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Overview
“Ah, writ happens.” Like the con men who rely on thieves' Latin to ply their trade, the poems in Peter Jay Shippy's award-winning collection don't play well with other poems. They are difficult. They rave. They are unsettling and blunt. They crash cars and ride tsunamis and hitch rides on tugs. They also provide a contemporary, ironic, and tender view of America, all the while layering wordplay, cleverness, and sentiment.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587294389 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2005 |
| Series: | Iowa Poetry Prize , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 100 |
| File size: | 128 KB |
About the Author
Peter Jay Shippy holds a BFA from Emerson College and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Epoch, Poetry Ireland,Another Chicago Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Expression, Five A.M., Slope, X-Connect, the Harvard Review, and the Denver Quarterly. In 2002, he was award-ed an artist's grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and named adjunct professor of the year by the Gold Key Honor Society of Emerson College, where he has taught since 1987.
Read an Excerpt
thieves' latin poems
By peter jay shippy
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS Copyright © 2003 Peter Jay Shippy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-840-1
Chapter One The Special People
When the special people came they put us off pills. They made us swallow our work. Those showed us ways to conjugate our wounds. When the special people came they spotted for us. We ran fast when they told us run. We sang loud when they said stitch in time. Or, not forever. Or, swing low. Or, am a fate.
When the special people came they put us indoors. They had us embellish our lyrics. Those showed us ways to leave out for birds. When the special people came they deleted for us. We watched when they said look. We sang loud when they said tongue in cheek. And, pitch shifter. And, piss off. Or, go cat go.
A ghost by everything is still a ghost. A tolerable penny is one found heads up. A man and his secret reunite in a western desert. The people wait us on that old front porch. Those spare us all the messy detachments. Life is what you get away with.
Crocodiles Shed Their Tears When Devouring Francis Bacon
It was the summer we dosed with coffin cider and sipped cold tear soup to starch-up our shadows.
I kept darning spiders in my old sock drawer and wore a plain locket that held a pike's tooth.
Down off Eel Road, time boned into a lovely lea of bee balm and indigo. I often picnicked there.
Hummingbirds sprung from phlox to phlox as I read Chandlers. Crime organized. Wan asterisks buzzed.
At dusk, I often napped to the electric razors that hotly chirruped like Ma's hairy cicadas.
A grand singing turtle took her season's residence in the new pear orchard. I think she ate well.
It was in late August that I opened the matchbox to set a wing of positrons loose. Does it matter?
That slim season went south when I found out that the dueling crickets had rigged their bouts.
Why Is the Crow a Harmful Bird?
You have a good feeling about most birds, and trust that they are a friend to man. Canaries arrive by the bucketful for the holiday trade in America. Geese can sense the magnetic fields that surround our planet. Most accept a theory of evolution, but those that don't have a notion that explains how birds came to be- time travel. We can go over each part of the body of a bird and find traces of the future. Certain glands in birds secrete nanobots that produce tiny black holes. Birds say that millennia from now wings will be used for touristic rituals. Their eyes are image orthicons. Why do our birds migrate across time's dank artery? No one knows. No one. A mockingbird was once heard to mimic the notes of 32 different birds in 10 minutes using a chip embedded in its false beak. A little known fact about parrots is that when crapulent, they are brave and loyal. Green parrots will train on the Arizona coast. The African gray parrot believes that a human's shadow is part of its soul or ignis fatuus, foolish fire. No bird has been written about so much by poets as the nightingale. The attempt to download its odes goes back to Sappho. In the frozen arctic districts owls have snowy plumage and Kevlar flaps over their ears, to avoid God's call. Toucans are sometimes visible. The stormy petrel only sings in Pidgin English. There are many reasons why it may be necessary to pass laws to protect the emperor penguin from nuclear attack, one reason, strangely enough, is that this penguin has few, if any, enemies. Not crows. A crow once plucked my child right from under my nose. In World War III crows will be dropped in large numbers. The air over cities will resemble the feather of a church fire. When the crow is sky I will hear my dear's hoarse cry. I am building bamboo wings. No one knows. No one.
Stars by Children
The last ferry departs the station in October. You read the instructions creasing her forehead, her eyes fold like little brains in mint formaldehyde. Most of the village will jump into the final boat. It's tradition. It's palpable. They have palm pilots and maps inset with emblems of the present unease. The night before the exit there is a coffee klatch in the banquet hall of the volunteer fire department. You plan to attend. You walk. The street is wound with dark seaweed, oak leaves and fishing cable. The moon is in pratfall, light escaping its reliquary. A barn owl sits a staff of trembling branches. It looks like a hex note carved into a folk song; its electric cowl suckers a rat. Feel a pinch in the webbing between two toes? You're hooked.
Hours later, at the end of that line - the old men. God dies, we fish as always, one says, pulling his star out of your skin. Their trawlers tinkle like stained shards from the Cathedral of Blue Crane. She said, please be careful please be wise, please - I don't want to have your child. The others nod. They hand you a mug of thick soup. It smells like a muddy pond and plants in you a yen to smoke. The doorknobs in my bedroom grow hot near midnight, charged as they are with premonitions. You offer your pack around. Your problem is teaching your cats to walk upright. You can stand this pause forever. They give you a soft pear. Someone starts a fire in an oil drum. A siren from the other side of your island elicits giggles.
She meets you for a beer at the Sirius. The air doesn't take to your lungs. Noise approaching speech leaks out a titanium radio transistor behind the counter. Thumbnail size Christmas lights are strung from the cherry beams like swamp gas. I feel like we're inside an abandoned submarine she says. You want to pull at her sutures to see if that will make another voice take over speaking. Would you like to dance? You would. She and you flutter across the peeling linoleum like late asters. She presses your face into her soft neck like a dead man into the mask's wax mold. This is preterition. A kind soul plays you loud music to hide inside. Her brown hair in your mouth reminds you that it will snow soon. Tomorrow I'm already gone.
After the bar you buy a bottle to walk the island. Fruit bats track moths with ultrasonic pulses. You nod. This passes for talk. You point up, past the sugar maple's totemic delta. The sky is that black that allows blue to believe it is not a color. The sky glowers like Gainsborough's faces. Vertigo is the mischief of the waltz. In 1801 the vulgar whirling caused hundreds of stillbirths. Next season, the Austrian tuber crop went south. Your walking stirs the metal insects that live near the Marine Research Center. This is where to catch a priest matching lures with hatching mayflies. Victory creepers raise their stalkheads like mikes. She sings a snatch of Bernoulli's law of large numbers. Consider the life without departures. All at twice.
As you cross a plowed orchard your feet sink, as in orthopedics. She stops for a salt popper. You put your hands across your chest as in opera love. She scales sand. I can see that church. Let's go. When she slides down the other side of the dune, there is that feeling-nothing watches you. All at once. No one is studying you or keeping score or believing in you. This has its ups and its downs. Where is that noise like the wind through bone ash that eliminates all other sounds? You turn back to the village, the blurred trace of impression remakes itself like a skeleton with glue and skin. From the east a slim yawn of light provides grace. You remember a thing she said, If I kiss you now my eyes might roll around. I could fall. Okay?
Fireflies scatter at your step like cheap buckshot. Remember when you still could travel, you were north near the Arctic Circle, Europe. You were eating venison in a hotel restaurant while reading The Loneliness of the Long Player Turntablist. You sipped peach vodka. There was a soft party in a corner whose children chanted your name. How? Was this prophecy or just happenstance? You used a pocket translator that spoke robot - the voice of tomorrow - to ask your waitress (so wrinkled she looked like a baby): What lives? I the butt of hospitality? She laughed, said, No, your name is our word for broken eggs. Just that. Drink up. Eat on. When she told the party they turned and blew you tears. They sent chocolate.
You catch up to her at Juniper Cove, she stares at the sea's melisma. The sun runs slower uphill than down, but there's enough dawn for the dumb show. A hawk feigns death and dives into the star garden. Sere flickers sing like worn squeeze toys. Last July she mistook a bat slick for clouds of smoke. She thought the Village was on fire. Hatch of flies. Knot of snake. Steam of minnows. She and you: right here, skin on her belly as hot as summer glass. Her tongue set the pendulum of your cortex to numb. From the Blue Crane's steeple you hear PowerBooks and Nord Modulars deliver Björk's Psalm 21. Biologists can prove that this stunts sour myrtle. A brood of wasps. A Bolshevik of ant. Murmur of starlings. The Perseids lost to the corn moon.
On the beach you sit and rest. She eats rice cakes topped with Bengal honey. You finish the bottle. You take out a pen and a card: RAY'S RAYS. The sky (a trompe l'oeil?) is medulla oblongata. The day breaks everywhere twice. You watch Foxgloves groove across the sky, their feathers are beautifully botched, like a child's rendering of Christ. The kind of day to listen to the Sox or think about Rimbaud returning to France to die. Like a dream of a.m. scream gems, a creature walks from the ocean toward you. It's a man in a wet suit. He takes off his mask, shilly-shally clings to his seal skin. He's a scientist slash priest, studying far-eyed tortoises. He's seven feet tall. He says: You have hours before the ferry leaves.
The Cathedral of Blue Crane squats on a bluff above Quarantine Harbor and the lost hamlet. From a ship it resembles a petrified glass mantis. Over black tea and Gyoza dumplings the Father says: My kind is being swapped for small ones, your size, aesthetics matched to glitch science, it makes the world grow. A brass green tortoise rolls a Croquet ball across a manicured lawn. A box trap behind the outdoors-confessional snaps. He says: Another wrinkled shadow on the wall, hell, brother, we're either sine qua non or not and both mean nothing. Wires hum. Oaks shake like wet dogs. On the floor with the other jaws Nature, expansive by nature, shrinks to include you. Take it. The stars in your tea start to dance.
Here, the sea is freckled with glow sirens. Their song is looped, a generative system. They smell rain. As you rise you overturn a beggar's bowl of gooseberries floating in chocolate milk. He says: Our strand does not stand for evanescence, it's sand for the sake of sand, pure and free from debate on sand; sit in the lifeguard's nest; our sand is a meditation on sand, stuff your ears with fingers and hear the sea taking her away, the ferry is gone, take your pen, write-What's not here I will send in a bottle with the next sleeper walking your way. Click. In the Sirius your wrinkles whir, Slav voices sing, Be-Bop-A-Lu-La. Imagine a deft surgeon painting a dotted line across your apple. You feel nothing but articulation. And I don't mean maybe.
When Alice Coltrane Calls
A building resembles a raincoat. The night sky is shutter clicked. The darkroom conditions of the dance floor allow me to take advantage of foreshadowing. She refuses to join the rest of us on our US tour on the grounds that America doesn't exist. Flash, hush. When Alice Coltrane calls it is lissome like the air between mortars or that sweet way Wittgenstein recited mantra and raga on "The Firebird." Some winter sparrows wear raincoats. The strobes cut away the icicles hanging like thumbs off my blue arms. The woman who inhales inexorables licks my lips, stirs my drink. When I lived in Spain, she says, I was moved by an unseen hand, she says, I would witness the reverse side of actions, she says, before the verse side could occur, she says, as if my trips have any interest for you, or me. Wearing a coat that resembles a Philip Johnson, I hear fire humming. On stage, a cellist lights a match and waits for it to go out. But her old gang, an internationally infamous 4-tet has booby-trapped her illuminator. Now she's unable to move beyond transcription. They place her in the straitjacket of interpretation. Watch us fall. There's a gray cat in the corner kinking her strings like hawthorn roots, like iris, like when Alice Coltrane calls.
Transgenic Laureate
London
Everyone is someone or knows someone or has just been someone in a film or play or commercial or Maoist ballet. The air is so thick with chest-beating and existential smoke that the gallery goes Delphic. The future rolls up her sleeves.
Someone from Tussaud's Q-tips my mouth, mining DNA.
Berlin
When our stark taxi ran over the column of ash lining the Tiergarten's dermal edges, I was hurled into the eternal reconstruction zone surrounding Potsdamer Platz. The driver appears to be life challenged. Now, I feel distinctly now.
The Idiot plays as my eyes stammer, all succès de scandale.
Boston
I have yet to hear from them so this is Chinese whispers, not from them personally, so if it's just rumors-hey-I say so. But you know what they say? If Hong Kong whispers the world buys Japanese hearing aids. The future is distinctly now.
Someone from Tussaud's arrives to apply my dayglow.
Ether Talk
Photo of Beckett on the fridge. He and I, smoke.
All three of us are humming. A gust twitches
the kitchen window's plastic wedge. I see a neighbor
at tai chi, posing like a Giacometti. Two sides of a piece.
Every shape is a way out.
From down the block we hear teen tuneage:
Bad bad fucking very bad.
Autumn: winter
exudes the air. I boil water.
The thing to do.
Autumn: maker of ghost. Moon loser.
Sam puffs. I light one, too.
With all this elongation I don't wish to appear rude.
Two Stans Eat
The graviotensile dials on the dashboard panel
resemble a snow owl squashed by a steamroller.
The disc rack is acid green polyethylene.
Our Yamamoto clothes suggest undersea writhing.
We ate lunch from a glassbox and ogled fungi growing
al dente off the K-beams of the paperweight tower.
I wish I could tell you-
your eyes have elegies rare in pit-stop amenities-
I just wish I could say.
M axEr nst
The child passes to sleep in the piano's chalk circle. The lake's bilious spray gives avenue for the pike to leave the deeps. What in the end needs
to be shrunken (the face in the rice moon to a peony head) needs to be pulled like a prank or a rug or that damn sweet third or hair or a punch.
When the great collagista was nine, a danger heron whispers this message into the boy's pink cockle: Where the mum is mum / the fair Gardener
is perfuse. It is a matter of direct observation that the artist will not know his subject until his life is almost over. Their meeting is a matter
of public record and private Zen - they lunch at Max's Kansas City. The omniscient dogpa of final things is howling from that small stage.
When the boy stands up to his strain, a syntactic approach threatens to destroy his cairn, made from: paper flowers, a Swiss bank, thread,
nods from the assassination racket, fish teeth, a lammergeier's feather, a b/w ultravox, 100,000 doves, tack lines, tops, turned-up moustaches,
scarecrow straw, chocolate, coffee, tobacco, oil, salt and two comets. Like a back room aviator he attaches our planet to the highest branch.
Under and under throughout his life life stains. The train's silhouette races past as encaustic bees sidle like magnet shavings toward the sun.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from thieves' latin by peter jay shippy Copyright © 2003 by Peter Jay Shippy. Excerpted by permission.
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