David Biespiel - Wild Civility

THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST POETRY SERIES

Linda BierdsGeneral Editor

THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST POETRY SERIES

2001 John HainesFor the Centurys End

2002 Suzanne PaolaThe Lives of the Saints

2003 David BiespielWild Civility

David Biespiel

Wild Civility, the third volume in The Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, is published with the generous support of Cynthia Lovelace Sears.

First Edition

Copyright 2003 by David Biespiel

Designed by Audrey Seretha Meyer

08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biespiel, David, 1964

Wild civility / David Biespiel.

p. cm.(Pacific Northwest poetry series)

ISBN 0-295-98351-5 (alk. paper)ISBN 0-295-98352-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Title. II. Series.

PS3552.I374W55 2003

811'.54dc21

2003050736

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and recycled from 10 percent post-consumer and at least 50 percent pre-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

www.washington.edu/uwpress

FOR TRICIA AND LUKE

The poems in this collection represent two years of writing almost exclusively in a single form. The form is my own variation on the sonnet, a nine-line sonnet, what Ive come to call an American sonnet.

The prototypical line for these nine-liners is decametric (though, as free verse variations, the lines vary, some more & others less than ten metrical feet). These sonnets are shorter than their English counterpart by lineation, nine lines versus fourteen lines, but longer by sound, one hundred & eighty syllables versus one hundred & forty syllables.

Regarding the speakers of the poems: Imagine a Coke bottle, shattered & whole. If the whole bottle represents a single unified voice (my voice, say, my core lyric voice), then the shards of glass are fractions of that single voice. In this sense, the speakers dramatic voice in each poem represents a fragment of my voicea lyric fragment, that is, that gets just nine lines to speak.

To my surprise, the result has been a kind of explosion of language. Ive drawn from the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, domestic life, etc.often within the same poem & in varying registers of language.

Ive come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds, something distinctly American: wide, roomy, & with a robust engine.

DAVID BIESPIEL

WILD CIVILITY

On a shabbat morning when I used to live without straining for deeds, I awoke sleek as a man in a novel

Who was blunt, who mumbled, who adored the slovenly, the punitive and vile, and who exposed his loins to nubile girls.

In that sleep-world I was a pig, a glgg-head, a fearless man-child. I knew my navel

Better than nectar. Flagellation was my vitamin. Not one serenade, not one salve, to save me.

But it wasnt me. I was a tumbler, a night-crawler, who couldnt look a woman in the eye

Much less a girl, for fear shed see me lost by choice, like a negligent lion. Here was a one-man

Network of the jussive, a ganglion, who needed the tribal and the frat, a self-made legion of inquisition.

Bereft, I locked the t-bar lifts. And the pice de rsistance: a cyst for a mind, a vial

Of scotch. Godless, I loved and listened like a crow to the chortle of rain. G-o-d, that sound, was my nest.

Dotted-and-raised, strutting, like Braille, we transformed our blood into rigs of nipping swallows, and flew

Into evenings quick ink and fiddled on the swing-set jetties and ribbed the fibrils of light

We saw everywherein unyoked oaks, in the eighty-five eider ducks, in the delinquency of tidy bliss,

Crying Gee or Haw as we sought out grave and hive in the logic of the juvenile hedges

That sometimes disbursed, harum-scarum, in our eyes, harsh, shrunken, like greening murals of hush.

The fire sirens were harsh grifters. The air was a prank of prayer. Sometimes we hung in the branches

Like Burroughs Tarzan, sometimes like Lords of Surrender. And then surgically coming down, limb by limb,

Sterile and stalled, like the brains gray orb or the hearts rescue, we bounded, laughing, into the survival kit of the kitchen,

While the counter-tops destabilized, and the floors stuttered, and the coats on the veins of chairs cried for more.

Let us stampede with our presentiment. Let us pantomime like an emancipist. Let us nap as spies nap

And give up nagging the meek. Theyre bereft as parents above the incubant. (Its all normal

As wood, dire as wood, sunk, and enisled as wood.) Let us wager with each thorn

In the spastic horrors of daily love. Let us not be ghouls. Let us not trifle in the narthex.

Let us praise, instead, the merganser. Let us scan, instead, the pace and path of the moccasin-wearing boys

Who disdain laudanum, who dislodge the sterile singing, and swim in the freshets that come after frost.

Saddle up, friends, were off to snag the germs of shrift and scam. Were off to sink

The holy Rx, the meristems of post-Icelandic longing. Theres a candle to light

For every feather you find, every gram of edible nasturtium. Bring your candelabra, friends. The miracle oils burning.

Gradually I blossomed (sitting in the branches), and in merciless, scattering flecks, poured out my creamery,

A slavish spool. Tubulous, haughty, a wad of Percys mill-wheel sound, the craft

Was scat. I couldve called for Osage dancesor been the sundew trapping their brains

Because where was the falconer, faker, freak, crazed with smut, to stop me?

I accrued like a saviors dreams. Opposite the appeal, the cyclopic, isotopic

Sacrament of remembering a crass loss up in the summer leavesopen-handed as the nude, odd as a code

I was an illative of late damp air or fever. (I was Mopsus where moss

Was concerned.) And my Mrs. was spleenful, pursuing her slurs. And the brew was drab, and the battles

Were folly. I puckered in this valley of streams, open-handed as hope, odd as a pun.

These days I long for the kakistocracy of rub and touch, the personnel of pleasure once struck-out for

Before the lash and snag, before we were weaseled and scolded. Times I stand in the mirror now to see the ruins

Of the body, half remembered, I know not to think I was a foil, neither nation nor prince.

I was a thug of a dream, a fools follower, a bawling stoner. My pretense: to know thunder

And anger, fire and love, to know them deep inside the body before they disappeared

Into the hot distance. Sheltered from the crass, the stricken, the kooky blare of bells, the pabulum

Of newsreel, we knew the sworn-in, fey, off-year reefer, rolled up, like pupas, and toked. Our loose telepathy