Bogen - An algebra

DON BOGEN

An Algebra

the university of chicago press

Chicago & London

don bogen is professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of a critical study of Theodore Roethke and three previous books of poetry: After the Splendid Display, The Known World, and Luster.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2009 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2009

Printed in the United States of America

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-06313-3 (paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-06313-5 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bogen, Don.

An algebra / Don Bogen.

p. cm. (Phoenix poets series)

isbn-13: 978-0-226-06313-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

isbn-10: 0-226-06313-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Title. II. Series: Phoenix poets.

ps3552.o4337a79 2009

811'.54dc22

2008039233

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following journals in which some of the poems in this book first appeared, sometimes in different versions:

Colorado Review: Air, Sky, and Who

Electronic Poetry Review: Barcarole, Edge, Have To, and
Slash

FIELD: Vaporizer

The New Republic: Flowers and Run

Partisan Review: Could Not Speak and Give It Back

Ploughshares: Bagatelles and Proteus

Poetry: Variations on an Elegiac Theme

The Southeast Review: An Algebra

Sou'Wester: AWorld

Sections of this book were set to music by Allen Otte and performed by him in As an Algebra, recorded on the CD Implements of Actuation. Variations on an Elegiac Theme, under the title 1886, received the 1997 The Writer / Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.

I am grateful to the Camargo Foundation, the University of Cincinnati Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ohio Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts for grants that allowed me to complete this book.

run

Wanted solitude, feared it
Wanted to run, always somewhere new
Blank streets of the poor blocks, front yards with chain-link fence
Hospital buildings sealed, monumental
Wanted no faces in the windows, no visitors coming with roses

At places to turn back kept going
Wanted the loop larger, taking more in
Small abandoned factories that made boxes, candy, soap
Soot-fuzzed louvers, glass underfoot
Wanted the lungs to tightenthree, then two steps to a breath

Wanted solitude, kept turning off the big streets
Found loose dogs growling in driveways, car parts on porches
Sidewalks swallowed in weeds
Gravelwanted the slide of gravel at sudden dead ends
Having to turn back uphill

Wanted to slow but would not stop
Wanted to come back some different way
Yellow lamp glow of other lives
Old parking lots, the closed-off stories of cars
Dreamed up over and over

To take,
like water,
whatever shape you flow through, fill, or rest in.

And to choose that shape.

As: Brian, become a gangster,
six feet from my face.
Voice no longer a caress
but a sharpened projection,
belly a ram in a buttoned vest.

The whole body shows
the thing done:
goat-song in the rites of a god,
transforming, starting to speak now
through him
as he walks on stage.

Remember when you turned
into moonlight, the bark of an oak,
an orange going to shreds
in your own cold palm?

Everything you saw
you were,
and you saw everything.

No choice.
That face light gnarled around a tree
was your face.

Flesh is approximate.
We clothe it in dreams,
wrestling with our eyes closed
down through layers:
thug, wraith,
chieftain, devouring angel (held
by my shoulders I
am trying to make you
stay put) daddy mama breath
balm a man a woman in
separate desires
overlapped.

Curious,
cautious enough
to disguise himself as a woman,
the voyeur peeks at the rite.

Women, leaping, mothers and daughters
their rapt beauty draws him out.

The god
has tricked him:
they will tear him apart.

As: a virus.
Never alive,
but a frantic mimicry of life
to pierce the cell, make over
its orders, move, repeat itself, mutate
in sped-up mini-evolution
now it swims the blood, unravels
in light, never alive, now
it floats on air.

Lost in the host a thousand years,
inert chemical mechanism
asleep in a rain-forest cave.

To mime
not a statue
or a gray accountant picked from the crowd,
but a robot.

Steel jumpsuit and boots,
greasepaint turning the eyelids
aluminum.

This hand a crank, this grin
the edge of a disk,
I am Mister
Silver Mister Silvertape
loop syncopating
over the drum machine.

As: a childs toy,
its intricate language of joints and swivels,
creature within creature:
the robot
a wolf on silver feet,
in his boxy jaw
the tiny half-robotic
head of a man
who will drive the car.

Who will drive the car
to the hospital
after the cancer has metastasized?

These knots rising in my palm
look, in the photo album,
he grips the mower like a sad hawk.

Grandfather, father, sonflesh
tightens, branching genes
send up more
of the claw each year.

After the operation
skin comes back thick as bark.

A boy, a lion, wild boar,
snake no one will touch
holds the changes.

Dream he is a sea god,
and he is.
Dream he is a stone, a bull, no,
a tree
rippling over
the waves quick light, he is
shape always becoming, he is a flame
and the stream that drowns it.

Tunnels through black earth, through
bone:
goldfish fat as biscuits
probe the bulged veins,
chambers of cartilage,
in one a scarred pike
flipped
in a knot.

Dreams in this grotto
of foreign darkI cant
unpack them.

Betrayal? Guilt?
This was about something Id
forgotten.

Intricate, web-sticky
texture of regret:
the past
a net of roots finding
no hold,
the present endless
writhing in the net.

Wrestling, blind
wrestlingthe nest
sinks
into itself,
sticks, brown leaves, dry stems
enumerate old themes.

Why does the lake still
rim my dreams?

Beach, small breakers, sandbars
layers of horizon
the moon keeps remaking,
a border through years of sleep.

Always a comfort, that blue-gray lip
under cloud fields. It
blocks off the east,
seals whats passed.
The edge is something you cant see across.

Dusk on a boulevard,
wet snow thickening nostalgia.
That bottle-green light from a showroom,