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
Poems and poetics