning to evening 

evening to morning  audible 

inaudible

 

the rhythm  the rhythm

of spontaneous changes  sunlight/

blackness

 

blinking in and out

 

piles of sand appear 

disappear  audible  inaudible

the sound of digging

 

digging deeper

precise  methodical  searching

always the Aardvark

 

moves in circles  moves in circles

in the here and now

 

swaying side to side 

 

piles of sand appear 

disappear  work is a binding

obligation

 

suffer the Aardvark children        

 

            *

 

Out of an ant hill

a waft of air  lovely the ant hill

curved like an embrace 

 

           *

 

Rays of sunlight

penetrate the roof of your skull

warming  your back

 

warming your hands

and fingers holding a piece

of charcoal

 

drawing zigzags of

black lines  tendons  nerves 

ligament 

 

spirals of veins pulsate 

blood in  blood out

 

          *

 

On a concrete wall

lit up by fluorescent light

vibrating particles

 

shape the contours of an animal

 

the face of the Aardvark

is its parts  the eyes  nose

and mouth 

 

the cylindrical tongue

 

the long ears

heating to the temperature

of human skin

 

          *

 

Pale and red

the mouth of a child eating

an apple

 

a montage of bite marks

 

your hand balled into a fist 

 

           *

 

Press button to hear

morning to evening  evening

to morning

 

a  s o u n d s c a p e

 

of everlasting duration

evening to morning  morning

to evening

 

out of the digital age

 

a course of events

the scientific explosive realm

across

 

the twenty-first century

        *

 

Press button

to hear a musical interval

in the afternoon

 

sipping Umbrian wine 

 

tearing off the wing

of a roast pigeon  a musical

montage

 

evoking the rhythm 

the rhythm of spontaneous changes

Louis Armstrong’s 

 

“Black and Blue” 

a Bach cantata  Native American flutes

Buddhist chants  singing dolphins

 

Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” 

 

           *

 

You turn in

the direction of a voice

spelling out a word  

          

A m f a t t e h r

 

a voice repeating

an unknown word  motionless

the Aardvark

 

stands listening

a voice repeating  spelling

out a word

 

A m f a t t e h r

 

made of the letters

of a noun  drawing zigzags

of black lines

 

horizontal/vertical

 

a piece of charcoal

held with fingers and thumb

body of data

 

data of body

an animal from Africa

a member

 

of the mammalian order

 

          *          

 

Mounds of sand

appear  disappear  massive

the claws digging 

 

searching

long ago  an hour ago 

only a minute

 

the universe contracts  e x p a n d s

 

disease  famine  torture  war

 

rhythmic a flow

of hormonal forces  blood in 

blood out 

 

disease  famine  torture  war

 

the Aardvark

comes out in daylight to lie

in the sun

 

        

                    — Rochelle Owens