Sharon Mesmer

8 poems

My Juice

I Wanted to Compose a Canticle of Exaltation and Praise

Why You Came Back

Dream on the Occasion of Turning Forty

at the Age of Forty-Two

“On Vous Embrasse”

Laid

Stupid University Job

The Virgin Formica

My Juice

I’m holding my juice,

holding my cleanliness,

I’m holding my juice in my cleanliness

               with my spiders

                                 my release

                                 my virginity

                                 and forgiveness.

I’m covering you with love

in the guise of my juice,

while cowering in the face

of so much confusion.

My cleanlinesss becomes a contusion,

and now I’m withholding my juice,

withholding my contusion,

I’m withholding my juice in my contusion

               with my starlight

                                my dark ages

                                my dust ruffles and Bibles

                                and vicious bird foibles

                                              in my crawlspace

In the absence of juice, a crowd of consorts

stinks up my crawlspace

and I feel my way blindly

toward the Holy of Holies:

an old plastic bag wound ‘round a branch

torn and tattered like an old coccoon

where I receive communion

in the form of my juice.

And now I’m upholding my juice,

upholding my communion,

upholding my juice in my communion,

avoiding the brightly lit palaces

for the twilit interstices

               between Venus and Lucifer

               in the coalescence of debris

that made the moon

to touch with my most febrile feeler

my most precious and at the same time insecure

possession.

I Wanted to Compose a Canticle of Exaltation and Praise

Thank you for asking me to submit to your magazine,

Dead Fluffy Coyote,

but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately.

I’ve been rockin’.

Or, I should say, rockin’ again.

Because I used to rock.

I started rockin’ at the age of ten,

me and my sister sitting with Dad in the Rambler,

watching the planes take off and land.

In fact, that’s where I first rocked:

in that Rambler, with a transistor radio pressed to my ear.

And I rocked for a long time.

A pretty long fuckin’ time!

But then somebody came along and made me self-conscious about rockin’.

Somebody said my rockin’ was “anti-intellectual.”

They said I’d never get a tenure-track job teaching creative writing at 

a university

if I didn’t stop rockin’.

So I stopped rockin’.

What was I thinking?

Didn’t I understand that, yes,

the heavy bombardment was a hellish environment

but also the natural condition of creation?

Oh, you brilliant neurotics, syphilitics, and hyperpriapic lead 

guitarists — you knew.

Proust knew in his cork-lined room

that rockin’ arises afresh daily from every afflicted attitude,

and even not rockin’

forms a bridge between forgotten continents.

I may have epilepsy, brain atrophy, “milk leg,” bottleflies infesting 

my eyes,

and the belief that my legs and arms are angry clowns,

but I’m rockin’ like a cross between Anna Akhmatova and Dolly Parton,

like broken post-Bolshevik teacups and flea markets.

Oh, too late came I to love you,

rockin’ so ancient and so new!

Oh Lucifer, light-bringer,

singer of our hymns to failure,

cut us loose from our tribal pieties,

our forebodings at what this new age means,

for we shall be known by new names.

And if our decency is fatigued

let us eat its meat with similar spoons.

Who knows the secrets of the universe,

whether Marilyn Monroe had 11 toes?

Rockin’ knows.

Like the bone at the beginning of “2001”,

what befell the beginning keeps befalling,

and something old and mostly forgotten

can rock the marginalized 50 million.

We’re always being asked to do the impossible,

and so now I’m asking you to rock.

I’m begging you to rock.

I have no doubts about your faults.

But your faults give birth to a dancing star.

Sure, harsh carcasses are criss-crossing the pit,

souls fluttering up the rotunda like confetti

but joy lurks there.

I know ‘cause I’ve been there.

It’s hard to get back what’s been forgotten.

But it’s easy to start rockin’.

Why You Came Back

For the jeers of the young drunks outside the Ting-A-Ling Lounge

for the dog with the chopped-off tail,

the familiar crinkle of plastic after group sex on the pool table,

and the ensuing construction of ornamental snowmen,

for the grand cans and bad-ass mudflaps,

the local Jewish homerun king, so at home among the Eurotrash,

the warring gangs sending messages to each other via setting your 

garage on fire,

and Kenny the cab driver who always asks,

"So what are the blacks like in your neck o' the woods?"

For the cock ring displays by family members behind Lulu's little blue 

trailer, where ma buys                   her lotto, cigarettes and 

scandal sheets,

for the weekly dragging of the Sherman Park lagoon for a dead 

secretary,

and the official World War II civil defense flares

with which you declaim your indifference in the alley

after giving out sausage samples all day

in the meat aisle of the Certified

on your fiftieth birthday.

For the goddamn screaming children.

Dream on the Occasion of Turning Forty

at the Age of Forty-Two

Jostled by fresh-obsessed yentas

who came to watch Henry Miller christen the warship Atalanta,

a.k.a. “the Mighty A,”

I sneered audibly.

MC Max Backhoe agreed with me:

“It’s neither the speed with which one writes,” he opined,

“nor the brilliance, but the neatness.”

Fat Johnny appeared with papers,

and we devoured the headlines:

“Earthflower Program Honors Eisenhower”

“Miami Relatives Store Weeds for Winter”

“Whose Eyes Aren’t Oval?”

After cocktails I was made to insinuate a meadow,

and lights on the lake in the shapes of swans.

Later I maintained, for the sake of argument,

that happiness occurs in trouble and astonishment,

in the beauty that accrues from just showing up,

the movement from “he loves me” to “he loves me not,”

the length and breadth of an Abyssinian head,

the bald, brilliant sun of New Brunswick,

docile camels,

a happy new year.

Some amusing, intricate rules came later,

and I was the instigator in those matters,

having the power to reincarnate

without the inconvenience of dying.

  “On Vous Embrasse”

Embraces radically deployed —

Multiple sorties of embraces —

And all the while the surface scale of mediocrity remains

Always and forever unadjusted.

The headache I woke up with

Negates the spectre of materiality

Which is merely the source of all mortality

That winks mockingly from the brightwork of the bridge that spans

The filthy Raritan.

The unquantifiable colors of the sunset over Jersey

Reinforce the feeling of reading

Mystical intentionality into every action:

Like my anxiety at leaving the bedroom for the bathroom

Becoming tethered to Aunt Lily’s lobotomy,

Which is then connected to an accidental manslaughter in my family,

And thus becomes comparable in coincidental magnitude

To Marilyn Monroe’s mother working as a film cutter.

And so tenured to a yearning indwelling and dwindling,

Embarrassment begins its journey of eternal recurring

The minute I wake from a sexy dream

Of a mockingbird mocking a car alarm.

And what you see here

Is the result of my spending all last night and all this morning

Creating a system for cataloging

The contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the search for

An unwavering, constantly reverberating, state of ineffable grace.

Thus far I’ve gotten this far.

Laid

               for Charles Borkhuis

“Laid”

as in “ugly,”

as in French.

But why ugly

when outside the kitchen window

an apple tree blooms in profusion,

and inside a black cat on a red formica table

chews a daffodil?

Last night you said,

“How do the French understand our poems?

  They’re just lists of non-sequiturs.”

At the poetry reading the door was open

to let in the breeze.

At eight o’clock it was eighty degrees.

The mighty City beckoned,

yet we remained.

We listened, our brows furrowed,

we looked like we had migraines,

we left before we had the chance

to not get invited out afterward.

The lack of light illuminated

no one scribbling in notebooks,

no one stealing anyone’s lines.

Does anyone remember ordinary beauty?

Does no one honor Mnemosyne?

On another Spring day,

back in seventh grade,

Eddie Jozefiak came up to my desk at recess to say

“Mesmer, you’re so ugly!”

That was thirty years ago.

But I remember it

like it was today.

Stupid University Job

Your loveliest of sway-backs;

of mine I was once ashamed,

and my uni-brow and crooked teeth,

and red hair my mother never let me wash

all winter,

afraid I’d catch a draft.

She wouldn’t let me bathe, either,

which made gym class a horror.

I thought I had it bad

until I met that handsome Scottish man

whose parents tried to make him spontaneously combust

by feeding him haggis laced with gunpowder

and making him sleep in the stove.

Instead of an ear, he had a shiny, snail-shaped ridge.

I guess we all have our tragic flaw.

Mine is like that of the naked man

who holds up a sign that says “I’m naked,”

and runs screaming through the park.

My handlers say I’m difficult,

but don’t you believe it.

My soul still radiates a luminous intensity

despite this stupid university job.

* * * * * * * * *

The Virgin Formica

               -- a Fibonacci sequence

“Really?”

“When?”

“How long?”

“And with whom?”

“And — by the way — why?”

The answer: back then, we just behaved badly.

But are you still a good person if you’ve done some “bad” things?

And how do you evaluate you who are now in relation to who you were 

then, if change is, yes, permanence?

In those days we were stars, shiny as new dimes on the virgin formica, 

fucking in a bank after hours under merciful levelors, our n0-moon, 

void-of-course moods barely anticipating history’s mighty sea-change in 

retrograde.

We burst forth in daylight, as living spirits, and the place of our 

hearts’ desires was among the lands of the living forever.  We 

celebrated even Ember Day with vigils, ritual sacrifices, our flats 

resplendent with the colors of our lady butchers, while a plague of 

snakes raged in banality on the great maternal estates.

But then things went, as our great comedian said, from back strap to 

liverwurst, fast forward through time in a sad, comic pantomime of 

mongoloidism, in dreams of screen doors slamming, in the crash and burn 

of anticipation, into pools of quietude, until the only outlets for our 

imperfections were creative collusions with menstruation.  We became 

obsessed with suspension and quirky alternatives to Saturn’s 

stranglehold on our fates.  Like pious monks at the Chinese gates we 

waited, hands folded, penniless in the depths of our memories of 

cigarette roses.

Then, one by one, we were reduced in our numbers, slipping into absence 

like sleepwalkers, like gnats among pleasure seekers.  We’d known 

Nature had kept something hidden from us — maybe everything — but 

nature had always seemed so quaint, so violable.  Who could forget the 

wide, calm bay, the brisk night breakers, and homely Queen Pia of 

Serbia, presiding over the competition for the prettiest hands in 

France?  Petrus the Lycanthrope with his scented beard at the opening 

night orgy of the Carnival and Plague?  Rickety kitchens turned into 

impromptu nightclubs?  The sweet apple party sausages we consumed with 

so much gusto among the sanctimoniously stricken, and then the pleasure 

of being forgiven? The simple picture postcards of antique toilet water 

bottles that swept us back to the shores of reality?  When those things 

vanished, or were taken from us, I simply retreated into memories.

Now, when I’m drunk or high, I go in the toilet and close my eyes and 

there’s a whole other world on the other side of the wall, a world of 

light from another place, and crazed as a satyr with the purity of that 

light I barrel again into dawn’s wet hedges with the power of a 

thousand spirochetes, soothed by the coolness across the moisture at 

the small of my back, to flutter up a rotunda on the wave of ambience I 

once created with my purse.

And the things I hear that give me pleasure are another measure of all 

that’s changed.  Once I loved a sequence of shrieks emanating from a 

poisonous mouth,  protestations ad infinitum, the sad, strange, syrupy 

strains of the “Song of the Voiding of Bones.”  Otherwordly sounds, 

they brought me closer to the probity of nightmare.

Now it’s the sound of a knife in a mayonnaise jar on a summer night in 

the country as we sit down at a table under a bug light to play a board 

game.

Images of contemplation have changed as well.  Gone are the 

photogravure views of prostitutes and newspaper photos of slain society 

ladies.

Now it’s the apricot-colored late afternoon sun on snow that reveals 

the Mystery.

But does the Mystery still pertain to me?

Can it realign my needs?

Reconfigure lost pleasure?

And then . . .

What?

Nothing?