ars poetica (with a small p)

(reposted from Tuesday, February 15, 2011)

A poem should not mean / But be.
          - Archibald Macleish

Outside, the snowflakes dance a minuet.
Wait a minute.
Do I need outside?
Isn't it implicit?
Outside, the snowflakes.
Inside, a minuet.
The snowflakes minuet.
No! No! Too telegraphic!
Try this.
The waves lap the shoreline.
The shoreline?
How about the shore?
The cat lapping the milk.
A minuet of cats.
And the paperboy?
He too could be pelted with snow.
On the beach?
Yes, on the beach.
In the middle of winter?
Why not?
What about the middle of summer?
What about it?
An evening of minuets.
Outside?
Yes.
Under the stars?
Of course.
The empty parking lot filling with snow.
Tracks.
In the snow?
From the dancers?
Dancing a minuet?
Yes.
Outside?
Yes, outside.
Under the stars?
Maybe.
Implied?
Possibly.
Possibly?
Possibly.
The newspaper is snow-soggy.
I'll speak to the paperboy tomorrow.
Outside?
Wherever.
Whatever.
In the middle of a minuet, if need be.
A paperboy dancing the minuet?
Why not?
As one of the snowflakes?
Yes, as one of the snowflakes.
Wouldn't his legs get cold?
Perhaps.
Are they made of paper?
Of course not.
They're made of snow.
He's one of the dancers.
Of the minuet?
Of the minuet.
The dancers have spent weeks rehearsing.
The minuet?
Yes, the minuet.
And now it's snowing?
Yes, and they're dancing.
The minuet?
Yes, the minuet.
I can see it.
Yes, it'll work.
Outside?
Yes, outside.
Outside, the snowflakes dance a minuet.

Excited that two of my "woman" poems (below) have been selected by Upstate Artist Guild artists as prompts for paintings to be included in exhibitions at Troy's Fish Market Gallery in November & Albany's Food Co-op in December.

Woman XVII

She enters my dream

through a side door

a blues harp player

in snakeskin boots

and weathered jeans.

Getting out of bed

I slip on a musical note.

Woman XXXIX

She says she wants to ride

and pulls up on her Harley.

I roll my Schwinn

back into the garage.

Screen Dump 724

With irrevocability looming, how can you be sure? . . .

Unlocking the tee-time,

OK, I get it,

but let's face it, it's nothing,

days pummeled with coffee and Danish . . .

No one in the know . . .

No other way . . .

The joint had to have been bugged, yes? . . .

Subjects flashing tenure, mashed with newsprint . . .

Opening statements . . . gappy, medieval references . . .

The room in stitches . . .

Talking heads . . . He walked! . . .

despite the fact they had chauffeured the 12 angry men

in an unmarked vehicle, windows blackened . . .

Yup, closed-mouthed

for the rest of the show, they were . . .

It was positively 4th Street, or maybe 5th, I forget . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Your past lives gather in a room filled with familiars . . .

You're dumbfounded . . . speechless . . .

standing outside in knee-high grass . . . green and metronomic . . .

An upright bass player on loan from the produce section

of the food co-op runs changes over the retractions

you're riffing . . . prompting you to peel a dead language

from the interim speaker of the House of Crazy

who casts his die midstream and arrives at a reception

where the scene unfolds with blank stares . . .

Your mother's eyes redact the script . . .

A director calls for softer thought bubbles . . .

The move trips a flushed response hurling the entire cast

into the bowels of a banned book . . .

You want this hot early fall day to be enough but it is not . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 722

You draw a line as if the why is adrift

in a soon-to-be-predicted snowstorm

when incomplete sentences flurry

and you, jacketed against the cold,

attempt a semblance of sanity

while talking heads feel compelled to cosplay . . .

The moment-to-moment touch and go diminishes . . .

especially now with crumpled scripts

cluttering the gazebo

where an Anthony Hopkins' lookalike

walks you through the proof with:

Let X equal the cold . . .

In real life, it’s not that simple . . .

In real life, it takes a long time to break the ice . . .

the entire ordeal offputting  . . .

You worry tragedians . . .

You confirm the faces comprising your past selves

which your therapist, confusingly, demurs . . .

Yet, a brisk walk awaits . . . so you leave, quoting Woolf:

If a writer were free, there would be no plot . . .

Antonio Palmerini

At the Transfer Station

Rain sheets the windows

of the black Dodge truck.

There’s a young guy

in the passenger seat

and he’s giving you the thumbs up.

His grandfather is unloading the Dodge.

You're getting soaked

wrestling trash bags

out of your SUV

but you stop, put down the bags,

and give him the thumbs up.

Screen Dump 721

The provocativeness of close reading triggers

a memory that will prove your undoing . . .

Still, it's a wonderful life, yes? . . .

Clouds retreat in joy to the core of a volcano

on a remote island in a sea of forget-me-nots . . .

A sidelong glance from before glimmers . . .

You, in the moment, spend the rest of your allotment

running lines from award-winning one-acts

hoping, if nothing else, for a takeaway . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Wait, there's more . . . it'll come to me . . .

that elusive construct that opens a dialogue

and you're off and running

with depositions about the hazards of following suit . . .

I know you know what I mean

having been interrogated again and again

about the meaning of meaning . . .

You said as much in discovery

and now you're living in a yurt

with midnight puppets

editing autofictions with invisible ink . . .

mirror images reflecting after-hour hookups . . .

It's not so much the tabbing . . . but flipping out

over the admittedly loose adaptation

of a fragmented backstory . . .

And this was elsewhere, yes? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 719

You thought you had the journey all mapped out

dividing days into passionate melodrama or befuddlement . . .

napping in transit as resident fashionista . . .

Ubers and Lyfts at your beck and call . . .

Upgrading short stacks from a Dance Macabre . . .

odysseyites promenading with corpses along the boulevard

only to be messaged stack overflow . . .

That you decided at that point to shuffle the sequence

ballooned the palatability to the delight of standins . . .

You could have danced all night . . . and you did . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Disconnecting the Dots

(reposted from Wednesday, August 16, 2017)

Sometimes I left messages in the street.
          - David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress

And then Frank O'Hara stopped by.
He's living in a yurt . . . in the 'Dacks
doing this . . . doing that
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
And how about Gustav Mahler channeling Frank O'Hara . . .
bicycling Bavaria
I seem to be absolutely born for the cycle!
deconstructing Moby's Porcelain
disconnecting the dots
as if it matters . . . and it does . . . but not to
his gorgeous, alcoholic, hearing-impaired,
superflirty, 19 years his junior, wife and muse, Alma,
whose bedpost is mottled
with the notches of affairs.
Billed as the most beautiful girl in Vienna
she believes several men are better than one
and spills as much to Freud one afternoon on his couch.
Never a fan of her husband's music
she chooses none of his for her funeral 50 years after his death.
And here again is Frank:
It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, . . .

Laura Mentink in Wittgenstein's Mistress (2017)

Early this morning, bicycling Route 28 to Inlet:
unforgettable . . .
meandering past pristine lakes, deep woods,
and rustic little towns, someone wrote.
I know a moose when I see one.
And I've seen several . . . at Hoss's General Store in Long Lake.
Everything anyone would need . . . or want.
Everything.
Books . . . some read, some unread . . . on my shelves.
OK, so I've skipped a few chapters
and skimmed others
and disregarded enjambments.
Who hasn't?
But really . . . what is this thing called PO-ET-RY?
Without coffee, I mean . . . or, I mean, of course.
And what's with that?
Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends:
A photograph's all that's left of you.
Must we write from prompts?
Or from furniture music, à la Satie?
I am now trying . . . to write upon nothing, Swift said.
Someone keeps elbowing in with irregardless.
Where, oh where, are the grammar police?
Can you spell donuts?
How about potato?
How about VP Quayle's version of potato?
By the way, it's now called Dunkin'.
Dunkirk is showing at Bow Tie Cinema.
Try this . . . but not at home.
This is a text.
I'm embedding pics in a text.
Putting pen to paper . . . sitting on the fence.
Trying to write right
and other absurdities for understudy
by standins . . . and passersby . . . and wannabes
saddled with odysseys.
Three rows over, 60 years ago, in Latin Class
this girl - an upperclassman - in the school uniform

imprisons me in Dr. Caligari's Cabinet
while Julius Caesar divides Gaul into three parts.

Latin Class

Coming Into the Country with John McPhee
who memorialized big rigs and other uncommon carriers
in Uncommon Carriers
after shadowing truckers for a few months.
Something about momentum
and air brakes
and commercial breaks
which speed delusions
with Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man.
I'm out here waiting for the answer with Soren Kierkegaard
the other Dane who loved the rain falling mainly on the plain
in full view of Either/Or
written after breaking up with his fiancée Regine Olsen
using the pseudonyms A for Either, B for Or,
and Johannes Climacus for The Diary of the Seducer.
I can well understand why children love sand, Wittgenstein said.
It's all about castles . . . my home is my castle, yes?
With you bundled with apps . . . one day in the foreseeable . . .
An algorithm walks into a bar . . .
This too will be tweaked . . . and tweeted . . .
to fit the model to the facts
or the facts to the model . . . whichever . . .
before Cicero's Third Oration:
How long, O Catiline, will you tax our endurance?
How long will that madness of yours escape us?
To what end will your unruly boldness hurl itself at us?

Lucius Sergius Catilina

Sound familiar?
This, by the way, is an example of trichotomy,

in full habit Sister Anna Roberta said.

And why the Fates red-carded Caesar
in the middle of the Rubicon
and why Hannibal joined the circus and mastered elephantese.
It comes full circle . . . all of it . . .
the dots connected . . . disconnected . . . fading from view . . .
with paybacks and fallbacks

playbacks and callbacks

wetbacks and drybacks
and boxes of ephemera
near the counter of the old, lamented
Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston,
Dan Chaisson wrote in The New Yorker
brimmed with
mangy postcards
wedding announcements
lobby cards
vinyl LPs
hippie stickers and patches
Civil Defense pamphlets and evacuation maps
poker chips
Old Maid decks
and skinny dogeared self-published PO-ET-RY chapbooks
filled with messages in the street.

Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop

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Rehearsing lines for detox where talk-talk is restrung

with unwords for transposition . . .

rearranging the furniture of the mind

to extract the right answer by rewording the question . . .

Of course, the drama of the get-go

with the feel of a silent movie . . .

eyes darting around the corners of the room

as if a mouse had sped past

slamming down chunks of cheddar

trailed by a reconfigured tabby . . .

The flattish physiognomy of the perp

under the cold, bleary sheets of confusion

opens the key to eventual deformity . . .

To hear the little click for another season of reruns . . .

is OK . . . even par for some of the players

chomping to borrow a phrase

for when the lake freezes over

with you dotting the horizon in yet another rewrite

of your one wild and precious life

bought and sold by plagiarists

shoplifting future episodes for junkyard flaneurs

in search of thought bubbles

floating above orphaned backstreets . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 717

Content providers are providing content

for weekend do-it-yourselfers . . .

Why did you walk off the set? . . .

The troubling aftermath of parsing the logic

long listed drip-dried

up and out . . . into and out of the tropes

clutching the elusive, the untranslatable . . .

chopping and framing the sum of its parts

to evoke the essence of absence . . .

You're drowning in word soup and loving it . . .

backstroking to Nothing Compares 2 U

while down-time and emptiness haunt the backstory . . .

Wouldn't you rather smirk the passcode

reminiscing short stacks in the greasy spoon

of one of your past lives

when odysseyites stood on their heads

and busied themselves

assembling paraphernalia

for your next expedition

into a supermarket's labyrinthine aisles? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 716

A long hauler paging through the elements

and with that, the scene shifts

summoning a fact-checker

to fact-check the epigraph on tippy-toes

when all seemed taken by the virtual bridge

you had conjured the morning after . . .

Where were you on the night in question?

You seem never to tire of that . . .

Approaching it as if this is it

as if this time is it

as if toggling the options . . .

The events in the just-released transcript

by the just-released who had long been forgotten by most . . .

But that was long ago

to say nothing of your selfish devotion to your art . . .

And then this happened

with the weird-ass energy of the woebegotten

and you bejeweled with scrimshaws

sitting among the antique furniture in the atelier

blue-penciling diatribes . . .

Was there no other way? . . .

What was that anyway? . . .

The dynamics of engagement, perhaps? . . .

The regrettable choices? . . .

The nomenclature of streaming seems to have caught on

as a contender for an individual's legacy

revealing the contents of the steamer trunk hidden in the attic

having been asked on facebook chat what's important . . .

Weathering love's inconsistencies

you may want to consider the language of divinity schools

where the shades of gray are Wac-A-Moled into submission

to the delight of those on the wait list . . .

Antonio Palmerini

That Was Then . . . This Is Now

That was then . . . and it was good, yes? / But this is now.

          - anon

When is one finished?

When does one know that one is finished?

A repurposed wasteland appears.

The walls whitewashed.

The floors swept.

But the rooms remain empty.

Meanwhile, stories . . .

~

It's 1967. The Summer of Love.

You're living in a VW Bus

trout fishing in America with Richard Brautigan

drifting along like an easy creek

trying to follow the words of Carl Rogers

to become the self that you really are.

~

What is it all about?

What are you all about?

You get what you put into trout fishing in America

stepping in the water

feeling the cool drift

taking it with you.

Taking what?

The otherworldly contours of love.

The spellbinding angularities.

The waking-in-the-middle-of-the-night inconsistencies.

The ups and downs . . . the ins and outs . . . the wicked game.

~

Your daughter dances to Strauss's Annen Polka,

floating with the wide-eyed innocence

of a nine-year-old who has yet to glimpse

the world of the backstage.

Look at her taut sureness, the steadiness and poise,

the promise of her young movements

as they transcend choreography with a joy that,

you can only hope, will buoy her through a life

filled with huge pockets of uncertainty.

~

You cross over and find yourself in a choral group

performing Arvo Pärt’s The Peace.

This is good. This is really good.

The puzzle at the foot of your bed?

You try to recall the connection.

The mystery of happiness without remorse

or something like that. You’re not sure.

Here’s how it’s done, the caped magician told you

after your eighth birthday party.

Misdirection. Misdirection.

~

At 42, she faced her final storm,

and now floats, high above the seas,

guiding fellow sailors,

her last words, Goodbye, my love.

You turn the soil for a vegetable garden:

tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant.

Rhode Island Reds appear

scratching for worms with gnarled, yellow claws.

Your grandfather is here, too, from the dead,

a stubby Philip Morris dangling from his lower lip.

He speaks to you, in Polish, about happiness.

~

K. H. Brandenburg tweaks an algorithm

for compressing audio files to birth MP3s

using Suzanne Vega's a cappella, Tom's Diner.

~

You return to a post

about a rhino poacher

who was stomped to death by an elephant

then eaten by a pride . . .

~

She checks herself out of detox

chugging rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer

and into an ICU where a voice says

You're not going anywhere

but to a psych ward

and a 28-day program . . .

and the Monkey laughs

and rides shotgun

through late-night streets.

~

It's good that grandma's here

on this early July morning

on the beach

in her housedress

with her beach chair

and it's good that she's invited you

to sit on her lap for a while

watch your cousins in the water

and slowly wade into the day.

~

On reconnaissance in his second tour of Viet Nam,

he takes a shrapnel

dying 35 years later at 57

without a memory of a parade

because there were none.

~

Looking at the lobsters in their watery cells

awaiting execution by boiling water

reminds you of David Foster Wallace

clinically depressed for most of his life

who one day stopped taking Nardil

walked out onto his back porch

threw a rope over a beam and hanged himself.

Wallace was an abusive assaultive explosive misogynistic

gifted alcoholic and drug addict.

Looking away from the lobsters

you think of Consider the Lobster

Wallace’s essay highlighting the unethical abuse of animals

in which he asks

Is it right to boil alive a sentient creature

for our gustatory pleasure?

Knowing that the so-called scream

of the lobster being boiled alive

is not its voice but air rushing out

of the holes in its shell doesn’t help . . .

nor should it.

~

You've stopped by again today
to see how your father's doing.
It's August and he's eighty-six.
He's asked for some blackberries,
so you're out here,

in the blackberry bushes,

in shirt and tie,

picking.

~

You get lost with Chet Baker

replaying the opening bars

to All Blues from The Last Great Concert 

recorded two weeks before he fell

out of a window in Amsterdam . . .

because you can't stop

because it's one of the realest things you've encountered

and for a few moments . . . nothing else matters . . .

~

She breaks into her counselor's office

at the therapeutic community house

drinks a bottle of hand sanitizer

and is taken to the emergency room

where she drinks more hand sanitizer

then sneaks out of the hospital . . . wasted . . .

She's picked up by the police

taken to a homeless shelter

on Christmas Eve

then back to the community house

the day after Christmas

where she apologizes to her counselor

and the other residents

and is put on probation . . .

binging . . . purging . . .

She is given the option of treatment for bulimia . . .

She refuses

and is discharged to a cot

in a warming center

where the lights go out at 9 . . .

Next day . . . she's back on the street . . .

~

Do you believe in magic?

Of course you do.

~

March 28, 1941, a little before noon

Virginia Woolf

with hat walking stick overcoat and large heavy stone

wades into the River Ouse drowning herself.

She was an escape artist

who mapped the extraordinariness

of our interiors . . .

~

Elizabeth Bishop catches a tremendous fish.

~

It's 1960. Latin Class.

Julius Caesar divides Gaul into three parts.

Three rows over, an upperclassman, in the school uniform

imprisons you with her long legs

while Marcus Tullius Cicero addresses the Senate

with the trichotomy of his Third Oration:

How long, O Catiline, will you tax our endurance?

How long will that madness of yours escape us?

To what end will your unruly boldness hurl itself at us?

~

You fritter away time and space.

Goalposts splinter.

Your goalposts splinter.

No one believes the converse.

At one time the b-ball shoe of choice

but then on the seventh day

of the seventh month in the seventh year

you fall asleep at the wheel

drift over the double line

and the winged goddess of victory

teams with Aldous Huxley

to open the doors of perception . . .

an aha moment.

~

The mixing of your lines bear the awesomeness of youth.

The imperfection is imperfect, perhaps,

yet as perfectly as possible

as perfectly as you know how

with the almost-imperceptible mistakes

making it delightful.

Let disorder triumph along the boulevards of redaction

where the ifs ands and buts barter transfusions.

Adjusting your sightline along the monochrome,

you resemble a look-alike

from one of your favorite films

the wake of which is a which of a which

but my advice is not to wait it out.

You will know, trust me.

And it will be good.

~

Late at night when you lie awake,

tell yourself that you love who you are,

that your half-concealed life

is not without promise.

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 715

Losing your place in line at a tag team lawn party

the moment-to-moment gazes

the moment-to-moment costumes . . .

The iffyness . . . especially the embellishments

highlighting the timetable of your life . . .

where you are . . . and why . . .

The accumulation of happenstance . . . scripted . . .

does little to quell the offhandedness . . .

The offhanded notations of old money . . . of old and new money . . .

Consulting a flowchart for next steps . . .

But is it enough? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Irrevocability pins you to the mat

to wrangle seconds . . . or thirds . . .

as if messaging with footnotes a sarabande by Yo-Yo Ma . . .

Why bother sweating the opening bars

with the prelude bleeding through the score

inflicted by a little-known? . . .

You're regressing faster than the speed of sound

to when you auditioned for intimacy's promises

and were thrown for an infinite loop

by odysseyites reopening the book to the chapter you slammed shut . . .

A well-known misstep, yes? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

 The Poetry Hotel at the Rensselaerville Library . . .

Woman XLVII

(reposted from Tuesday, April 19, 2016)

She consorts with puppets . . . no strings attached . . .

in a room filled with bobby-soxers

where she is subjected to the free passes

of agents who feign muteness

to fake Stradivari's signature

while playing stoop-ball with bassoonists smoking joints.

Weed is dressed to kill.

She loves basement bashes . . . un-posing . . .

and underclothing worn out.

The streets criticize her player-piano introductions

bottlenecked on bridges during rush hour.

Her wherewithal has caught on

with post-coital interviewers

who tweet at double-headers

where triple plays are as commonplace

as nosebleeds.

Costumed for night . . . she seldom rides shotgun

saving her literary lollipops for footnotes

and phony phone numbers floating in her wake . . .

her long legs spanning one and a half sidewalk cracks.

Let's Get Lost

Chet Baker 12/23/1929 - 5/13/1988

Leaving the airport at 5:30 AM you keep replaying the opening bars to All Blues from The Last Great Concert recorded two weeks before he fell out of a window in Amsterdam . . .

because you can't stop
because you can't get over how perfectly he nailed it
because it's one of the closest things you've encountered
and for a few moments . . . nothing else matters . . .

Screen Dump 713

Nonsense lapses into feigned forgetfulness

dumping you in the middle of nowhere . . .

second guesses segue to pastoral settings

upstate with stemmed glass bumped

to the edge of tomorrow as Georgian models

infiltrate your REM sleep . . .

There's a history, of course, going back to the City

where who knows what happened . . .

the loss temporary . . . weighing the pluses and minuses

of your next move . . . memories of tagalongs

bloating the escape route . . . conflating the statistics

while all along, in the cards, the Shirelles

with Number One on Billboard's Top 100 Chart

for 1960: Will You Love Me Tomorrow? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

An article on a poem's first line by Elisa Gabbert in The New York Times Book Review from February 12, 2023 reminded me of Raymond Carver reading My Boat at UAlbany in 1987:

My Boat

by Raymond Carver

My boat is being made to order. Right now it's about to leave 

The hands of its builders. I've reserved a special place 

for it down at the marina. It's going to have plenty of room 

on it for all my friends: Richard, Bill, Chuck, Toby, Jim, Hayden, 

Gary, George, Harold, Don, Dick, Scott, Geoffrey, Jack, 

Paul, Jay, Morris, and Alfredo. All my friends! They know who they are. 

Tess, of course. I wouldn't go anyplace without her. 

And Kristina, Merry, Catherine, Diane, Sally, Annick,

Pat, Judith, Susie, Lynne, Annie Jane, Mona. 

Doug and Amy! They're family, but they're also my friends, 

and they like a good time. There's room on my boat 

for just about everyone. I'm serious about this! 

There'll be a place on board for everyone's stories. 

My own, but also the ones belonging to my friends. 

Short stories, and the ones that go on and on. The true 

and the made-up. The ones already finished,

and the ones still being written. 

Poems, too! Lyric poems, and the longer, darker narratives. 

For my painter friends, paints and canvases will be on board my boat. 

We'll have fried chicken, lunch meat, cheeses, rolls, 

French bread. Every good thing that my friends like and I like. 

And a big basket of fruit, in case anyone wants fruit. 

In case anyone wants to say he or she ate an apple, 

or some grapes, on my boat. Whatever my friends want, 

name it, and it'll be there. Soda pop of all kinds. 

Beer and wine, sure. No one will be denied anything, on my boat. 

We'll go out into the sunny harbor and have fun, that's the idea. 

Just have a good time all around. Not thinking 

about this or that or getting ahead or falling behind. 

Fishing poles if anyone wants to fish. The fish are out there! 

We may even go a little way down the coast, on my boat. 

But nothing dangerous, nothing too serious. 

The idea is simply to enjoy ourselves and not get scared. 

We'll eat and drink and laugh a lot, on my boat. 

I've always wanted to take at least one trip like this, 

with my friends, on my boat. If we want to 

we'll listen to Schumann on the CBC. 

But if that doesn't work out, okay, 

we'll switch to KRAB, The Who, and the Rolling Stones. 

Whatever makes my friends happy! Maybe everyone 

will have their own radio on my boat. In any case, 

we're going to have a big time. People are going to have fun, 

and do what they want to do, on my boat.

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But there was more to it than the translation

skirting the main event while asking the resident Sphinx

the passcode to some inner chamber

where alternatives are kept on ice with Facebookers

posting the past despite the plethora

of contemporary adaptations of your take on Beowulf . . .

those damaged destined to repeat their obsessions

tumbling head over heels into roundabouts . . .

A treatise on the importance of getting your house in order

targets hoarders making the mess messier . . .

This longing for one last shot at immortality . . .

a day in the life of a day in the life . . .

everything volumizing a high wire act 

with no less than how to get through the day . . .

The vigilance you signed up for, yes? . . .

Can you imagine this ancient hatch? . . .

This escapade of hopscotch fueling the voices in the air

that today argue happenstance . . . the lone and level sands

stretching to a wooden-legged captain awaiting a white whale? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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An afternoon class in Classics

changes the way you approach texts

while the gravel trail bloats

big cats on fat bikes

waiting to find out what it all means

beginning with Shall we begin?

as we begin Frances O'Connor's Emily

with more isms to latch onto

sprung from the sibs' paracosms

to embellish the autofictions of those

in the boarded-up storefronts of no-no

disputing the biopic tag

with sex, drugs, rock n roll

and a downplay of collaboration

ignoring Emily's diary paper . . .

And behind the embellishments

The facts in the case of . . .

You walk the walk for more words

using the Index of First Lines

to guide googling only to return

cache full of purple waywardisms

as if you had trod the moors . . .

Then on to the myth hands in pockets

parlaying passcodes at transfer stations

to level the playing field

for odysseyites bused to the soundstage . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Again, asking yourself in the mirror

What good would questions do? . . .

the silence between extremes

leaving the madness of March

with index finger pointing to ring finger . . .

You buy time . . . walking through replays

that slam dunk you awake

in the middle of yet another dream

of being called out for texting plagiarisms . . .

You're thinking of taking the day off . . .

wanting to call in sick

when sick has nothing to do with it . . .

besides there's no one to call in to . . .

You should know this by now . . .

You should know that the gallerist

reviewing your work has run out of excuses

trying to make something to find out

what it means to make something . . .

Antonio Palmerini

30 days . . . 30 poets . . . 30 poems . . .

Rensselaerville Library’s Seventh Annual Poem-A-Day Project
celebrates National Poetry Month
with a new poem by a local poet each day for April’s 30 days.
With this year’s entries, PAD will have showcased
210 poems by 120 poets.
Stop by PADYES for your daily poetry fix!

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You're grappling so as not to forget what you want

to remember . . . a whoosh as if the surf crashes the cliff

with you floating above . . . You have decided

to practice narrowing your focus to eliminate

the superfluous from your walks . . . the day, deftly unraveling,

seems almost to disappear . . . so many thoughts

vying for your attention . . . then this idea of the texture

of it all . . . everything everyone seemingly connected

with tabs for those nestled in the cleft of your memory . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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You recount how touch initiates the sense of "I" . . .

how it costumes the body on misty mornings

and waits at the bus stop for passengers to resume their lives . . .

A test email breaks the silence . . .

The number of people passing through the portal increases . . .

And so it begins . . . parsing the engagement

with you in the soup aisle at the supermarket

swiping your phone for texts, checking the message

you took great care to get just right,

elbowing through inundations

amid the wearisome floundering of the spinning orb,

harvesting the future for meaning

while standing at the edge of a cliff for however long . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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You leave the gallery and long-limbed bronzes

which is OK since it's being streamed

with gaps for reconciliation

by people filing in . . . as what? . . .

let's call them inadvertents . . .

visiting the exhibition retrospectively,

following Zoomed corridors

through an opening in the text

and into the next scene

of customers at the counter in a diner

rewritten while obsessing the commonplace

with thoughts of odysseyites

going round and round the roundabout

in your old neighborhood

resonating with the rhythmic beat

of a blacksmith's hammer on an anvil

shaping steel red-hot from the fire

as if it were planned . . . 

as if it were the answer to the blue question

glued to the ATM . . . empty, unused

on a one-way street

informing each and every touch of the day . . .

Antonio Palmerini

My poem, The Mathematician's Daughter, was a finalist from among 468 entries from 44 countries in the 2023 Stephen A. DiBiase International Poetry Contest. Bravo to the other poets, & many thanks to curator Bob Sharkey & his team for a super event!

The Mathematician’s Daughter

But what of the cul-de-sac of her childhood?
The slow circling of bases on the dusty diamond,
calculator in hand?
The unraveling of ribbons on warm Saturday afternoons?
Her knack, yes, for movie theaters
and the sheer pagination of her intellect.
Her ability to plumb the depths of bodies in motion
to retrieve artifacts long forgotten
pinning onlookers to the mast with her proofs
as she practiced higher-order equations
on the sweet-smelling turf
under autumn’s orange sky.
Forget as well that she knew by heart
the names of Leibniz’s monads
the mass appeal of transits
the high rise of sorts with the stop sign in front
the vase of freshly-cut delphinium.
I once found her calibrating the pulsating, scratchy music
of stoops, wearing a smile filled with late hours -
hours spent spread-eagled over reams of graph paper
lined with doodles and obscure footnotes
from the sixteenth century -
her first four words as illuminating as ever.
She tried hard to find happiness in coefficients
in the beauty of imaginary numbers
staying the required course despite the odds
instead of shortcutting to the breakfast nook without a word -
an unmade bed, some fast food bristling in the wastebasket
the canned soups in her cupboard
arranged as they were in powers of ten.
In the end, she returned to the lecture hall
where, amid furious note-taking, she had once plotted our future
filling the whiteboard and the air
with intricate drawings of the Interstate at dawn
calculating the logarithmic distance from x to y to z.

Backstory Alice Deposed

Numbers. Their coming-together.

Their commingling. I loved it.

Positive and negative numbers.

Big and small numbers. Real and

imaginary numbers. The purity

of primes. Testing their solitude,

their robustness, their

resistance to proof.

Walking them through the

nightmare of dreams. It was

seductive, addictive . . .

not only on the page

or the whiteboard

but also in the day-to-day.

My days throbbed with them.

I was lost to them. Then

I collided with Dear Luddy.

And I abandoned them.

Just like that. I stopped.

I stopped playing with them.

I stopped sleeping with them.

Nada. But they pursued me.

Their images pursued me,

haunted me. Infiltrating

my fibers. Cavorting

as they did. Yes, there

was a Wonderland of sorts,

but it was finite.

Then the lines began

rewriting themselves

and it was as if I was shoved

through a firewall

into an alternate reality.

The images squeezed

through . . . along with a solo

accordion. I filled my journal

with admonitions . . . not

bothering to correct

misspellings. I began

trafficking in consumables.

Packaged as in . . .

As You Like It. I held

the aces. Controlled the

scene. Flipped the roles.

But always far from the

madding crowd. My height

intimidated them. They loved 

it! Especially after googling

wine lists. Always the same

sluggish words . . . blah

blah blah . . . as if . . .

as if . . . I never anticipated

having to count ceiling tiles.

I always made the most

of a (sometimes) pathetic

situation. Do the math. Run

the numbers. Pair the

primaries! Olly, olly, in-free!

Ready or not, I always came.

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You practice a disciplined indifference

trying hard to seem not to be trying too hard

plagiarizing Seduction Theory

eyes on angularities

racking up odysseyites for a casual game of nine-ball

in the diamond formation on the subway

where it's all tag-team fashion show

for the clock's hand-wringing . . .

Trying to stay awake amid the blizzard of YouTubes

you reach back for the metric of then . . .

bundles of literary allusions

misquoted misspelled misplaced

in the rare book section of the museum . . .

spending nights alone in a dark room

teaching yourself to draw as if blindfolded . . .

learning to unlearn . . .

the fascination when the game is afoot . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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You hop into bed with happenstance . . .

scenes of endearment in black and white

on a doilied Stromberg-Carlson

in a room reminiscent of Miss Havisham's

crammed with memories of home-schoolers . . .

The boulevards distract with light reading . . .

odysseyites await first dibs

their landing craft reassembled

with the same worn colored pencils

from a gallerist's backroom . . .

Renderings . . . mounted in amber

slip past the watchers at the gate

satisfy the elements of someone's style . . .

You google factorials

applying exclamation points

to escape to the garden . . .

head filled with Mahler's doom-laden Ninth

its twenty-seven bars for strings . . .

transcendent . . . a prototypical specter

redacts your clang associations . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Of course one could ask, What options? . . .

Imposing complexity on a single piece of prose

as if the flat darkness

demands a gathering of sorts . . .

You are now here . . . on your way there . . .

The permutations of if drone on

debulking the synthesizers and spandex

of a second Stone Age

at times engaging the rhapsodic

with a view from within . . .

risking enormity with its attendant salads and sadness

yellowed pages of indecipherable scribbles

appear late at night at the foot of your bed . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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You favor transmutations . . . real and imagined . . .

passersby cosplay odysseyites

follow dotted lines . . . the consciousness of overcast days

delivering overcast shadows

acknowledging overcast notations

as if in the tunnel of unread words

appearing again and again in dreams

of morning shows throughout . . .

You try to recall days when in the middle of nothing

you were handed a different script

a different unfinished script

winging it with nothing more

than semiotic regurgitations

connecting the dots to an overgrown apple orchard

from someone's childhood secrets . . .

the one your friend let go of when his parents disappeared . . .

The knack of going back intimidates you . . .

as if riding through storm clouds of white chickens

on a red wheelbarrow . . . overly-anthologised

beyond recognition . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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A diorama shadows your blue-penciled autofiction . . .

The day wanders through snowflake-dotted buildings

leaning against one another

as if the whole world is about to entropy . . .

You enter a wormhole

parlaying archival footage

for an afterlife with benefits . . .

the deck stacked with thumbnail sketches

of odysseyites seduced by Sirens of Dissonance . . .

The eons avalanche . . .

there are so many you've lost track . . .

A downsized news anchor holed-up for days in her room

bangs out magic on an ancient ribbonless Remington

over and over and over . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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The instability that looms . . .

like arriving at insight through revision

so you keep rethinking the path

and it turns out to be illuminating

even when you feel on the brink

or fear going over the edge . . .

the stick-to-ittiveness . . .

Sorting through old photographs . . .

your past lives . . . your past choices . . .

the anything as everything . . .

regrets at the last station . . .

doubts . . . insinuations . . . 

ghosts recapping playthroughs

dance across rooftops . . .

How often have you been slammed with less

despite costume changes promising more? . . .

despite the correct passcode? . . .

I know you know this from past table reads . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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You're dicking around with comma splices

trying to flesh out the ambiguity of appositives

checking prices of navel oranges and fuel oil . . .

The books on the shelf in fracture mode

stare you down, threaten to open . . .

There's a diagrammable certainty to all this

but you're having trouble putting your finger on it . . .

It's just so intricate and deliberate . . .

like winter's grip . . .

Traffic at the tray feeders jams

dislodging with a bright palette

the ennui of second-growth trees . . .

This could be about me, you, or someone else . . .

This hodgepodge of injecting meaning into the day . . .

the value of your words plummeting

given the seeming insouciance of event parking . . .

The relapse is about to relapse

with its refusal to countenance

any change in policy governing rules of grammar . . .

No doubt we'll hear more about this . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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A dropdown menu of grayed-out options

is about to announce your seeming willingness

to engage theater as theater . . .

After all, it’s all theater, yes? . . .

Even the garnish on your takeout . . .

So how about a share plate of edibles

selected with care

by your favorite chef-de-cuisine-du-jour? . . .

enough to dampen the gratuitous hostility

of your joystick with the rag-dolled strangers

backstage urging hardtail fat bikes

down gravel paths with night moves

going meta . . . stretching like taffy

along the yellow brick road of imagination . . .

Everyone memorialized in the softcovers

cluttering your backroom

is a person of disinterest

kneejerking golden rings in fables

transcribing the blank pages of the novel

you inhabit . . . while you reach

for your autofiction trying to forget

what you saw, who you were,

fashioning orphaned marionettes to retreat

into the theme parks of your fragmented mind . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 698

Many were inexperienced . . . time and again

misinterpreting hand-holding as condescension

revisiting the cul-de-sac with the passcode

at the wheel of your nightmare . . .

So you would proceed . . . slowly . . .

encouraging them to ask questions . . . take notes . . .

The strangeness of the encounter . . . a given . . .

both of you stepping out of your comfort zones

as if shooting with a green screen . . .

And what about postproduction at the tea shop

with work-a-day costumes oozing hilarity in retrospect? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Voices from the air elbow in with the insistence

of Crayolas pocketed from the early days

when naïveté colored your renderings

with eyes wide shut

dumbing down the circumstances

for palatability's sake . . .

A breeze through an open window

with images of past lives

swells thought bubbles into the full catastrophe . . .

You as confused as I . . .

Yes, add that to your write-up . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Seasonal hymns carry you aloft

the small print assuring you that the exaltation

in the fuzziness of the rearview mirror

is evidence of your coming-of-age . . .

Reams of prayer repurpose happiness

on the street where you live

and alter the topography of your brain . . .

You day-trip backstory practice

mimicking the chamber group in Pictures at an Exhibition . . .

the momentum enough to spearhead you into the beyond . . .

Isn't it magical? . . . intimacy's joggle? . . .

The candles flickering their excitement . . .

puzzling amusement . . . dynamic

in their medievalism . . . in their ability

to quell supermarket stalkers

comparing notes on extended techniques

with odysseyites dabbling in noise . . .

The snow is indeed over the top

but, look, the wonderment of this winter wonderland

is a dotted line to the divine

prompting players to sort through their collections

of unfinished symphonies

sorted on imaginary number . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Odysseyites curry favor with Johnny-come-latelies

homeless in email . . . palming handouts

and a free pass to the Lone Star Steakhouse

where buy-ones get-ones feature . . .

A Shakespearean interface perplexes you far and away

your memory skewed by the cacophony

of the signal-to-noise ratio

filling the first movement with incomprehensible snow . . .

You have come to appreciate nautical wherewithals

and manage to navigate the second movement

mindful of the snow whose melodic drifts

you later learn was what everyone

had slogged through the snowstorm to hear . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 694

Sometimes in her sleep Albertine throws off her kimono and lies naked.

          - Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout

Hence, your fascination with sleep

and with Proust's Questionnaire

alluded to in the opening scene . . .

This, of course, made to seem inconsequential . . .

Alone now in the wilderness

in a blizzard . . .

OK, a good start . . .

Tweak it a bit to fit

into the Islets of Langerhans . . .

That can't be right . . .

Nonetheless, continue . . .

Act Two is much the same

prompting your comment on the formulaic . . .

The cluster fills with posers . . .

That it works is insidious, I mean, incredulous . . .

Are you sure you want to proceed? . . .

If you do, you'll have to walk us through

the proof specing falsehoods within

a narrow margin of error . . .

Think an endangered Snow Leopard

in one of the most remote areas on earth . . .

You are with yourself

you are within yourself

not unlike the unnamed monster

in Mary Shelley's novel

with Victor Frankenstein near death

on an ice floe relating his terror

to explorer Robert Walton . . .

this excursion into horror

by an 18-year-old's nightmare

two years after she became pregnant

with her first child, also unnamed . . .

The monster like all seeks love and recognition

but suffers misunderstanding, rejection, hatred . . .

Enter TikTok:

a world out of balance scored by Philip Glass

whose teacher Nadia Boulanger

arguably the greatest music teacher of all time

fueled his one-upmanship

with fellow composer Steve Reich . . .

and so the world as House of Crazy

forcing us to dip our quills

into rose-colored liquid

to palatabalize appropriating a one-way ticket

to elsewhere . . .

Antonio Palmerini