Read an Excerpt
Animal Husbandry Today
By Jamie Sharpe ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Jamie Sharpe
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-311-1
CHAPTER 1
MASSACRE AT SUPERSTITION BLUFF
Stagecoach with a penchant to drink,
the tinhorn crucifix,
cracked wheels fixated
on a chasm below,
chaste revolvers filled
with explosive chorus girls,
gentle reins
and the masochistic horse:
all the same under gravity.
Locals' arrows pointing you
in new directions,
to find a fable, a life,
elsewhere.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR NILS LUZAK, CLASSICAL PIANIST
What makes us hate
piano tuners?
Their jealous eyes?
You ever allegro your father?
Why does E-flat major
do terrible things, like
excite optometrists?
Does ivory make the softest bed?
Ebony the hardest casket?
Should eyes be gouged
for greater musical acuity?
In Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,
when skies open and vengeance
bolts heavenly, are you Rachmaninoffing
hell from those helpless pedals?
Given "baroque" means
"deformed pearl," should one
graft one thousand shattered
oysters' shells to every piano's hull?
Mother-of-pearl is visual trickery,
destined for the secular and profane?
Harmonics are paternal lies,
doomed to become sacred?
Why must each chord contain
a condemned father?
Why must I see the music so clearly?
EQUILATERAL POEMS
Receding Matchbook
"For danger eclipsed
every excuse for him to
pursue laundry instead
of silk whiter-whites in
the Biltmore Hotel, where
Diane's blouse was but
temporary advertising."
Alimony
Mixed metaphor Sedentary
"The girls flitting past
were sparrows. What she
saw as those delicate
bodies ran was not the
youthful abandon of
playgrounds, but a life
she'd never rise to."
Rash
Productive Means
"The whir of fabric,
at such speed, cancelled
thought. For others this
sound haunted sleep, while
Aura spent a week's wages
on an industrial fan,
placing it next to her cot,
replicating work's perfect
emptiness in dreams."
White Noise
FÖRARBETE
After the container,
how to recognize
the content —
easily cast,
always held —
if not inscribed upon?
A regret for what
amounts to faulty math
1000x over.
The want for concrete
markers to parse us into
ever smaller marks.
When to realize
is to lay to rest.
What are we preparing for?
THE POINTLESS ODYSSEY
Frank gave you 2:1
That someone, somewhere, was
Putting on his shoes. Pompous
Certainty makes bookies preachers;
You have to break them or go broke.
Outside, you Benjamin a man with a baseball bat
To watch your car. He turns, smashing a Lexus,
Shattering the car's headlights.
A lady yells from across the street,
"I paid you twenty."
"The price has gone up."
In the children's hospital you place
A hand on their pale foreheads;
This is not making them stronger.
Eyes gaze through pain and uncertainty.
You carefully document everything:
"No Shoes."
Outside: rub your skin off
With whisky. You're gigantic
And the stakes are high.
Sobriety leaves others mute: tinkering
Temporarily with day jobs; sewing
Buttons onto pound cakes
Like reputable grandmothers.
But the gamble holds you steady.
You hit the bowling alley
With a notepad.
They all slide in socks on the hardwood.
You want to laugh at every stale, hackneyed
Banker and yet, in the presence of the real
Thing, even the spirit leaves you: ascending,
Unshaken, like every 7–10 split.
13 STATEMENTS AND THEIR COROLLARIES
My handicap should be more on the back nine.
There's an equation for the speed at which all things fall.
Music today is just noise.
A crocodile's tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.
I had no idea that cactus was illegal.
Distance is an optical illusion.
Rednecks have their own eloquence.
I compulsively cut my hair.
Find me a stockbroker, I'll show you a thief.
The trade winds shaped migration throughout history.
My wife's a decent lay.
Tuesday is Seniors' Day.
Where can I get a rubber plant?
You tire too quickly.
Gravity never tires, even of itself.
Said Bartók in 1805.
Either they speak, or you listen, upside down.
Lay off the peyote.
I'd trade my eyes for you here.
Conservative poetry is justified to the right.
SSRIs or barber's college, in my opinion.
Why I invest on the hard eight.
I'm in the doldrums.
Charity begins at home.
She broke, producing her licence, to save cents.
You will still be alone.
THOUGHTS: GEORGES BRAQUE
{ Wheeled Chair }
Today a young child and father navigated the town square, father on bicycle, son a wheeled chair. How strange the child seemed — spoked rims replacing legs, hands propelling him forward on geometry. Quite possibly he was born without use of the lower extremities: if so, while watching the man ride his bicycle, which did he consider his father?
{ Georges Couthon }
Something of my early schooling (far before the École des Beaux-Arts) has imposed itself upon me after lying dormant. Georges Couthon, my brother in country and name, also lacked functioning legs. History additionally tells us he lost use of his head when the Revolution turned. Can you imagine them dragging the poor cripple to death, while Robespierre walked assuredly beside? The guillotine was likely not the liberty either had in mind.
{ Silence by Anticipation }
Could I anticipate every critic's question, answering it in pigment, prior to the asking?
{ Georges Couthon II }
Again! It was written that Monsieur Couthon would, on occasion, ride the back of a man when his chair was indisposed. If one, the ridden, is transformed to that of a wheeled chair, is the other, the rider, also changed? Perhaps he has become something more noble: a throne?
{ Portrait: I Am a Ring }
Today a photographer came to memorialize me — my paintings, although me, depict something else, and as such fail. While I sat, the background forced itself forward or dropped out completely. For a while I was a wall. Then a hat. A scarf. A ring. How confused and disappointed the camera will be tonight in its darkroom!
{ Muscadelle or Chardonnay? }
My mind is a hot wind maker and maker of balloons. Funny what rises to consciousness: today it was grapes and a clarinet — simultaneously. I believe the grapes were Muscadelle, but you can't always taste the mind.
TWO TRAINS
There are seventeen apples in a tree.
If you carve your name into the tree's trunk,
How many apples do you have?
A plane crashes on the border of two countries.
Can you wear white to the funeral
If you're a virgin before mayday?
John's mother is seven years younger
Than John's father, who is twice as old as John
Plus sixteen years. If John is seven, how much
Has his father failed to pay in child support?
Two trains depart from stations in opposite
Cities. If train "A" is going 155 km/h,
What's the fuel economy of my '86 Chevy
As I drive to the corner store for cigarettes?
TAURUS
Mishaps befall us
courtesy of moon-white light
(inequitable droppings):
still life thrown all gaudy motion.
Chart the sky's restlessness.
Extrapolate: wealth, future
husbands, cattle prices, why
you cried last Thursday
when this theatre stampeded
above and left you untouched.
CIRRHOSIS
I drank my grandmother's wedding ring
and sold the pawn ticket for peanuts
(salted).
Wandering into the broker's at 10 a.m.,
I looked at the kid like he was my conscience.
He looked at me like I was 10 a.m.
DENTON: AN OBELISK
Denton claims the obelisk
the pinnacle of architecture
precisely as it serves no purpose
its singular column holding
Nothing aloft except the sky
which has maintained
a prudent weary distance
from us of its own accord
Denton maintains the larger the obelisk
(the more rubbish amassed
in its looming bloated shape)
the more useful the obelisk becomes
As a symbol of greatness
for to tower surfeit time and material
toward cloud-heights one
must simply have too much
Denton notes the historical use
of obelisks as proclamations of glut
the eye driven upward to heavens
on the path of excess
See: Pharaoh's Obelisk
See: Cleopatra's Needles
See: King Ezana's Stele
See: The Washington Monument
Today Denton is pleased
by suburbia's "tiny obelisks"
the sidewalks no one travels
the picket fences keeping nothing
Dangerous from getting in
nothing valuable from leaving
Today Denton is arranging
his thoughts into a teetering obelisk
of each superfluous thought
upon the last erecting
A monument to himself
GLORIERIJKE ONZIN
Jamie SharpeMedia on canvas (2007)
Speaking of these pieces at the Prado, the artist remarked, "tulips-prostitution windmill-clogs cheese-abortion." Created during a brief sojourn in the Netherlands, Glorierijke Onzin reflects Sharpe's obsession with painters of the Dutch golden age. Although the delicate handling of the portraits reminds critics of Johannes Vermeer, Sharpe asserts, "stoned-rural low-lying pope-hell."
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
To be dwarfed by beauty: paths
winding into green infinitude.
The air light in lungs, and our
shoulders' weight: daypacks.
Not realizing the colours nature
carried, until the atomic tangerine
of wild mambo rose, the rainbow
of trout.
In the friscalating dusk we walk,
in the shadow of our nation's parks,
in the shadow of one-hundred-year
evergreens, back to tomorrow's life.
The $1.19 nacho cheese chalupas
were also excellent.
COMBINATIONS
12-16-09
I found a combination lock
lying in the middle of the road
and carried it everywhere, twisting
its dial (14-37-6, 40-29-0, 12-16-07),
hoping for that telltale click
to unlock the mystery.
8-6-10
Eight months later: another
lock in my mailbox.
A simple thought settled
heavily within:
the solution to the second
might lie in the first.
RATED
This poem is rated "*" for nudity
and a brief traumatic moment.
When the towel dropped he stood
wearing only water glistening
against his muscled flank. Her breasts
were pert, at attention and pointed
toward him.
Elsewhere a man, drunk off cough syrup,
is frozen against the steps of a school.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Animal Husbandry Today by Jamie Sharpe. Copyright © 2012 Jamie Sharpe. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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