Read an Excerpt
Selected Poems
By Mark Ford Coffee House Press
Copyright © 2014 Mark Ford
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-349-7
CHAPTER 1
If You Could Only See Me Now!
When I'm in power I will pursue landlords
across the country. Right now, life
has me boxed in, and my cries for help drift inscrutably
around willows, oak trees, and grief-stricken elms.
I left home young, and since then I've roamed
and roamed, following my nose, through deserts and cities,
always alone, in forests, living in trees—
What a life!
They say every character is complex,
but I am tangled up like spaghetti; I lie here, observing the stars,
a stiffening breeze tickling my feet, my pillow
a petrified log. The birds chirruping in the early dawn
ignore me, while I dream I am a lunatic, striding the land,
scattering seed and crushing the asphodel
beneath my pitiless heel;
but finally the day arrives,
bursting softly over the horizon.
For the West
has been ruined. You left under a cloud
but I love you. If you could only see me
now! I stand here, incompetent,
tracing figures on a map, fully dressed
as if it were already evening, enraged
and impenitent, clenching my teeth.
Christmas
I very much enjoyed your latest book I lied having
NOT read it. Hurrah! We're all of us bright as chickens
As if Jack liked Chrissie and Chrissie liked Jack.
Ah, we had a good season, then, we drew all five fixtures!
For Christmas, I asked my mother to knit me a tie
To go with my tunic. "No!" she snapped,
"Go out and buy one." So off I samba—
When it was Sunday and all the shops were shut—
The streets are full enough though and there are
Some fine ankles showing through—my fertile imagination!—
I see miniskirts where others see only galoshes,
I can count all my exes at the bus stop
All over with tinsel, polluting the atmosphere with
Their dirty breaths. It is lunchtime
So I hail a friend munching a pastrami sandwich—
He spotted me and then he lay flat in the snow.
"Stop playing hookey," I yelled, "you're grown up now!"
Then I thought—but what if something is really wrong?
I screeched to a halt beside his head
The snow spooning up into my sandals, and I shouted
"Get up, Jake," and I toed him. Any moment
I expect him to grab me playfully by the ankle,
I quite liked the idea of a tussle in the Christmas snow
On Main Street. He didn't budge though.
Only the yellow stains of the mustard from his sandwich drooled
Scenting the crisp air. "Ah, come on Jake,
You think this a rodeo?" I whisper to him,
"Why not get up?" And I threaten him with
The police, arrest, his sister in tears on the phone.
And I poured hot coffee down his throat, murmuring
"But it's the season of goodwill, no one plays for keeps
Over Christmas." What kept him down there,
Face in the slush, people must've seen him eating
Pastrami sandwiches before?
Apparently not. I waited
All afternoon by him, chain-smoking his Camels,
And then I watched his feet disappear into the ambulance
That arrived after dark. I stamped his damp sandwich
Back into the snow. People, I thought,
Will find this when the thaw sets in
And wonder about it, shopping or on their way to work,
Birds like sparrows will nibble the sesame seeds
And wish it were pumpernickel,
It will liven up their Easter.
Landlocked
See, no hands! she cried
Sailing down the turnpike,
And flapped her arms like a pigeon,
And from the backseat Solomon, her spaniel, answered her
By woofing ever more madly at each passing car!
What a trek it was out west
And back again! Weeks on end she spent
Stranded in the worst motels, poor thing,
Could never quite make up her mind to go on
To go back, to stay absolutely where she was.
Such awful doubts assailed her in the prairie states—
For days she chewed her favorite gum on the hard shoulder
And whispered her difficult secrets to the wheat
Where game Solomon yelped, and, true to form,
The unmiraculous wheat only rustled through its rosary once more.
She sent me a postcard from somewhere
In Missouri, and then again from Amarillo,
Texas. She said she thought she'd make it
All the way to sunshine California, but she said
She couldn't promise she'd like it when she did
Or even that she'd get all the way over to the ocean there,
Which didn't surprise me or disappoint me one little bit,
And I sent one back to an address in Vegas saying,
Well why should you, unless of course you want to?
Street Violence
I asked for nothing better than a five-spot.
I thought that modest. Whisking around
On her single stiletto, though, her lips twitching,
She stared me in the eye so forcefully
I saw only the familiar words—
Nothing Doing. I determined there and then
To take each disappointment as best I could.
There you have it, once we were so close
Nothing short of a machete
Could have separated us. Now ...
I watched her hail a shiny yellow taxi.
It was such a wonderful afternoon!
I moved off down the block, my block,
Its bright red bricks seemed to watch me,
There was a sudden breeze fresh in my face
And the sun was so strong it made my eyes water.
Too bad, I thought, for her sake,
That she didn't remember me like she should have.
General Knowledge
Atlanta emerged from the ribbed, red soil
Of Georgia; it now has
One of the busiest airports in America.
From there we flew to the cradling arms
Of New Orleans; here, where the Mississippi
Ends, perspiring jazz musicians like bulls lock horns.
It's said that every forty minutes the world is girdled
By a satellite; with a nail I trace the thin blue
Veins of the delta winding dubiously toward the sea.
Stocking Up
No one lives in the imagination, or if they do
they probably stink of garlic. What a thought!
Five o'clock. Everyone's pushing off to the country for the weekend.
What a jamboree the streets enjoy, sticky
traffic jams, spouting hydrants, and roofs that catch the red and dying sun.
While Tom Cat plays with baby, there's Mother
waving us farewell. "Drive carefully," she cries
as we pull out, "it's Friday night, remember."
We slide so easily though through strings of amber traffic lights
on our smooth journey to the shops, our windows rolled down
all the way. The light
lies down beautifully over the new arcade.
What a lovely evening! My trolley is overflowing
with supplies. In the low, flat sweep of store window
my friends and I see ourselves reflected.
The lot behind us is beginning to fill up,
could be they'll introduce valet parking at some point. Pleased,
we fill up the trunk and go back for more
("You again" the cash girl joked us),
enough to feed us and our families for
a part, at least, of the long, hot summer now approaching.
Invisible Assets
After he threw her through a
plate glass window, nature seemed that much closer.
Even the dastardly divisions in society
might be healed by a first-rate glazier.
Of course, on Sundays families still picnicked
boldly on the village green, and afterwards
marveled at the blacksmith's glowing forge—
how strong they all were in those days!
And yet how small! Even a man only six foot tall
was then esteemed a veritable giant.
Surely the current furor over architecture
would have evoked from them only pitying smiles.
Meanwhile, the market for landscapes has never
been firmer. This view, for instance, includes
seven counties, and a bull charging around in its paddock.
Daily
Newspaper clippings drift
across the Walworth Road,
and, in the unmentionable cold, the shops
incline their shutters. I imagine
chalk dinosaurs erupting from the doorways,
and a tinkle of glass to accompany
the carefree motion of their scaly tails ...
Inside, the soup
has already congealed inside the single pan
around whose rim moss sprouts,
and released into the air the innumerable sightless microbes
that will later perplex the authorities.
Hungry pets yelp in locked attics, while we gawp
as at last the rubbish enters the furnace.
Turn out the light—some story
is breaking, crumbling, collapsing
under the intolerable weight of fresh evidence
whispered over telephones and hedges: awful
types prosper and suddenly the rhumba
is everywhere the rage again, a perfect dance
for couples or singles, for either in front
of the mirror or actually on the crowded dance floor.
Winter Underwear
How vividly the football flew
Only he would remember;
And likewise the dark purple scarves
In which the body was later wound.
Until one day speech
Is merely syntax, and one's head
Is so full of stratagems
The tea freezes solid in its pot;
And a fresh snow covers the plains
Above which newfangled aircraft constantly
Maneuver, their vapor trails soft
And brilliant as the white
Winter underwear she is even now pulling on.
I'm
I'm an aggressive man
Always walking up escalators
And sniffing out rights. Sharks
Infest our local waters,
You too I despise.
Night floods the land.
We must leave now. Armies of flowers
Advance, stealing the oxygen
Right out of our mouths.
Free the Spirit
So polite he could almost have been
The villain in a Charlotte Bronte novel—
If only he knew what we were about to do!
A school bell rings shrilly in the distance
And the very seconds prepare to choke
On their own significance, marked out by an orange kitchen clock.
Noon arrives nursing its own peculiar threats;
No wind and a soft meowing sound
Accompany the last hopes of the vanishing day, and soon
It will be more than late enough for a drink.
Leaving, on the other hand, would mean
Forking out for a new haircut, and arguing
The whole thing through with the face man again.
Snowfall
You must be snug in there
you and your seventh TV wife
with a cat and a fire, I swear
I'm so glad you ended up with that.
He writes! How wonderful. And
bloodies his own nails and nose
for sensation. He has a firm hand-
shake, why I'm glad of their liaison.
And she sweet vague snowdrop
is also carefully posed each morning. Does he
draw her? They sketch each other! And what could stop
her melting but amnesia?
I've a new taste in my mouth all day.
It rises overnight and hangs there,
and chokes my breath, all morning I say
this final straw, now chew it over ... please.
My system! I fiddle while Rome burns. But find
another, or more untrampled snow
which doesn't exist. Kind kind
rain has pockmarked everything.
In the afternoon I swept
the porch and yard and dressed. We left
in the early evening, under gray skies, the car leapt
into life, and I relaxed with a sigh into its rich upholstery.
Hush! my mother said ... The lights
are green but she won't go.
Move! Mother, I said, nights
are long on the Pulaski Skyway.
We shunt around town for hours.
Ah, Mother, she must have been held up,
her car wouldn't start! Even ours
is unsafe in this blizzard.
Oh Mother, I'm sorry. Let's go,
we'll go home. Don't say anything,
please, I wish we didn't know
each other so well, drive safely.
We stare out the car.
The snow is rain for a while
and then slush. I find where we are
on the map. Mother is silent while she drives.
And it is silence which falls
with more snow. I don't care, I must speculate.
Mother ignores my silence and calls
the weather awful when at last we pull over.
My dear girl! My sweet friend!
I compose to you in the hissing dark,
you are a poker player to the end,
your breasts are mushrooms without stems ...
We try the engine again.
It coughs but it is frozen and out
of gas. I see the shapes of moving men
blanket the windows, they rattle the fender.
Mother! Ghosts! She finds an old
tartan traveling rug and lies down in
the back. Get some sleep, I am told.
Her breathing goes quiet and regular.
No ghosts. I can conjure up though
wide-eyed fevers to sweep the nation and
bloody betrayals and grotesque obesities and low
heaps of wrecked trucks and other violence.
What I picture comes true—their livestock frozen in the snow
and polar bears in our once-warm houses
and the creaking of glaciers and a wild ice floe
and death and flames in the desperate cold.
Only once during the night I tried the radio;
it was dead, and once I dreamed I was on the phone
to my sweetheart. Believe me, I said, I can't just go,
with the frostbite I've got, and hush my mother's still sleeping.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Selected Poems by Mark Ford. Copyright © 2014 Mark Ford. Excerpted by permission of Coffee House Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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