|
|
|
|
|
|
Garrett Kalleberg
|
Limbic Odes, Heart Hammer, New York, NY 1997
Limbic Odes constantly tests our expectations of what a poem is and should look and sound like as it travels. As poems erupt and subside into new shapes and forms, we encounter fresh suggestions constructed from the found materials of poetry past and present.... In the end, these passages move us because they summon up the ghost of tradition and yet elude that tradition. The work as a whole thrives because it is fiercely independent—able to create its own rules of engagement with poetic history, as well as with the poetic present.
—Poetry Project Newsletter Limbic Odes was published in a very limited edition and is out of print. The cycle has also been published at alyricmailer.
* * *
from Limbic Odes: VI. Anaesthesis
Take this body away
Remove the bastard, tear off his arms and legs
Take away the part of fear fused to bandage, torn off
by the present enduring, repeatable, repeated:
sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry in the present
moment, let the moment out
through the hole in the rag
of the whole in the clot
on the rag of the leg, are you ready?
Tell me when.
Take the worm out of hell
measured and marked
and formed of forms almost not.
A rarer element with that weight
is not literally a place,
will not appear as serene and beautiful:
her eyes, breasts, sleeping
angel of the dish she carries, saying
that the whole, not these fragments
not a thing that decreases
not a thing.
Whither, whither, through and through
an opening of eyes, of mouths opening
from here throughout, turned
inside out, set sail the soul on
blood of fire such
seal the body
diseases nothing
I touch
seeds
will flower
tell me when.
Infectious tears dissolving in a pool of
stars melting in the stream
of blood flooding
a ship of needles forgotten
in the dusk, the smell, of colors, the metallic
taste of the fruit
of a torture garden, no opium
feeds the host.
No originary lost—
No organs missing, no particles lost,
heaven and earth pass away, conclude
similarly
simile
like the very unnamable
and so profaned by having named.
An allegory of real flame,
which consumeth all things in the present
self-sick consciousness, how not
be awake, how not know? but literally
feel the articulate folds
or flaps concealing packets or bits,
if not projected or viewed
if not changed to incorruption
if not saved “to the book”
in the ink of the letter in the image of
the other, thought
remaining “so warmed, dried by the autumn’s drought
and thus dried.” The seed will rise again, the body heal
affirmed by the sower, spiritually clothed
in flesh, animated
in bones, physically
led forth from the ashes out of tombs,
like flowers in Honorius’s heaven,
exactly the bodies we had
and so profaned.
Cellular regeneration lost
spleen-lung-sorry-heart, reading clockwise, the alarm
is set, are you ready? the entire specimen
submitted for sectioning, the edge
indefinite, color unknown, on the desk an iris
withers white. On the leg,
cotton gauze packing wicks
fluids traced of
bite impression on a gag,
tightly rolled dishtowel or rag.
A psychological slice, lacerated
for insight, you will feel burning,
first a prick and then a burning.
* * *
|