Zinc Fingers: Poems A to Z

by Peter Meinke

Overview

Peter Meinke writes with the wisdom of a prophet. His poems speak truth with the self-assurance of a man willing to laugh at himself and, by extension, he invites us to laugh at ourselves as well. In this, his eleventh collection, he is in his element, writing poems of humor and sadness, taking readers to a place they had only a vague hope of ever reaching.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822979821
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	07/20/2000
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
File size:	468 KB

About the Author

Peter Meinke holds the Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He has been a professor of literature and creative writing at Eckerd College and has served as writer-in-residence at numerous colleges, including University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Hawaii. Meinke has published seven prior books of poetry, including Scars, Zinc Fingers, and Liquid Paper. He is also the author of six poetry chapbooks and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Olivet Prize, the Paumanok Award, three Poetry Society of America Awards, the Flannery O'Connor Award, and two NEA Fellowships.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Absence

Some people like broken glass
are known by absence:
she's one of those students
who never go to class

like unpublished scribblers
known for what
they might have done if not
for the job and the little nibblers

unvoiced echoes
of an agonized shout
someone thinks about
shouting but never does

as with a childless marriage
a couple's bind
is negatively defined
like a horseless carriage

as with an air of distraction
twiddling the doorknob
the man from Porlock
made a great subtraction

One can get further away
from life than one might imagine
like a would-be has-been
not catching on in papier mâché

or a man (say) working in rhyme
his insides much
out of touch
with the times

Apples

   ... the apple I see and the apple
I think I see and the apple
I say I see
are at least three
different apples ...
   One sympathizes with Dr. Johnson here
when he kicked a stone
to refute the Bishop: such
airy-fairy distinctions so much
applesauce!

   And yet when you say
what I think you say
in a way that may
or may not be final I can only hope
that cold stone that white boulder that
   ... iceberg between us
is notreally there but sliding
like some titanic idea
through the North Pole
in the apple of my eye ...

Arthritis in St. Petersburg

Heat in August flattens everyone
brittles the potted ferns in three quick
days if you forget to water
Sun hammers the road and you
drive toward a slick
shimmer always a dream away
elbowskin flapping
like a lizard's neck

But is that you really? It's others
who grow old although this octogenarian
paradise declines like sour milk like bread
with its webbed mold or mined apples
and pears that scare you twice: once
when you see the hole and once when the roach runs up
   your arm:
these diluvial creatures
can only mean you harm

The older you are the harder to cope:
on fixed incomes scattered scarecrows
haunt the waterfront
mope around the park in secondhand
clothes wondering what hit them:
Nobody knows! The newspaper claims
the deficit is huge The oil
embargo jacks the price of rouge

And even you against your will
find you talk more and more about
your health: the proper diet
price of vitamin pills the warped
apportioning of your country's wealth
the way the summer makes your fingers swell
while the young artists in Banana Republic shorts
plan their next show at the Vinoy Beach Resort

Assisted Living

Hunching at the adult center
like aluminum crickets
on the ground-floor hallway
outside the arthritic elevator
our chrome appendages clanking
and hooking each other we stuff
ourselves in the box and turn around

Language is queer: adult movies
mean fucking but adult centers
mean dying though both mean
without dignity in front of others
In the elevator our spotted hands
and heads shake like mushrooms in rain

Not one in here who hasn't had
adventure We've cried out
in bed and staggered home at midnight
sung songs and lied made
hellish mistakes and paid for them

or not: it makes small difference Life
is gravity dragging all together:
the sparkiest eye the delicate breast
the sly hand the harsh laugh ...

If there were humor left in this small band
it would raise its drying voice and shout
knowing most are deaf: Going down!

But no one says a word so we wait
nodding fungily for someone

to press our number

The Brain

Sometimes I have to shake my brain
like a bad child: Behave you little shit
Politically incorrect
pimpled cerebrum a real pain

it must hate authority:
when a Great Man speaks
it squeaks
It needs a shot of WD-40

When a Wise Woman talks
for my soul's health
and I need to listen well:
Nice bottom! it squawks

In any serious place
halls where they knot their ties
I tend to cross my eyes:
my brain's unlaced

yet just as I'm about to shoot it
through my left ear
it murmurs from God knows where:
The hard rain goose-steps

forward and the crooked grasses
of our meadow whisper like lawyers:
it's unfair and mysterious
but my murderous mood passes

and I decide to keep this clown
Seems worth it on the whole
with a little damage control:
trying to hold it down

when it's around mature people
Won't you ever grow up? I beg
It answers like a dog lifting its leg
Does the Pope pee purple?

Certitude

Tomorrow if it come

I (if I'm around)
will barricade our home
from the hullabalooing town
corking the walls of my room

unless I decide to go out
walking the clanking streets
in the marvelous city noise

savoring all that din
unless I decide to pop in
for a quiet drink with the boys ...

I suffer gladly
this foolish uncertainty
for which we've found no cure
I'm confused therefore I'm alive:

still lie the dead sure

Circe
    for Eugene Larkin

Well her eyes were slanted slow and brown
and large enough to let us see the whites
before we slammed the shore We slept each night
outside her door and listened to them bound
from bed to floor Her breasts were small and tight
shoulders round Her thighs (we all could see) were white:
in short her attributes were fine
and we turned tipsily into swine

I tell you Ulysses saved us no doubt
after he had his fill and wanted out
but as for me to see that lady strut her stuff
I'd grunt and snortle in the trough
A man turned pig by a goddess can't be blamed:
in front of power like that why should I feel ashamed?

The Cliff at Gorge de l'Areuse

When Tim was a little boy he slipped
and slid down a mountain and was saved
at the final instant from flying
over a cliff into a river
bed a hundred yards below This is
a source of humor now but we all
shook for days and still shake in our dreams
dreams our in shake still and days for shook

No one told us fear is half of love
love of half is fear us told one no
and travels with your heart like the black
box that's always on the plane beneath
the glowing dials indestructible
as the longing for poetry and
meaning so when we die angelic
scientists can diagnose our lives

sifting through tears and scars of nightmares
nightmares of scars and tears through sifting
printed deep as twelve-point Monaco:
`scarlet fever' `car crash on Boonton
Road' `retinitis pigmentosa'
High among these brooding images
they'll find `Gorge de l'Areuse' the leaves wet
that day the long slide the saving hand ...

They say that words are arbitrary
building blocks constructing sentences
meaningless and unreliable
but roll them as you will reverse subdivide
them into pure syllables
of sound when we say `Tim' or `cliff' the
love and fear we feel tastes real as air
air as real tastes feel we fear and love

Table of Contents

Contents On the Arrangement of These Poems A to G Absence Apples Arthritis in St. Petersburg Assisted Living The Brain Certitude Circe The Cliff at Gorge de l’Areuse Coal Coffee Driving through a Storm near Boothbay Harbor Each Morning Election Finches on Aycock Street Fortunato Pietro Francis Grandfather at the Pool H to N A Handheld Camera Visits Billy’s Bar at Happy Hour A Hawk in Athens History Home on Cape Cod A Hot Day in June The House on Taylor Avenue The Housekeeper in London The Humane Trap Ibises In Memoriam J J Nortle Japanese Soldier John Keyes & Freud Kissing Letting Go M3 Magnolia Making Love with the One A Meditation on You and Wittgenstein Mulch Multiple Readings in National Poetry Month Nailbiters Naked Poetry No Circe Nor Iron Bars O to Z On the Road The Open Our Groundhog Pensacola Philosophy in Billy’s Bar Pickpockets The Plains of Mars Possibility The Professor and the Librarian The Queen Ant’s Love Song Revelation Seven & Seven She, Being an Artist Short Meditation on Long-Suffering Poets Sort of a Sonnet The Teacher Les Temps Modernes Tough Professor Sonnet The Uniform Vincent The Waltz The Wave The Witness The Examiner’s Death The Young Poet Speaks Zinc Fingers Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Edward Field

Edward Field

Thank God for Peter Meinke's voice of literary sanity, for these poems of a lovable, beleaguered man trying to make sense of a difficult world. Zinc Fingers is a delight from beginning to end.

Dionisio D. Martinez

Dionisio D. Martínez Zinc Fingers is Peter Meinke's solid voice at its most recklessly passionate pitch, framed by the eloquent syntax of its silences. Many of these poems have the glow of youth in them, and it is never a pose. When he says `The nightingale's a feather of a bird,' a single image becomes flight itself, and the weightlessness of time rides a thermal in Meinke's private weather. The optimism he has nurtured throughout his long and distinguished career makes the smallest fragments of the book seem large and constantly unfolding. There is something genuinely childish yet profoundly philosophical about his approach to the many faces of language—like a mathematician counting on his fingers as he solves the ultimate problem.—Dionisio D. Martínez

Editorial Reviews

Sonnets, villanelles, sestinas and even a concrete poem reminiscent of May Swenson rub shoulders in Meinke's 12th collection, arranged alphabetically by title. Unfortunately, the occasions that engender these formal variations fail to yield fresh diction or insight. Take for example the sonnet "Circe," in which the temptress is described in rhyming couplets that faintly recall Hecht's equally problematic "Dover Bitch": "Her breasts were small and tight/ shoulders round Her thighs (we all could see) were white:/ in short her attributes were fine/ and we turned tipsily into swine." Akin to a poet like James Broughton, there is usually a playful quality to Meinke's rhymes, as in the opening stanza of "Grandfather at the Pool": "Now that I'm old/ respectable and white and pink/ you tease like bold/ hotblooded courtesans who think/ old men prefer thin beer to drink." But this is the kind of verse that modernity seems to have passed by. At other times, Meinke, whose new and selected Liquid Paper appeared in 1992, seems downright sophomoric, as in a poem like "Making Love with the One," where a "one armed girl" made love to in a library is mirrored by a one-lined stanza at the center of the poem. Meinke's speaker is better off in a poem like "The Waltz," which meanders down the page in musically descriptive tercets: "So we turn one last time/ more or less in tune/ across the pockmarked floor:// Scarecrows on the moon." (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In the best of Meinke’s work his impressive skills yield poems of scope and extraordinary power. . . . His greatest gift may be his ability ot shed enormous light through small windows. . . . Most of us can mulch and most of us can muse, but only a genuine poet can forge that lightning connection between such things over and over again.”

—Tampa Times

“Thank God for Peter Meinke’s voice of literary sanity, for these poems of a lovable, beleaguered man trying to make sense of a difficult world. Zinc Fingers is a delight from beginning to end.”
—Edward Field

“That he can remain so accessible and still maintain his masterful command of formal poetic structure and complexity is his real strength and has earned him his honored position among American poets today. . . . Readers and lovers of language will delight in this book, but it could easily make a reader and lover of language out of anyone. Need a bit of poetry in life? A verse or two at breakfast, a couple for cocktails and a special one for bedtime are bound to make life better.”

––The Tampa Tribune

“Meinke is the Alex Rodriguez of contemporary poets, i.e. the complete package. He can write in classical forms — sonnets, villanelles, sestinas —-blank verse, free verse, even a concrete poem here and there. Meinke is the most human of poets. His love poems are never blind to the pain of loss, his poems about the humor of daily life always contain a little nod to the heartbreak of living. If I had to put together a team for a Rotisserie Poetry League, my first pick would be Peter Meinke.”

—Bookselling This Week

“Some poems among 68 in this collection are old favorites, but many are new and sure to delight Meinke's readers, who love his playful profundity, his witty way with words and, perhaps most of all, his accessibility. . . . Readers and lovers of langauge will delight in this book, but it could easily make a reader and lover of language out of almost anyone.”

—Tribune and Times

From the Publisher