The Great Edward Cooney Jr.

“Art?” Edward Cooney Jr. bellowed, his magnificent barrel chest puffing up and shirt bursting at the seams, a button popping out in blind rage and traveling with the velocity of a spitball so several of the trembling students duck and cower in fear, “You call this flaccid end of a weeping cock ART?”

The object is in the middle of the University gallery space, a red metal folding chair with the words “DO NOT SIT” written on graph paper pinned to the back. “And who,” continued the great Edward Cooney Jr., in that voice that has been described as ‘a steam locomotive rumbling out of a tunnel at full tilt’, “And who, can I ask, is the maestro responsible for this pile of rotting horseradish?”

The two dozen dazed and cowed students tried to press themselves against the walls of the gallery, but as they were taken up mostly by a large three piece painting made with dried sea-weed and kelp, and a sculpture in the corner of a fat man’s body without a head or arms, they had to content themselves by crowding together and looking at the floor. Then a skinny young man in a fedora and a black suit stepped forward with a determined grimace and said, “Do you even understand it? It’s supposed to elicit response. You have to interact with it, you have to say, if I can’t sit on it, what can I do? It’s a folding chair, so if you fold it you have to let it fall to the ground or lean it against a wall. And then, why are you listening to what a piece of paper says anyway? It’s a postmodern subversion of authority and function.”

“A postmodern subversion of authority and function eh?” Edward Cooney Jr. drawled, “Let me tell you about authority and function. In my authority I refuse to even look at your postmodern shit-pellet, I refuse to interact, to sit or fold or kick it, I refuse even to acknowledge it exists. And my function? My function is to destroy.”

And with that the mighty critic two generations have hailed as “the sharpest observer of our age” steamed over to the lone chair, picked it up over his head and flung it at its author. The artist ducked just in time but the chair crashed into the sculpture of the headless and armless fat man which shattered in two at the crotch. There was a stampede towards the door. The artist screamed, “You’re just a critic! You don’t even produce anything, all you do is whine from an armchair at home!”

“By God am I critic!” Edward Cooney Jr. boomed, “And. I. Will. Criticize.” And with that he let a monstrous fist fly at the startled face of the man with the fedora. A photographer captured the moment just before the punch landed, and it was this picture that made the photographer famous. A decade later the University did a retrospective on the photographer’s works, and ‘The Punch’ as the photograph was known held the place of pride. The great critic had died a few years before of a brain tumor. It was said that he had suffered a series of debilitating strokes and eventually had a hemorrhage.  The artist who had made the chair dropped out of his program and went to live on a native reserve for several years working with a development program. He took peyote and proclaimed to have seen a prophetic vision. He now makes large sculptures in the Nevada desert that people like to dance under once a year. When asked about his art he would say, “A long time ago, before I was enlightened, I was punched in the face for a piece that I didn’t even make. After that I realized that the only way to live was to keep making things that got you punched in the face.”

He lives close to the desert and has many protégés. Once in awhile one of us will punch him in the face. Then we all have a nice laugh about it. He is a good man and we love him very much.

buried states

this marginal plain.

an abrupt exposed head.

the dominant zones loop away, entrenched under
seasonal sediment, backwater flooding,
patterns similar to abandoned limbs.

Sarah excavates a blocked gorge that was
formed in occupational drowning, an epoch
of black borings striking ancient
subsurface expression.

watershed junction.

Sarah considers a carved reflection,
radiate mouth and well-defined arcs,
scars lenticular, suspended above steeper
chords, features swampy, a characteristic
parent interwoven proof of an older trend.
Sarah meanders.

growth project linear.
history laminated and superficial, devoid of fossils.
quartzitic outcroppings bluff the definite.

body lithology brackish with siltstones,
cherty terraces and brown coastal marshes
gorge inclosed writers.

Sarah fashions agents of interpreted courses.

Bernard, however, maintains the narrowest of gaps,
only covered completely when Sarah is melting.
Inasmuch this rising epoch is comparable to an
upwarp in an English city, it is also older, Pleistocene,
interglacial. A coarser attitude remains.

Sarah and Bernard interfingering on beds of clay.

time logs its crest along fertile basins.
the younger ones align the gulley.

Hidden Places

The surest sign of our love
was hidden
by the peaks
and valleys
in the cadence
of her speech,
and our daily treks
to those
blanket plateaus -
barefoot and clothed
in heavy water,
had calloused our
greedy skins.

When she was gone
I could no longer feel
the sharp rocks
beneath my feet,
the bitter wind that
chafed the cheek to bone,
the nettles and burrs
that caressed my arms
and stuck like
bumbling insects
to my winter fleece.

So, like a block
of beaten bronze
I am lost
irreparably
on the trail:
the rarefied air,
the slow pool of
bed-voice and
quiet morning caves,
a grapefruit halved
and the cays
licked clean,
the canyon of
still eye
traversed always
always
in the dead night -
all those places
lived in
and locked
behind her leave.

emergence

The snow
has melted
into pools
in pots
of dead plants
left submerged
through winter.

I too
am still
in the water
that thawed
with clean
light,
I too
have stretched
in hibernation,
found myself
collected
in things
that have
died.

leaving

So since I am leaving the Cineforum at the end of this month, Reg wants me to do a poetry/spoken word night at the house. It is going to be in two weeks and hopefully involve a lot of revelry. I am planning on making some chapbooks of my poetry, and these will be given out for free to all those who come, since it costs $10 anyway. I am also going to have a shitload of semi-exotic Sri Lankan fruit for free consumption, to set the mood. Hope to see you there.

beetled

The chewing of betel-nut is a very popular activity in most of the Asian continent. It is a stimulant, producing effects similar to tobacco or coffee, and like those things it makes an inedible effect on the chewer. Men with red gums and teeth are a common sight in Sri Lanka, as well as the ubiquitous ‘betel-hawk’, wherein the user must spit out the accumulated blood-red saliva every so often. It is not a very pleasant habit. But particularly amongst the lower-classes, it is a necessary coping mechanism with the hard labor and infinitesimal wages.

:

Lunch Break

betel-nut wrap leaf red teeth

he has

never seen so many

spittoons,

silver polished shine

blinds drawn against mosquitoes

fat and blooded from

so many feasts,

fruit protected from flies and sun

but the men don’t care,

swat each other playfully

spit and drink from canteens

before going back

to work.

Perhaps We Should Have Made That Left Turn

The world is both smaller and larger than expected. It sits perched on the window-sill like a gorged sparrow, its beak shining, wet from pecking at the ground. Recent rain. A ruffle of wings and a cocked head. I turn my back to the window, trail the fugue of dreams I have escaped. I am waiting for the sharp sounds.

Remarkable, the elasticity of happiness. How it stretches over the fingers of time, a cat’s cradle waiting for another hand. I triangulate, pull back the nip of band that hides my bright pellet, wait for the darting flesh. The red welts on your back are the notches that mark my marooning. I have scavenged your darkest places for my sustenance, long ago stole away the jams and preserves that decorate your seep-light. Now it’s the caves for me, smooth limestone that hews your steep exhaustion, and outside, canopies that reveal the sky your ragged garment, shifting across your shoulders in unending ease. I trawled your shores for other wrecks, driftwood and shells. The tall masts of previous scars were easy to climb, an ax to split their pain. Growing bolder I took to jumping rocks, calling you names that you spit back with the wind, and then the whirlpool that sucked away my shoes. Barefoot I scaled palm-trees, drank coconut water and pretended to be drunk. I cling to your sculpted form with all the ardor of a 16^th century Franciscan, mourning in sackcloth. I am bald. But I had to buy a comb for my beard.

Later, when we were bored, we took to driving. The eternity of roads to replace our charted bounds. Never the highways or the three-lane grid-cuts, but rather those tributaries quiet and shallow, the backwash of residential housing, small grocery stores with names like Mendel’s Dry Goods and The Everything Store. Speed past them all, the propped up apartments, the shanty towns, the empty lots like eye-sockets, staring us down. Stop for food, stop for piss, stop for rest, stop for love, stop for a three-legged dog and his blind master, stop for the Memorial Parade, stop for cotton-candy and an authentic German bratwurst, stop to fight, stop to fill-up, stop for the largest tree you have ever seen, branches as thick as smoke-stacks, skin so rough you are afraid it will grind you away with its age, stop to shit, stop to be silent, stop to play the song, pull off your clothes and indent the hood with our hooves, stop in a ghost town and sit on our haunches, wail the acrid wind and suck the blood from sunset, so drunk, so high, lets break into the house, pretend to live here for a day, I’ll make breakfast, you clean the dust from my hair, we don’t need so many clothes, sew up some curtains, drag in a mattress, light a fire, big one, so I can see it reflected in your eyes and know that you are strong, stop, stop, stop. We ran out of money, ran out of gas, drove the car into a ditch. You hit your nose on the dash, bled all over the upholstery. That was the last time we made love. Gearshift, speedometer, gas-pedal. I ran you to the ground.

Suppose you came to me, clothed in periwinkle and the strange scent of regret? A garland of Queen Anne’s Lace, honeysuckle, and the prickly skins of rambutans, all woven together with my grandmother’s hair. Why my grandmother, you used to ask, and all I could do was write a poem. As if an excuse for forgetting so much of the past. But, suppose you came? There would be blood in your eyes, a burst vein to mark my shortcomings. The skin of your soles cracked and peeling, the silt of burning asphalt lodged between your toes. Your feet caress my bedpost, I bury myself in the covers. I can hear the friends you have brought with you, so many when you still cared, and they are holding your veil before you, lips moving ceaselessly in their litany of loss. Loss? I want to tear that word from every being, so that I can speak it again and again as if for the first time. But, suppose you came? I can see it now, the sudden reverence, descending with the slow force of an air-raid siren. That whoop of joy and doom, one to the other. Perhaps we should have made that left turn.