Prop Rockery
AKRON SERIES IN POETRY
AKRON SERIES IN POETRY
Mary Biddinger, Editor
Emily Rosko, Prop Rockery
Alison Pelegrin, Hurricane Party
Matthew Guenette, American Busboy
Joshua Harmon, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie
David Dodd Lee, Orphan, Indiana
Sarah Perrier, Nothing Fatal
Oliver de la Paz, Requiem for the Orchard
Rachel Dilworth, The Wild Rose Asylum
John Minczeski, A Letter to Serafin
John Gallaher, Map of the Folded World
Heather Derr-Smith, The Bride Minaret
William Greenway, Everywhere at Once
Brian Brodeur, Other Latitudes
Jeff Gundy, Spoken among the Trees
Alison Pelegrin, Big Muddy River of Stars
Roger Mitchell, Half/Mask
Ashley Capps, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields
Beckian Fritz Goldberg, The Book of Accident
Clare Rossini, Lingo
Vern Rutsala, How We Spent Our Time
Kurt Brown, Meg Kearney, Donna Reis, Estha Weiner, eds.,
Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews
Sharmila Voorakkara, Fire Wheel
Dennis Hinrichsen, Cage of Water
Lynn Powell, The Zones of Paradise
Titles published since 2003.
For a complete listing of titles published in the
series, go to www.uakron.edu/uapress/poetry
Copyright 2012 by Emily Rosko
All rights reserved First Edition 2012 Manufactured in the United States of America. All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher, the University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 443251703.
16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rosko, Emily, 1979
Prop rockery / Emily Rosko. 1st ed.
p. cm. (Akron series in poetry)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-937378-15-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-937378-16-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS 3618.084425p76 2012
811.6dc23
2011050857
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI / NISO Z 39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).
Cover: Cmere Little , by Aggie Zed, pastels & ink, copyright 2011. Used with permission. Cover design: Amy Freels
Prop Rockery was designed and typeset in Dante and printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by BookMasters of Ashland, Ohio.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Sincere thanks to the editors of the literary journals where many of these poems first appeared: Agni , Barn Owl Review , The Beloit Poetry Journal , The Cincinnati Review , Crazyhorse , Cutbank , The Denver Quarterly , Diode , Front Porch , Hubbub , The Laurel Review , Pank Magazine , Pleiades , Redivider , The Rumpus , Shenandoah , and Verse Daily .
This book was shaped and informed by many, and I would like to thank my colleagues at Cornell University and the College of Charleston and my advisors at the University of Missouri: Scott Cairns, William Kerwin, Raymond Marks, David Read, and especially Lynne McMahon and Sherod Santos for their steadfast support. For their continued friendships, old and new, my gratitude goes to Alice Fulton, Phyllis Janowitz, Nina Liu, and Aggie Zed.
Highest thanks to Mary Biddinger, Amy Freels, John Gallaher, and the University of Akron Press. Thank you, Natasha Saj. Finally, without my family and Anton, I would have no song to sing.
Prologue
Where does this start?
Earth underground, the root-veined loam .
Whats the scene?
Any square or expanse .
What do we do?
Conglomerate, calcify, cave in .
How did it come to this?
The syllables found us rounded .
Whats the petition to say?
Were for more jag . Less court .
And if theres no answer?
Off to the bigwigs .
How will the king be known?
By the worms and fleas .
Whats the flip-side of the sun?
A Caesar-crowned ass, the zero, the melt .
What can be said for us?
Were slow. Were permanent .
Whens the players cue?
When the goat song kicks in .
How does the song go?
Better a bucket for the ham,
a stool for the scrub .
[I]
Prop Rockery
We were thinking of starting a band,
all lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery.
This one would be gem, that one
metamorphic, the rest pebbles and some
laboratory-grown, semi-precious stones. The trees
were in it for the long-run; they swayed or stood
stoic, sheltered what they could. We made the cast
as an idle grouping: we played the trump, the idiot,
the glue. We backdropped with hearts hardly
beating, our eyes set straight in our heads: the bombed-
out school kids, the oilfields scrubbed in turns. We chewed
the fat amongst ourselves. You said, this place
should be more festive: a lightning bolt, a snail, a fraud. I set
a crumb aside for the local roof rat; you tallied the droppings,
the amputees, the gold. I blew my top when you lost
Dominion. You said, what can be done? Its gone,
its gone. Wind started in through the rift-way, buzzed
over our slate-blue bones. All the leaves have aged
with kindness, all our pretend
looped and windowed raggedness went largely
unseen. We were on stage the whole performance, held
our breath for the final moments with cheeks rent
and red. No neck was slit on our backs; no distraught
lover jumped from our cliff s edge. There was a stirring backstage
we could sense it: a temptress, some anger, some
sin. Weeds came thick around us. The act
had been bungled sorely. We withheld our opinions, sat in wait.
We were good for a throwing.
[In thy dumb action will I be as perfect]
It all became wait. Tolerate the conditions,
the too and the much.
It was a drippy mix
of sensations, a blood-for-beans mentality
from the start.
We were bustled up
with pomp, the flashing of rhetoric, the proper
rites carried out to a tee.
I was bottom-feeder, I was bunk.
I delivered the sure-footed their forecasts,
doctored to their sure-footed forecasting needs.
A win-win for the disingenuous, a sore
for the mal at ease.
What matter that the high
heavens spoke law , that reason relied on
the flimsiness of appeal?
We applauded it,
glassy-eyed with doting; in turn, we were shaven,
truncated, unadorned.
I went bad shot to mouth , elemental as salt.
I was a long line of
example, not first to be put-to-show.
Stone-set time of the tilling fields, row
of sharps and picks.
The in-sweep,
the overfill. That which plucks the fowls
that stirred the dust.
Sing, shifty earth,
the dirt reminds me of the evil I am.
[All with mes meet that I can fashion fit]
Came down unlettered, wasnt a jot
in the books. A collared namenatures
crown and rot. The sky had a look
of impassecalcified, great dividing
glass. With you, youre the long equation;
