V i s i o n a r y V o i c e s
Poetry by JEFF CONANT
Jeff Conant is Project Coordinator and lead author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health, a popular education manual forthcoming from the Hesperian Foundation, in English in 2007 and in Spanish in 2008. He serves as senior editor and contributing correspondent for LiP magazine, and writes occasional freelance pieces for other media. Once upon a time he wrote and published many poems in many obscure literary magazines; a collection of his poems, The Evacuated Forest Papers was published in 1999 by Buck Downs Books. His translation from the Spanish, Wind in the Blood: Mayan Healing and Chinese Medicine, is available from North Atlantic Books.
In this skeleton which still can dream
(still can dream)
You cannot go back
You cannot go back
You cannot turn the clock back
You cannot turn the clock back
You cannot become primitive
You cannot turn the clock back
You cannot become primitive people
That's all behind us
That's all behind us
We have to face the modern world
But, that's not true
But, that's not true if
An organism is involved
If we are talking about human needs
If we are talking about human needs
You cannot go back, because you haven't left
You aren't going back to something primitive
You cannot turn the clock back
You cannot go back, because you haven't left
Ambient pornography
Dear friend,
Ignore the gate and the men behind it.
Ignore the thinking fog.
Ignore
The view from the bridge, up to
And including:
The filthy river,
The panoramic 3-D skyscape
Laced with vapor trails, the
Tourists waving distractedly from
Ferryboats below, the skyscrapers'
Arch whiteness, the statue of liberty.
Dear sleeping princess,
Ignore the cat, mewing to be fed. Do not
Hide the fact that there is no food
Tell the cat to its forlorn face
-- There is no food. Shut up. --
Forget the falling leaves and the
Soft spot in the fontanel where
Forget the falling leaves and the
Soft spot in the fontanel where
The plates of the cranium join.
Forget the heat lamp, the bed pan, and
The panoramic 3-d skyscape
Laced with vapor trails out
The hospital window.
Dear Doctor O,
Please renounce the atom bomb
Up to and including nuclear medicine
And x-rays. It's not worth it.
Dear Union Carbide,
(Warren Anderson CEO), please pay up
For Bhopal, and ask yr friends at Dow
And Monsanto to apologize for Agent Orange.
I'm sure it's not their fault. But do stop now,
Okay?
Ignore the raft of Medusa and
The sack of Troy -- the burning wall,
Collapsing bridge and tower.
Ignore
The constitution and its nitpicky, naggy,
Whiny, know-it-all, pushy, woosy, stupid
Overbearing nicey-nice crap.
Nevermind the guns. And please make this clear
To dockworkers from Oakland to Liverpool --
You push you're gonna get pushed. So settle
Down.
Ignore the rubber bullets and the seabirds
Hanging like marionettes caw-cawing for anchovies
Above the piers thick and white with guano.
The sea
Keeps rolling in, smell of salt, smell of lime, thick
And amphibious, ignoring the ships dumping sewage
In filthy brown rivers in their wake. Humps of
Creosote and burnt rope mark the shipping lanes from
East Timor to Easter Island, overturning the straw raft
That drifts from plate to plate across the brainy sea swell.
Ignore the moon that burns like phosphorous
In a slender open doorway above.
It has no mind to shine.
Dear moon,
Ignore the flagpole stuck
With pomp in your dusty, tender flank
And the piles of trash awash
In your dry seas and dark ravines.
Forget the footprints soundlessly
Imprinted on your face. Be like
The faceless waters
Be like
The faceless waters
That have no mind to notice them.
That may be all you can do for now.
False alarm: ignore the empire
A crystal pyramid rises
from the desert floor's dust
and under it
a colorful variety
of broken insects shouting
among the ruins.
The canals are dry,
a venting expression of
“virtual wetness” installing value in
a “dead” planet spinning still,
its blue veins
limned with noxious clay.
Still, some rich
mineral salts lie beneath
the shattered glass walls of “city.”
A child with a slingshot and stones
shoots out the windows, hurling
words and the screaming noise words make
when they fly at the taut glass.
They (the words) are sprawled
on a sky pale as smoke.
The child sites his target:
This is what
on the television news
they call
“violence.”
Do people do? People do.
People are the oil
of tomorrow.
Over the asphalt
cityscape I hear
my heart beat
and it says “no.”
O no O no
O no O no
O no O no
In my garden stray
dogs prowl. Buried
seeds push up
their green tongues
to taste sweet air.
Too sweet.
Too sweet
Too sweet
Too sweet
Too sweet
Bright birds
melt among
the melting plums.
War, like light, helps us to see in the dark
looking up into the street
lamp at the edge of the
parking area i am tempted
tempted to ask is it
a particle or is it a gas
(i forgot my air monitoring e-
quipment)
fade to black, lights
out
(seascape and nothing but
bubbles on the surface)
(slap of ocean's dumb
embrace)
Interlude:
when all acts are public
when all acts are public
everything will be a
secret (war, like light, war, like light
or gravity or time
itself, will be a law,
will be a law,
fixed, eternal, regular)
(fixed, eternal, regular)
when the sun spun around
the earth and a vault
held up the heavens, then
(the animals knew peace)
(but they, the animals
do not abide by laws)
So what?
So much depends
on a big blue marble
glazed with petrol
and hanging, itself,
by a fictional thread.
So much depends
on a big blue marble
glazed with petrol
and hanging, itself,
by a fictional thread.
So much wearier for wear
so much depends
on a blackened chicken
soaked in creosote
feathered and tarred,
not hungry anymore.
Water runs around.
And under the water,
bury the water. There is
water at the bottom
of the ocean. So much.
And so much depends
on a big blue marble
glazed with petrol
and hanging, itself,
by a fictional thread.
So much.*
*[spoken in chorus as if from the stage of Greek drama]
O ravaged voice, there still is some song left
As when a broadcast, tightly controlled
As when a broadcast, tightly controlled and
near silent makes lies and more lies of our words.
(Whose words?
OUR words.)
[audience chants this throughout] As when a broadcast, tightly controlled and
near silent makes lies and more lies of our words
fattening frogs for snakes,
and makes lies and more lies of our words and
fattening frogs for snakes,
opens its cold jaw
and makes lies and more lies of our words and
(Whose words?
OUR words.)
The fully irradiated earth illuminates
beautiful shadows in your hand
In nineteen hundred and ninety-one
-- as guests at the burning cinema --
watching oil fires spreading slow smoke when, O…
A flood plain to the East,
a fertile valley,
home.
As advertised on TV.
Before light there was only
there was only
a shop where
you chose one history over another,
in the dark.
Away from that fertile grassland with torches in the streets,
peasants with pitchforks
race to skewer the beast,
crowds overturn burning buses.
Now, after the burning stair, collapsing roof and tower
“everything” “is” “different.”
[Quiz on shopping:
how do you feel at the moment you make a purchase?]
Before light there was only darkness
And so it was that in the time before time
the sirens and helicopters burned a hole in the sky.
But what became of the smoking crater that was home,
before home was where the village was,
where the ship
was where the cement row houses were where the tin shacks
were in a crooked little row
when all of this was ocean, long ago.
And so it was that in the time before time
the sirens and helicopters burned a hole in the sky.
But what became of the smoking crater that was home,
before home was where the village was,
where the ship
was where the cement row houses were where the tin shacks
were in a crooked little row
when all of this was ocean, long ago.
what terrible shopping there was there was,
what terrible shopping there was
[crowd chant here]
Announcement of new morning: it's springtime in america
all gaudy horrific yelps and flowers, dogwoods
plastic white and spinning on its petrol
shaggy bark, it's springtime
in america after the decline
sun still shines over the flags
rockets glare
triumphant haze
little brown mushrooms swollen with
rain are chemical hands, fact-
ories always transforming ashes
to dust, dust to ashes, gas to gas
big chunks of brown quarried stone
strips of forged steel and burnt brick
smokestacks
and still
the sumac intimidates the train track
any society that produces this much
trash will drown in it
springtime in
the decline, green grass notwith-
standing
nothing doing in a ruin, springtime in america.
Ignore the wreckage love, look up in awe
it's true this time
you cannot go back
ignore the wreckage, ignore
the upward whatever
nor forward nor any
word
you cannot
go back
in this
skeleton which dreams,
in this skeleton which plays
and loves and dreams,
so gentle, please notice those days
are over now. nor
any no, nor no
not no
it's not
so terrible, some
event so savage only
through bright birds swimming
in the dark to a flood plain,
fertile valley. some
organism
so what, no
word no
not. no not not
and
bright birds
melt among
the melting plums
and and and
let flowers seed themselves now
a flood plain to the east, a fertile valley,
home
the forlorn moon burns
like phosphorous now
dear moon,
ignore the flagpole
stuck with pomp in your
dusty, tender flank. forget the footprints
soundlessly imprinted on
your face. be like
the faceless
waters
that have no mind
to shine
that have no mind
to shine
[hint: that may be all
you can do
for now]
The human being
The human being is divided into three
equal parts: the still landscape of wet
human parts
the vexing oily joints
(release of sobs)
and the civil guard.
That's why you should vote and convince others to vote.
After removing the stomach
further inspected the paved roadway
unearthing moist dry cold hard shattered of bones
equal parts: the still landscape of “moon” from “city”
and the sexual membrane
stimulating “small, firm horrors.”
The entry wound
(like avarice, lechery or vanity)
bearing territorial markings and
a musky scent
whose venerable antecedents
raised a red flag of
The body is moved to tears
The body is moved to tears
by the bodies surrounding
it. In its nervous web of
maps and empty passageways
(s)he is like a tree
(O broken clarinet! O sounding for the end of time!)
until
the earth gets old and the people
go away
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