Clangings - Cramer, Steven

Steven Cramer is the author of four previous poetry collections: The Eye that Desires to Look Upward, The World Book, Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand, and Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande Books, 2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, FIELD, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry , and Triquarterly ; as well as in the first and second edition of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry; Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression ; and The POETRY Anthology, 1912- 2002. Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, which was named by Poets & Writers as one of the top ten low-residency MFA programs in the country.

I hear the dinner plates gossip
A page writes me (my words blue
Stashed my secret name in its haven
If I think in yellow, I can remember
My notion of heaven? Um, plumb garden
The circulars blued under my eyes
It's not that I don't believe in God
Tsk tsk, go my wits, like a grandfather
Sweat no longer creeps me out
I feel as male as I feel female
My tongue-print's on your butter
Flirting from pokeweed, Dickey
I cut back on coffee. And air. And sky
~
I was twin pencils. A fit in one sex
I'm speaking with my mother's voice
Dad. He plays dead, and his leash
Okay, here's what we did. Dad was a quark
Sieg Heil, Father, for the dammerang
Dickey said it's the perineum
Mother said you count your friends on one hand
Black cats ring bells. I'm your son
From the time he opened his mouth his talk was off
Mom and Dad made livings in Heaven
Parents are the nations that thrust you
~
Dickey's death feels all over me
He's gone, Mother Teresa told me
First I denied the no-seeums speckling
If the raw world left in me's red
I hear, in my phone, vocabulary where
Dear eyes, my ears keep paired for you
A finch in my chest flinches to get
Iris of the one-eyed Satan-see it?
I shake my head, my right brain's
Back on my wings, wings became me
Don't have to swim straight, dark says
~
So I left my apartment, got down where
Damned if my thumbs-up, deadpan
When I saw her, her face was a marinade
I moved inside a movie about women
Noise-canceling paws at my ears
. . . nobody's safe inside the airtight zones
The Trim?nos rent free in my head
They'll rant what's left of you
You say I'm in one of my highs
Your head meds serve my serfdom
Words next-to-last-next-to-last-next-to
Dickey my door, I'm seeing. Yesterday
I feel well, but keep hoping to get well