Tony Tost
& selfhood begins with a song
a sudden irruption historicizes the divine
the poem’s knot disappears
only to determine
which of my contemporaries I am to walk among
looking into the wolf’s eyes
approaching the self in victory
fearful
singing by the light snow’s subtle
series of heavenly bodies
the kiss of origination begins in doubt
ends with my tongue in your mouth
getting to know your name
each angelic immersion
a vision & not
only the suggestion of what one is carried with
a whisper and/or the song of what I am
*
It is not to wander in intuition
here one seeks one’s confusions
as a dream in which exactness rides
grabbing the throat
of what the eye divides
who should not be spitting up blood
perched upon the mind’s throne
I gnaw at the hammer and its blood
disappears within my own
it is between sentences we must argue
to keep from collapsing
like some balloon
crouching in wonder is not enough
we have come down here to believe
between sentences one translates the grief
any body is the major image of
*
Drawing the boundaries one collects
a variety of passages over the text
a beginning to the conditions by which grace
may speak
the expense of experience relays
thinking as sensuous registration
an act unbearable as a singular innovation
yet the brilliant images are tucked away
the distances between each
one may carry
our science is that of astonishment
interrogating the aesthetics I am yet to invent
doomed to speak in the same tense
my knowledge ascends there
clarity has its costs
a rearrangement of the air
getting it said is the exact expense
*
Outside the words relation seeks
the touch of wisdom as a sign to break
into the sentences that follow
ratios of paradise
the song of limits
if writing I half-close my eyes
to be either forged or forgotten among my needs
a moon on the roof of a mouth
a contemporary delight I do not think about
pulling the sheets about me as I begin to feed
what have I not written in the air
to arrive as wonder
I’m still here
biting my fingers
each thought is immense
the shaking of the sheet is an accompaniment
the telephone rings sounding the violent
a career of terror the call invents
Tony Tost is the author of two full length poetry collections, Complex Sleep, recently published in University of Iowa Press’s Kuhl House Poets series, and Invisible Bride, winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award; he is also the author of one chapbook, World Jelly, published by Effing Press in Austin, Texas, in 2005. Recent poetry and prose appear in Hambone, Talisman, Mandorla, Typo, Denver Quarterly, Wildlife, American Literature and Third Coast. He is alive–with his wife Leigh and their son Simon–in Durham, North Carolina, where he is beginning work on a dissertation concerning media, critical theory and an American modernist poetics of knowing at Duke University. The sequence “Elephant & Obelisk” is dedicated to David Need and is from Tost’s larger work in progress, called Consequence.
“Very few front porches in my early development: when my parents and I moved from the Missouri Ozarks to a rural, wooded and perverse spot in western Washington state, there was a small step-up from the grass in my grandparents’ backyard to the camper trailer we lived in. When we moved from various apartment complexes in town there were usually concrete walkways connecting all the doors with a black metal railing riding along. Once we moved into our single-wide home in the Misty Mountain Trailer Park there was a three or four step walk-up to the front door and the awning connected over to a small wood garage. When we purchased and cleared out an abandoned, overgrown lot several years later, near my grandparents’ house in Cumberland, WA (as Wikipedia puts it, an unincorporated community in King County, Washington. A former mining town, Cumberland is accessible only via backroads’) my father built an expansive red-stained wood deck to connect to our new double-wide mobile home; a few years later, he enclosed the far end in order to protect my parents’ adored hot tub.
“My grandparents’ front porch, where I spent more of my time, was small, but sturdy; they purchased and essentially re-structured the house in the late 1930s when it was basically a barn; from the cellar you could see the enormous logs of the foundation give as my grandmother moved through the kitchen. The porch was also a spot of Tost family lore, as the location where my adolescent father (about 6’1″ 280 lbs and barrel-chested in his prime) finally stood up to and punched out his drunken uncle. It was also where we snapped pole beans and shucked corn. But once my grandmother died, my parents, grandfather and I moved into town’ (Enumclaw, WA: population 11,000, derived from a local Native American word meaning place of evil spirits”) and into a nice retirement trailer park. Less of a porch here (and also no grass: my parents had it removed from their lot and replaced with red lava rock) than a double-sided four-stepper. Expansive awning, though.
“My parents now live back in the Missouri Ozarks, and after having their nice two-story house (enclosed front porch with deep freeze, small deck with hot tub added on later) taken away from them by the bank (ask me about this when I’ve been drinking), they now live happily in a fixed-rent duplex which they share with a cycle of single-parents and/or addicts. No front porch there, though they have managed to fence off a twenty by twenty foot portion behind the duplex to keep a new hot tub in.
“Leigh, Simon and I live in a nice little two-story house near downtown Durham; our front porch faces a busy connecting street. We have, in a gesture of wishful thinking, two rocking chairs on the front porch, which we don’t use. We also put out ferns and flowers in the spring; here wrens have been known to nest and procreate. The back deck is much more conducive to a domestic life–if we’re going to shuck some corn, or get drunk to music and late night talking, we’ll do it back there. No hot tub, though. Kind of fucking hate them.”