Bruce Smith

Another case of sitting still in a room as for chamber music minus | I’m sure some animals negotiate and plea.  I’m sure there’s a hard winter’s compromise | Lou Reed sings “Berlin,” a voice that has in it paradise if paradise was broken
February 10, 2014 Smith Bruce

Another case of sitting still in a room as for chamber music minus

 

Another case of sitting still in a room as for chamber music minus

the performance, dust and a suppressed cough, an accumulated innocence

and mystifying exits [into – cough – what?].  You sit, dear reader, as for

the sentencing phase.  What is it you want out of the continuance?

Treachery of foretaste, treachery of conclusion.  Further music, music minus.

 

 

I’m sure some animals negotiate and plea.  I’m sure there’s a hard winter’s compromise

 

I’m sure some animals negotiate and plea.  I’m sure there’s a hard winter’s compromise

and a spring thaw’s feeble discussion over the elk’s body [you’re only allowed one],

and yet my animal wants the unspeakable to be unspeakable and not the harangue

which endangers my body [you’ve used your one already] and now it’s the soul

which sniffs the wind for the fraught whiteness and it defends nothing in its defense.

 

 

Lou Reed sings “Berlin,” a voice that has in it paradise if paradise was broken

 

Lou Reed sings “Berlin,” a voice that has in it paradise if paradise was broken

into 5 lines of cocaine on a mirror that was just a fragile slab of everyone’s transparency that’s the

proxy for errors in human understanding instead of flaws in the heart.

Someone had believing and someone had the shakes and everyone had a torch

that incinerated what pronoun she was, he was and replaced them with Ich, Du.

Bruce Smith was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the author of six books of poems: The Common Wages; Silver and Information (National Poetry Series, selected by Hayden Carruth); Mercy Seat; The Other Lover (University of Chicago), which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Songs for Two Voices (Chicago, 2005); and most recently, Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize. He teaches at Syracuse University.