Rich Ives

POETRY GROUP 5-10

EMBALMING CLOUDS

if the name of the architect is Mr. Rock perhaps the name of the fallen rock
should be Mr. Man it appears there has been a mistake at the mortuary
Mr. Rock has already been filled with the preservative known as Scotch

Mr. Rock however is English and Mr. Man was thrown at him to create this
accident and clouds have nothing useful to do with arriving at the mortuary
but afterwards small clouds are installed to replenish the deceased’s potentials

Mr. Rock is still a child like all men but now he’s a dead child
Mr. Man left a piece of himself in Mr. Rock’s head because he’s broken
no one removed it now formaldehyde comes out of the closet

oh no oh no says Mortuary Director Glenlivet too brightly who is named
for his liver this blood is still pulsing Mr. Rock is not seriously a dead man
and Director Glenlivet ceases and desists his ghoulish draining

whereupon Glenlivet offers a cute little suture-bow to the sliced vein
and Mr. Rock is filled rather than emptied until borrowed essential fluids
adequately support the return of pre-embalming opportunities

Director Glenlivet begins floating himself again now pickled and disguised
as Mr. Cloud but no sign of rain in his levitated mortuary heaven persists
and meanwhile the guilty indifference of Mr. Man grows legendary

later at the opening of the new mortuary they will all laugh about this and the party
will laugh about them and the indifference of the trees will laugh about everything else
but the clouds will not laugh and the rain will only fall upon them equally

POCKET FULL OF WINGS

a young man often builds something supportive with wood
this is not what a man is but what a man does and a tree
or a cloud are only tools for the creation of his man-things

a man’s first man-thing is often above him like a tree-house
and no women are allowed in paradise number one
paradise number two could be sympathetic clouds that melt quickly

paradise number three is not a woman but a young man’s dream
of a woman which the man creates as if he were a helpful tree
containing a house that was ready to offer itself to the woman

but that tree continues climbing its own ladder of dreams
which always returns to the ancient sun and father sun
may still fill the tree with leafy man-child simplicity

trees are always pointing and they never get where they’re going
until they let go and find themselves feeding what fed them
a young man is not a tree but the hope that remains after reaching

wood taken from the tree waits not in green dreams but graying houses
wood is the holding part which the man-child must use to create new rooms
which contain moonlit intentions and he will first be mistaken and later mistaken again

that’s not something that deserves criticism it’s not the same as
throwing spoons at butterflies or robbing postal workers or eating stale mutton
but be careful now falling clouds do not dream of transcendent wood

nor do falling clouds write epics about mankind or weather’s acceptance
falling clouds won’t explain what they’re doing or do it over again
each cloud is a tentative thing made of waiting and then knowing

flying ants were filling the young man’s pockets with wings
and of course there is pain here you’ll like it a lot
best advice I ever got says the old man

THE TENDENCY TO RELINQUISH THE BURDEN

perhaps you have wondered if fear is a prison
or an innocence that separates you from others but a prison
removes you from the source of your imprisonment

you don’t have to lock up a box of fear like a prison it can be
shared because opposing dreams live in the wood
which has been taken from vertical history

when the innocent man-child can see the determined tree
approaching the top of its misdirected cloud-ladder
his innocence falls away like a useless appendage

the women are watching what complicates them and
they place rocks to keep the dreamy ladder from rising
into man-heaven where no more men can be made

but man-heaven is lonely and falls day by day with the rain
upon the shoulders of the waiting women who carry this burden
as if it might pop out of them and walk away

THE SONG OF THE CLOUD CRADLE

now the clouds are opening and singing a song we’ve heard before
and it falls upon leafy conical ears that reach out to gather
enough sunshine to hear that deep old voice in the wood

listen with your tongue unhinged like the birds
such naked accessible ears gather more than we understand
and spread it around which smells like a baby urinating

aren’t you going to kiss the smelly fallen clouds aren’t you
going to lick the salt from the corner of the baby’s troubled eye
aren’t you going to cover the table tonight with terrestrial longing

hitch a ride on one of those old sky turtles we thought were deities
the wet moon creaks on its hinges and seems to be folding out over a porthole
as if it were a milked drink you could spill all over the deck of its longing

caught in the branches of the king’s favorite tree the last cloud before sunrise
soaks up the opportunities and bloodies itself for the sun
as if that pagan creature’s song were wounded back to peasantry

Günter’s worried about the snow with its friends all melting away
don’t expect him to act like fallen sky doesn’t matter
Ingeborg told the neighbor’s kids to leave him alone for a long time

listen to the ridiculous babies licking themselves with their beaks
musty nests and closets filled with dormant odors opening everywhere
you wouldn’t even be able to hear yourself if that weren’t you singing

REJUVENATION MONOLOGUE OF THE FALLING ROCK

the rocks’ offspring gather teeming with visitations of rain
children of broken down planets and energy re-cycled
what can you say of your parents who separated so many of you

blown about the voice of dirt your singing a granular thrust
through hardscrabble breakfast what can you say
that is not said better by soil given to a random neighbor

each grain hobbles its own tentative shoe but patient justice stands and
admires its accomplishments while children disassemble themselves
and toss about their lives in a frenzy of starting and more starting

brush quickly away the dangers and let the funneling field offer
internal fingers for the mystery because touching back isn’t always painful
follow the late rain into everything and follow the worm back out of your excess

adjust the invisible planet of the new home too small to fail
pedestrian energy disseminates the walls and soaks up little
generosities it’s a birthday of every moment spilling transitions

once more is so inevitable it’s small enough to go unnoticed
once more is not enough to move past me keep going
once more is what you say to me when I listen to myself

© Rich Ives 2013

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com.

Writer: Rich Ives

Flash Group

Concerning the Part I Played in the Movie I Thought Was About Me

Tony T. Toast was talking to the weather and the weather was talking back. I mean I was telling the world to be like me, and it wasn’t. I was listening to the voice it gave me, which wasn’t mine.
Tony watched the branches’ knobs turning back like the knuckles of a tough, badly beaten veteran still going back for more and already lost in himself. Built like an over-ripe pear, I had been offered an important part in a movie I was already in. I began crying right along with the deceived lover, who was not so much crying as slipping jewelry into his pants.
I was pretending to be Tony, who was pretending to be me pretending to be married to Eileen, my semi-beautiful, my beloved, my dipsy human pomeroodle of decency. The fog was smiling wanly.
Aw Sugarpaps, said Tony, I had hoped to witness the resurrection of our spoon, and she mouthed she had been drinking. Perch brandy, sounded like. Tell ya somethin’ else, Tony said for me, I take lessons at the club, but I can’t get out of my cleverness.
Eileen’s love, you see, was carried in a vessel too beautiful to continue because before I knew it, Tony had given me license to act like Tony, which was who I was, but not who I wanted to be in my movie, even if Eileen got the supporting role.
So I went to the workshop in my head, which I call the garage. Garage, however, is unpretentious, garage is lingering, like happiness and despair living in the same neighborhood. It’s where I live when my body’s looking for something I can turn in. Like a marriage lost off the coast with all hands, the ocean of still to come closed up over the parts the way what we think childhood was closes over what childhood was, only we haven’t sailed towards several but away from one.

Confessional

This is a true story about the lies I tell.
I’m patient for a little while, but this isn’t like the wet days of travel and deprivation I’ve been telling you about. This is external.
And I’m staying here because counting the beads on an endless rosary of misfortunes has begun to look like a lovely fat piece of excruciating excitement. Better at least than over there where Toto and Wilhelmina are playing with Bobby’s shiny rubber ball as if it could assimilate the subtle tenor of sexual innuendo visited upon it by their deceptively discrete interchange of gestures and whispery vocalizations.
This time the cold wet shadow with your name stitched on its skirt was taunting the relevant seashells under their hard velvet tongues like surprisingly cool nosebleeds, and the ambiguity had begun swelling and threatening suicide.
That’s just the distance between then and now that won’t quite disappear. It’s the lack of meanwhiles that bankrupts the salt ranch. We couldn’t have lived there without a little moisture.
Which is why I see you as one of those gifts that sits in the closet for a while and then bingo, out it comes on the occasion of someone else’s celebration.
I should have known better than Toto that Wilhelmina’s latent homicidal tendencies would not be excited by Bobby’s genderless skirt without the assistance of the patent leather shoes and a good stiff polish. Some things should be obvious.
Which is why I stabbed Toto with an eraser and the wound, of course, disappeared.
Which fails to account for the baby that lives in my head, continually laughing and dribbling, refusing to announce its age or sexual preferences, although I’ve discovered its name has been Meanwhile all along. It’s not, of course, a real baby but more of a vocational choice.
Which means I’m so happy singing the institutionalized version I can’t even tell you what makes it taunt its sadness so relentlessly. You just can’t give up if you expect anyone to be yourself.

Consequence

Okay, I’ll admit that it was sad, but at that time in my life my best friend was a dog, a mangy big mutt named Jimmy Carter. We lived in a trailerhouse I tried hard to keep bright and cheery because I wasn’t feeling very bright and cheery and the trailerhouse was getting old and tended towards the dark and gloomy. I had Christmas wreaths (fake of course) all over the place, and I sprayed them with pine scent. I had bowls of leaves and cinnamon sticks that smelled like air purifiers in 1963 Buicks spread out across the unattended surfaces of the countertops and tables. It seemed to confuse Jimmy, who sometimes limped from one to the other trying to figure out what that smell was. Jimmy had never experienced a 1963 Buick. There was an oil painting above the plastic fireplace that made snow look like something so comfortable you’d want to curl up and go to sleep in it. I had a picture of butterflies and children jumping around like popcorn on the side of my refrigerator. I can remember sitting down with Jimmy for a heart to heart and telling him there wasn’t anything to stop us from being happy. I was entirely sincere, and I believe Jimmy understood that. I had put the reliable old fan that sounded like the starter of a roadgrader into the dumpster the day before, so there weren’t any conspicuous impediments to keep him from comprehending the full import of my revelations. I was done believing that the world was against me. It was ungodly hot outside, but I had begun to wonder why I wasn’t out there frolicking. I consulted the time to see if it could help me.
I stepped with my left foot, I stepped with my right foot, and then suddenly I was going somewhere. I found it surprisingly exhilarating.
Elevated thinking was not part of my agenda at that time in my life, but I suppose I must have had relative moments of increase. I mean there were some complicated things going on around me right there in the grass outside and the sky demanded attention, but it didn’t seem to bother me that I was receiving the world on a rather simple level.
When I got home, I started looking for a hole punch. I needed some kind of a symbol that wasn’t too complicated. I thought it would save me from a lot of difficulty.

Cute Little Digression with a Taste for Chilled Asparagus

A window floated down the river. Fortunately, it wasn’t open, and the river couldn’t get out.
“It’s really something quite extraordinary,” I said without talking through my nose. Robert and Bob and Rob all agreed the window was not an ordinary expression of extraordinariness.
In this way, I was trying to describe myself, but I wasn’t listening, and I realized I do not wish to be removed from that which contains me, even if I have yet to fully comprehend the containment. I am certain to need a device of numbing if not a device of pushing away or of casting asunder.
“I can see your inevitable confluence and the tributaries seem promising,” said Robert and Bob and Rob to the enclosed river in the kitchen, where they were seeking alimentary completion. And then I heard them refer to, “One of those impulses that seem to arrive entirely unbidden, which herewith has caused me to observe that I have an ordinary and dangerous testicular condition the experts say is called masculinity (no no silly boy that’s the key to my heart).”
They opened the window. I told them I was their child and discovered they had not opened the window after all.
“I’m so glad the offering was chilled,” they all said, and, “speaking of transportation might not be the best means of realizing our abandonment of childhood, but neither have the methods in evidence thus far proved to be infallible.”
Finally we agreed that our participation was stimulating, yet reserved. We agreed that the window between us, and the attraction it created, was itself quite attractive. We agreed that containment was not an adequate career goal for asparagus. We agreed that we did not understand how the asparagus had come to be a part of our experience, and we enjoyed it waving gently in the chilly wind behind the window all the more for that reason.
Story

© Rich Ives 2011

Rich Ives is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2010 he has been a finalist in fiction at Black Warrior Review and Mississippi Review and in poetry at Cloudbank and Mississippi Review.