[un piano dans les Alpes]
. . . a scrawny cry from
outside
Seemed like a sound in
his mind.
—Wallace Stevens
What do you get
for a boy poet,
if not a lyre
made from a turtle shell?
Under the
suffocating furred roar
of the world, a
whisper, a red whisper
and the pitch of
his complaint rose higher
against the
silence
and he mouthed
his insults, blood curses
softly was all
that was required.
Was there meant
to be a break
right here? Were
we expecting to imagine
the lost, the
abandoned thread,
where it might
have led? I can barely
hear it, and the
longer and deeper
I am getting in
here, the fainter grow
the options. It
was the image of a boy
poet, what he
might have to say. Oh.
What he might have to say; what he
might have to say
—
what he might have
to say, what he
might have to say. Just say
something, to
keep it going along
(don’t talk that
way, don’t talk about
the poem in the
poem!) There was a baby
bird or a
tortured Jew calling upon God,
I heard it and it was my
own cry.
Charles Tarlton is a retired professor who now lives in an old farmhouse cottage in
Florence, Massachusetts, with this wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract
painter. After living in France and San Francisco, they moved to this suburb of
Northampton in 2014. Since 2006 when he started writing full time he has
published poetry in such periodicals as Rattle,
Ekphrastic Review, and The Journal.
He published an e-chapbook of free translations of Neruda’s Macchu Picchu in
the 2River series, entitled, “La Vida de Piedra y de Palabra”; an
extended historical tanka prose poem about the struggle of the Navajos,
entitled, “Five Episodes in the Navajo Degradation,” in Lacuna; and “The Turn of Art,” a poetical and dramatic piece about
Picasso and Matisse, in Fiction International.
