Poet Island Press

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3 Poems by Barry Tagrin

POSTED 2007-05-29 IN POEMS

Perhaps no critical insight can adequately sum up the force of voice and creative impulse that marks this unique and original poet. Tagrin’s highly personal poems are made up of a natural complexity of insight and a dramatic interplay of emotions, and while not opaque, are not always easily absorbed on first reading. Wisdom and tenderness at one moment can shift next into wonderment and raw, troubled self reflection.
Preview his new book in the 'True Visitor Books' section

THE FEMININE CENTURY

When I came home tonight I lit the lamps in the patio,
a couple of those kerosene flares too.
I guess I was lighting up the loneliness all around.
Just like my mother did. She too fought to stay young.
As a boy I watched her tape her cheeks up tight,
glue her neck at the back sides to tighten the throat.
She was a real magician. She taught me romance.
That’s why I’m up on the roof now,
listening to the goats navigate the moonlight terraces,
their bells the sentimental code of the mountain.
It was the sound Karen most loved.
It always made her feel safe.
The peacefulness that replaced my troubled days away.
How she suffered, my queen. How we rode the struggle,
between the present impossible and the future
we could not build.
Whenever I am out here, on the roof of the house
we built together, I think of her.
I like to imagine she is the center mystics dream of finding.
The secret scientists feel the universe possesses.
It makes me wonder just what it is that I have accomplished.
Perhaps the way is other than I have imagined. For example,
I could have cast aside the various defections of my troubled
behavior, the selfish nature of the un-godly investigations.
That punishing game of the body which worked to diminish
the spirit of the woman I loved. Yes I could have, but I didn’t.
Instead, I went on sending failed postcards to imaginary dolls,
and secret letters to angels who lived in my loins.
O I dreamed up a filthy universe, and made my wife carry
it to church. Into the garden, out on picnics along the bay.
For a generation I worked to salvage the Eros of my childhood.
Thundering under all before me. Using up the hopes
of my loving partner. Went on, and on, until I killed her heart.
And here on my fingertips are what remains,
a number of conquests, from cashmere
to dirty white cotton.

SOSUA TWO

I am looking back and fearing the peace
is too late. That he is already filled up with death,
and on his way. The white spectacle is corrupted.
The man’s existence is all feeling.

The mind suffers and cannot set the balance. It is
perhaps the last Holiday of the Heart. I struggle to
live what my shadow spills down my back.
Messes up what beauty has made.

I sweat and stammer before the mirror, and all this
is before I get up. All this is just the night.
The early hours pin my arms against the sheets.
I toss naked and think.

Something I remember from the half-built houses in Illinois,
where I sometimes took my clothes off in the morning,
out alone among the lath and plaster
of my youth.

My mother told me, “You push at the darkness, that’s why
you make noise when you fall.” Sometimes she’s not dead
and we are dancing. She is young and strong,
and there is no trace of cruelty or selfishness.

I can see before me the divided self, fighting
for good and evil. The black and white of the soul.
Calmness and turmoil creating a forever cycle of energy,
nervous and lovely, alternately making love.

NEW YORK POEM

Up the New York stairs, on up
and past the naked sleeping woman
in number eight. Who lay there lightly
in her night dress, and was known to cry
out. Tip toe, and unlock my door to Gerald Stern’s
lovely poetry house. Cold water kitchen and bath,
and to the right the dream room where the desk was.
My heart then would carry me to the front window,
and open it to the September night of the dying of my marriage.
Music and dark sweet rum, and wait there
for the sleek and obsessive little outlaw.
With her strawberries and rope, chocolate and masquerade
eyes. To reduce my sacred world to its basic anti-elements,
press my temples in orgasm to collapse my memories.
Drink liquor from the sack of my testicles. And repeal
the great poets. Her never-enough existence panting like
star breath on my pillow. Between the cocaine and
the disintegration of the senses, holding her vibrating face.
Masturbating together in the half light. She lived then
in a swing in the park down from her house. Seven years old
and twitching her legs together, like a hot cricket, honey,
she would say. While her eyes went vacant and I thought of
my wife, so far away and in pain. Closed my mind
to that death as a soldier does who enters
the dark house with his gun.
And next day, she lay there like a ceramic vase
in the light of noon, pulsating flowers in her center,
long stems in my watery floor.

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