avalanche
By Mark Prisco
i
when you name something you demystify it, break taboo.
even ‘Tiger’ is emasculate compared to what it is.
in this way, too, devils are conquered.
ii
when you
liberate the hands from the tyrant mind, unwind
the cloth, there is god.
not anywhere
iii
in the soft utterance of water
in the tread upon
wet grass & the brush of yellow corn
in the horns you clasp, the elm barks
which are nameless,
there it is
iv
it’s not a vision
like in a pool or when you’re high
in the mountains, but a shadow
at dusk.
you never get warm after that
v
it’s there
in snowdrift, the way it
blows, fingers
your hair, hot
breath, a spasm
as of bowels fathomed
vi
when you fled the trauma in the carpark
you lost a shoe.
glass sparkled under a lamppost.
bodies like moons formed
rose, blew. your feet
blister in the hard
anfractuous
sunshine. dapple the turquoise sea.
vii
there are swings you take
blind, sighs hovering
trees, flowers poised
beneath you, rusted
creak of slow iron
you sleep to.
viii
your teacher said there are no stupid questions
so you say: who invented existence?
someone answered God, which is so lame,
& someone else groaned.
(that was me. at the back on the end
by the window)
ix
after this it’s a breeze. you roll
downhill. sit back
& relax while we drive. watch
the staid, familiar
landmarks, bars
fruit machines
for the terminally frazzled.
smashed
you know what dying is
but you can’t explain it.
it’s related to living, you say.
a truism but not
obvious.
life is the antagonist of death.
(i said that. there was an embarrassed silence
& someone coughed
& coughed . . .
& wouldn’t stop — not
when i thumped their back, not
when i cracked their head on the table
not even when i called the cops.
how one suffers these blasted humiliations)
x
you jump off a rolling train & run run
& wave &
no one understands
but some bloke in the carriage
thinks it’s drugs
or woman problems.
xi
they dug you from the snow
thousands of years later
haloed, illuminated
by the ice-cool intellect
that spans the sky like a new
disinterred heaven.
how beautiful!
(that was me who said that & i kept on
because no other words would come)
superpower
By Mark Prisco
when i’m on the street i live, glow red, rubinate between
two stones. killer horns / albatross
wings. nothing can dislodge this
no bullet. on my bike it’s the same when i piledrive leaves
on the windy pavement. plough the rails on my train. scratch my name
on your tombstone. i get nirvana
when i glide along the river with the violet shades of evening. when the light’s
perfected. there are green mountains you touch
with the naked eye.
aeroplane
By Mark Prisco
i raise my head on instinct, an auto
reactive movement: the fear
of bad posture? an antonymous
gesture — a dig at the multi-headed
machine bowed before me? you choose:
google clues for a current location.
i could tell you but i’m too high
to spot the colour of my shoes.
meanwhile tho,
i condescend to urinate; behold
the waning sky, arched flora, an owl
with its back to the camera; it won’t
defer the moment, transmogrified
to a captured memory, 4D’d —
out there, but not really.
at the top of the road, the sky fell
several km. an aeroplane
crawled like beetle, sleek white.
i could have held it, flung
with the wind, got home before it.
of course, this is all
talk, imagination; actually
this fraught metalled thing, winged
& clinical knows its own end
lives for the head rush, the ultra
unbelievable
amyl nitrate
minute flitting like its sisters
amidst the complex
algebraic
branches.
An interview with Mark Prisco
There’s no fading out in the speaker of Mark Prisco’s ‘to not / let go’ — no intention of yielding to middle-age-middle-class resignation, no taste for limits issued by ‘placid bureaucrats, officials . . . shit-wipes like in / Kafka’, no quarter given to nice quiet suburban apathy and anaesthetising capitalist comforts: ‘I’d sooner starve than / swallow, suffer these holy / iPod, life-bearing / luxuries.’
This is a poet who’s damned if he’ll curl up in ‘accepted standards / of living’, who’s staying ‘on the street’ with jaw gritted, fists locked, an acid eye trained on the workings of power, and all the dirt of resistant human beauty under his nails: ‘i have not come here to kneel’. There’s no fall-back position — stalked by mortality, this is poetry that pledges to keep kicking, stay in the brawl and out of the ‘black hood’. But blooded, worn, sick to the back teeth of the status quo, buzzing with a lifetime of big knocks, they are poems that are just as likely to stun you with sudden strokes of fragility and tenderness as they are to land a cynical one-two gut punch, poems whose lines switch-step with head-turning speed between ‘bottled rage’ and unquelled love: ‘how beautiful! / (that was me who said that & i kept on / because no other words would come)’.
Lyric residues scratched hard out of praxis, they’re poems that leave a ‘heart smoking in the corner’ and press the reader to listen to the red-hot need and ever-renewed daily labour caught in that simple four-word directive — ‘to not / let go.’
Tracey Slaughter: Ever since we first met many years ago you’ve struck me as a ‘real deal’ writer, one whose days and drives are all about the art, who lives and breathes his craft. I know you threw over other things to follow your writing — and you’ve never wavered. You’re willing to work nights at Countdown if it means you get to keep scratching down lines: you don’t have a sell-out bone in your body (for all that you take the piss about penning a book titled ‘sell-out’ one day soon!). Your wholehearted uncompromising commitment to poetry has always inspired me, and I know it’s inspired other writers who’ve come into your orbit. Can you tell me when you first decided to put poetry at the centre of your life? What first woke the poet in you? What keeps him awake?
Thanks, Tracey. I don’t think I ever decided to make poetry the centre of my life, but that’s how it turned out. It’s just luck — bad luck, probably. There was this time when I was 10 and I threw a stone at this dog on a chain that started barking at me for no reason, and I hated it — the dog. So I picked up a stone and hit it. This was in Italy, in the country, and I was made to say sorry, and they were all lined up, this family, Mum, Dad and a few others, waiting for an apology like it was the body of Christ, and I hated having to say it. I was humiliated. Truly sorry. The dog was fine. Now I’m awake because of loud noise. Anxiety. I’m on fire, not in a good way. And I love nature — birds, flowers, etc. Nature is a big inspiration. If nature could speak to us, it would tell us to fuck off. Like that dog.
TS: So what do the daily steps of the poetry life look like? What’re the beats of an ordinary day at the task, grinding out words? I know that for you poetry arises from ‘non-poetry things’ and often involves a mode of ‘reverie — of trying not to think’.
Well, I’ve been told I don’t think, and there’s some truth in it. Did I say that? That I was inspired by non-poetry things? I am not sure what I meant. Other art forms influence my poems. Maybe I meant that. Or ugly things, like personal trauma or the architectural style of some buildings. Yes, that kind of thing, but also, as I said, birds and flowers. I love nature. Easy on the eye. Most of the time, I lose sight of it. But then it comes back to me, like when you’re five years old and you’re looking up at this tree and it’s awesome. Those moments are rare, but poetry comes out of it, and the rest — what we see, what we feel. Anything. The poet absorbs all this and delivers.
