NOT NOW NOR NEVER
 
Not that you can hold us to it but then
              E‑roads didn’t exist until recent­ly. Our fin­ger­nails feel
Veneered on our fin­gers, sinewy and locked, our hearts awaiting
             Erup­tions of light shoot­ing out of our heads:
Rags for the rag traders. Who’s been gath­er­ing up
             Neo­phytes and acolytes, teach­ing them a few things about
Eros, the vena cava sluic­ing blood, propos­ing some
             Ver­dict that’s well said but so watery that it
Evap­o­rates moments after leav­ing the lips, some­thing like
             Riffraff vs. the rac­quet crowd? Although we can’t
Nee­dle need, we can sure­ly near-miss it, like
             Evil, or cav­il, or even the cor­ral of hors­es act­ing like
Verbs, car­ry­ing the act, mak­ing it action, try­ing to
             Evade sta­sis and botch, avoid­ing those who
Rah-rah-rah, refuse to tou­sle the hair of the neatnik’s head. In our
             Neck of the woods, it’s not done that way. We dodge those who are
Erst­while, ersatz neigh­bors, fam­i­ly mem­bers we can’t i.d. Or
             Venal crumb bums who don’t do the first thing first, those
Eris­tic night­mares, no claim to a real brain, any smarts
             Rainchecked, but let’s face it, they’re hard­ly more than
Near miss­es in the park­ing lot, those that
             Err on the side of error: we’ve got a word for that
Venue that we can’t any longer recall, cleaning
             Erasers on their chalky selves, slap­ping them, the air
Rif­fling the dust of words that had appeared to us briefly as real.

“Never, never, never, never, never”; Naver, never, niver, nover, nuver; ne plus ultra; neap tide; necessary; neck of the woods; necrosis; needle; neo-Nazi; nepenthe; nerd from Seuss; netsuke; evade, evaporate, evil, erase, eristic, arguer; erode, erotic, err, erupt; vellum, veloce; Vena cava, 2 large veins that drain the upper body and lower body and empty into the right atrium; venal, corruptible; end; vendetta, veneer, venial sin, venous, verb, verdict, Vesuvian; rabbit ears; rack rent, exorbitant rent; racquet, rakes, raft, ray, rag trade, rage, reh-rah, rain check; ramose, having many branches; Lope de Vega wrote 2000 plays; riffle, shuffle; the pain is the realization of the pain; those of us who don’t do the first thing first put a second or third thing first; first of all, the first fist

PUSHING THE SAVANTS OFF THE FALSE CLIFFS OF JANUARY

We can’t explain the pained look we
Had in the ele­va­tor: it went up, we

Went down, the Prince-Henry-the-Navigator
Mien became a vague line of demarcation,

The new world becom­ing the old
World so quick­ly, mur­der marooned

On the islands, huts of full hate,
Plun­der plowed under to grow gold.

If the earth is the ter­ra­cot­ta in
Which we inurn the ash­es, then

The half-bro­ken moon we saw last
Night is just a brighter shard, taciturning,

Huge in its sky refuge. We had forgotten
About the storm after the calm after

The storm, sat­urnined, figure-eighted,
Lucky-sev­ened, deep­est sixed. We’ll

Wait for spring’s high jinks, hail
The join­ers, lead the quit­ters on their

Crutch­es to Car­rionville, home to
The picked apart. What’s more weary

Than to be wise? They sturmed, we
Dranged: isn’t it always this way,

The big losers tak­en by the hand of
The per­pet­u­al­ly lost? Amend the amen,

Always a feel­ing of falling, tree
Branch­es and ankle bones, lash­es of some

Archa­ic whip on some archa­ic back,
Great gouges in our only asy­lum, the starved

Nerve, the slow burn of the u‑turn towards
What was left that we had for­got­ten, what

We had gone back up to find, there
In a desk draw­er, there on top of a table,

Near the lamp we had remem­bered so hard
To turn off that it some­how had stayed on,

Even though this near-falling through
The Jan­u­ary air, the time not in need

Of mourn­ing, the curve not in need
Any longer of ever becom­ing straight.

January in the can; January endgame; canning January; gauging rain; daffodil is the asphodel; scrabble; savant; saturnine; Willie Mays, 1954 catch; the history of the English horn/French horn; river twice; January gamut; what January leaves us with; the end of January; wry January; carve, curve, nerve, deserve, starve, swerve; gauge, gouge, huge, refuge, rouge; taenia, ribbon worn in Greece; taeniafuge, agent that expels tapeworms/tapewords; January on the River Twice; burn, churn, inurn, mown, nocturne, return, spurn, slow burn, spurn, taciturn, adjourn; Samuel Tagliaferro Rayburn; Booker Tagliaferro Washington; savant nerve; the storm after the storm after the storm; storm and stress; ; “the time is out of joint,” “our little life is rounded in a sleep,” “nothing will come of nothing,” all from Shakespeare; aimless shopping; airy diction

INGOTS OF ARROGANCE

You’ve hit most of the traf­fic cones
You’d only swiped the day
Before. And the hand pump’s

In the garage where the double
Amputee won’t find it, a reminder
Of death and flat tires. Would

You be will­ing to shatter
The Arti­facts of the Oth­er Life
When you know that this life

Is lived out? Those who deign
Can’t eas­i­ly unvouchsafe,
That splin­ter in your thumb

From scratch­ing your eyes,
The dou­ble life you’ve led at
The fun­ny farm, from the culture

Of the trac­tor pull to crop
Rota­tion and sloughed-off
Souls. You’re a sat­ur­na­lia of

One, burst­ing your tubes, tubering
And non-ama­tive in all the untilled
Fields, the evap­o­ra­tion of any

Con­den­sa­tion inside of you you
Have left. When you took the fun
Out of fun­da­men­tal, you should

Have also tak­en the men­tal, and
The cal­loused thoughts, caterwauling
Spats, cal­cu­lat­ed squab­bles. The har

Har har hard­ly mat­ters, scattering
Chance, stinkhorn in the pleasance,
What will be won’t be. You give

Your­self the hives, the hee­bies you
Picked up from the jee­bies. First
Judg­ment: wrong. Last judgment:

Wrong again. You’re dogged and
Dan­ger­ous, trolling so sad­ly through
Sloughs, back­wa­ters of whatever,

Weav­ing noth­ing you know the name
Of, a cough, a minor calami­ty of
Liv­ing, a doubt, a bar­ren fear of death.

Soul sandwich, the sloughed soul; amentia, dementia; fat farm; the animal world, anima; bunker mentality; purgatory of the right hand; death penalty; caving in; the right soul and the wrong soul; conservation of momentum; first judgment; the cave-in we so loved; fundamental fermentation; artifacts of the other life; creak, break, crack, splinter, burst, smash, shatter, fracture, saxifrage, vouchsafe; deign; con game of the condescend, the vouchsafement of Jesus; condensation, amative; concinnity, harmonious arrangement; snow soul; a short history of the soul; hysterical soul; Saturn, roman god of agriculture, December 17, 7 days, Etruscan origin; agriculture, field culture, tilled; snod, headband, Middle English; the soul’s bark, arc of the bark, the book, bark ark; futhark, old English runic alphabet; airy fairy, Brit. Slang; aardvark to zebra; the double life; the suffocant; suffer, to carry, metaphor, birth, fertile, bairn, burden; the fortunate funicular; paraphernalia; airheads and arrogance; Barney Google comic strip

Next→

Edward Mayes’s poems have been pub­lished in The New York­er, APR, Keny­on Review, and Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry among many oth­ers. His books of poet­ry have won the Juniper Prize (Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Press) and AWP Prize in Poet­ry (Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press). He lives in Hills­bor­ough, North Car­oli­na and Cor­tona, Italy.