Tom Snarsky | Not My Style

TOM
SNARSKY

Tower in Orange and Green

I.

I have wintered in my selfishness
Which did not produce fruit. I bought
24 beers in two packs of 12 each

Because for some reason it was cheaper
That way, by about $1. I drank them
All myself. I will be going to therapy

For the first time soon, once
The benefits from my new job come through.
I’ll tell you about this plan in the morning

Since it’s the kind of plan I can
Tell you about & not ruin.
Tomorrow we are going to see

All the bottle brush trees
At the Christmas house. We’ll buy a few
Things we don’t need with money

We’d do well to save. I used to check
My account balances
Hypertensively, every day. I didn’t stop

Overdrawing but I couldn’t deal
With the constant dread
So I transmogrified it

Into emails & phone calls
About late payments.
If this were a nonfiction text

I would segue here into a fact
About stars or ecology or
History or something, you’d think

Ah, how
Connected, metaphorically,
Nothing cleverer

Than putting the beams under
The stage on which you hope
To stand & be admired. Claws

Is what we went with, it’ll be
Santa Claws for the cats instead of
Santa Paws. How shitty

Must the boxes be
For the twelvies
Such that the 24

Costs more. It’s almost 1:00AM
& I’m reading
The Sheldon Flory poem

Whose title is that time:
…“to live is to have
Family to fail, friends

To let down, secrets to betray.
It is also to claw at love's wake,
To curse, and to speak wistfully

Of celebration.” Flory was
Michael Burkard’s teacher,
I think? He has poems

About his priesting,
Attending to people in hospice
Care & writing little sermons

For the notebook rather
Than the congregation. I am dying
Just to get it over with

& cry, I’ve been sitting at a half-quiver
All night. Have you tried Two
Headed Boy Part 2,

Or maybe Dancer in the Dark, Peter
Stormare on a train
Going nowhere in baritone

J.

You’ve seen it all,
Smelled the oranges—

In a different dream Florida
Awaits you, dripping

Blood. Correct feelings
Like flakes as they dissolve

On a cold pond. The way
Some units are defined

With reference to water,
The purple thumbtacks of

Science. & some are defined
With reference to carbon,

& some are scared,
Hiding in the bathroom

Until it’s over. The muddy doves
Survive the shooting

& write a story about it,
Fog coming in, real low

K.

A cloud asleep on the mountain

Bullies frowning hard at the meaning of life

Cancer is (perversely?) joy

Does it recall? Noelle Kocot: “Is this the end of

Empire, / Or is it just the world, coming as it is?”

Fall

Green systems

Heteroglossia my mother

Italics in the poetry of Anne-Marie Albiach

Judge not, lest ye be

Killed by an agent of the state

“Lugubrious work,” Ben

Mirov calls it

No end to his Veterans Day poem

On this, literal Veterans Day

The sun, does she know perfection?

Does consciousness occasionally

Drop its façade of being

The way,

Pick up a wiffle ball bat instead?

The wiffle knuckleball is

Particularly heinous,

Like telling a lie with common air.

Do you remember going to Chili’s

Because they had cheap pumpkin beer

I used to get three classic tacos

& I forget what you’d get,

Something with shrimp?

Goethe was so many things,

Theorist of color & playwright &

Poet, naturally,

I’m really not trying

To bring Werther into this

But writing being death he’s

Always here, just out of view. It’s true!

I owe a million people two million things,

Have promised even more than that,

Blue’s Clues notebook full of snow

& minimalism

& seedless grapes

The thing about fineness:

It evaporates

TOM SNARSKY, SECRETARY TO THE CHOIR DIRECTOR