Joel Chace


from Times Rhyme


Midnight Classic

God loves himself with an infinite intellectual

love. Even after he lost his sight, he said, “Can you

imagine me leaving Manhattan and going down

to the Condo Commune in Florida with all my sisters,

brothers, and friends? It’d be like the blind sleeping with

the dead. I’ve been a lot of things, but never

a necrophiliac.” In circus band music, the time

signature is always 1/1. Tom Thumb left for

Philadelphia today — yesterday was his adieu

Farewell "Benefit.” I took in $280! Did

you ever hear the like? I have the Rocky Mountain Wild

Indians this week. Christmas Eve. Venice. Santa Maria

Gloriosa dei Frari. Titian’s “Assumption,” in her deep,

deep red, the Virgin being lifted out of this world. In a

small side chapel, Bellini’s blue Madonna, forever

in this world, joying in sounds, cherubs twiddling about her head.

Past the Locanda Riva, water taxis chugging; a

solitary standing Babbo Natale, with cigarette.



Lonely Light

The object of the idea constituting the human

mind is the body. The man in the yellow truck runs

right into a flying barrel of gas. KABOOM! Police,

ambulances, fire trucks, and people come to his rescue. Where

is the man in the yellow truck? He’s gone. Just vanished.

Where she missed, where she turned, where she wavered is

her pillared self, and there where her salt body is, no

pliability. Belief, complaint, whispers, loans;

how is it even truth? They saw him as he fled

from the Court of Ass-Sizes. Then there was Zip the Pinhead.

One day, my father took us to a feast, and my brothers

became very merry; but I was sad. My father then came

to me and told me to taste the wonderful food; but I

could not. And at that, my father, in his anger,

ordered me from his sight. My heart filled with infinite

love for those who scorned it, I turned on my heel.



Tomorrow

For the mathematics to work, the universe would

actually consist of ten spatial dimensions,

not the three dimensions we observe in everyday

life: the extra seven dimensions have rolled up out of sight.

He kept staring at us, as, over his eyes, diabetes

lowered its slow curtain, which he wanted to take us

behind, with him. Her blond hair brushes the harp’s carved, blond

wood and flicks against the strings. He who loves God cannot

endeavor that God should love him in return. On

Sola Beach, the Nazi bunkers, squat, gray-going-black,

windowless rooms of dazzling dark, stench of midnight

piss and copulation. But at their bases, nesting

gulls: sudden white-winged blur and screeching; violent

feces smearing hands, hair, camera’s lens.



The Rhyming Never Stops

I write you at the first opportunity to explain

my mysterious disappearance from school and teaching

position. I was seized by two men and told at the point

of their revolvers not to get off at my station. They

took me on to NYC and from there to Boston,

where they made me ship as a cattleman and earn my way

across the ocean. The development of the concept of

strangeness created something of a puzzle. We've

seen it! What? Why, that Mermaid! The mischief you have! Where? What

is it? It's twin sister to the deucedest looking thing

imaginable — half fish, half flesh; and 'taken by and large,'

the most odd of all oddities earth or sea has ever

produced. In other words, dark matter is the mysterious

something that makes up a quarter of the universe and

holds galaxies together. Then he asked me

for a second time, and more impatiently, if I liked

the garden. Trembling, I told him "No.” And at that, my father

struck me. And I ran away. For a second time I turned

away, and my heart still filled with love for those who scorned it.



Waste Spaces

Voices bleed from one darkness to the next. The charged kaons

are mesons which have a quark composition of

up-antistrange for the positive kaon and

antiup-strange for the negative kaon. They decay

in about 10^-8 seconds. Continually

visored, he unhorses one after another, in dusty

heat. Until, finally, he faces an older noble,

also untoppled, a lord who refuses to fight

an unseen foe until he at last removes his

helmet. And the father, now facing his banished, ugly,

hunchback son, reclaims him, tearfully. She says, “If I lived

like this, and wasn’t happy, I couldn’t stand it.”



Zones

Col. Cresap, last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked,

murdered all the relations of Logan, not even sparing

my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in

the veins of any living creature. There is

an intelligence of the young, and an unintelligence

of the aged. An ugly, dried-up, black-looking,

and diminutive specimen, her arms thrown up, giving her

the appearance of having died in great agony. A sage

has said, I will do nothing of purpose, and the people

will be transformed of themselves; I will be fond of keeping still,

and the people will of themselves become correct. The being

of substance does not appertain to the essence of man --

in other words, substance does not constitute the actual

being of man. The boy was rather a fool than

a freak; he was crammed full of senseless absurdities. One day

he hired an old horse and had riding-breeches made with one leg

blue, the other red, and rode up and down the streets as a

mercenary, to the joy of all beholders but

to the bitter shame of his family. At the end, she asked

what would her life have been like if she’d died of croup at age one?



Leitmotifs

While his leading order density matrix contains

only the diagonal terms, we calculate the

off-diagonal correlation terms. These correlations

start very small, but then grow in time. The cumulative

effect is that the correlations become

comparable to the leading order terms and

significantly modify the density

matrix. Circle of white mushrooms up through bronze

pine needles. Chopin was in awe of Liszt’s pianistic

technique as Liszt played Chopin’s etudes. A palm hulas above

his head, the postmaster on the beach: in his hand, a small

packet of letters bound for the interior. These outbursts

were painful to me. Up to now my virginity had

always seemed a glory. It never occurred to me that all

good, even this too, is relative and that he was only

blurting out what many think who secretly wish

for "an experienced woman." That, I

certainly was not; and so we tormented

ourselves not from love so much as fear of love.



Firewall

Who fiercely clings to fierce terrain, rock fields of Beara

Peninsula, or Adrigole, where ground yields nothing but its own defiance

and, in April, yellow furze? This emperor farmed far out

his duped viceroy. “I see it in my mind, the story

of my sadness, a solid black line.” So say it. “I’ve tried,

but my outloud words are gray, and the line is broken.” Yes,

I hear that. And if he is not wise, then in vindication

of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and

my occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time

to give either to any public matter of interest

or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter

poverty by reason of my devotion to the god. Stars

tonight, and moon; her skin is quiet and tight.




Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as The Tip of the Knife, Counterexample Poetics, Eratio, Otoliths, Infinity's Kitchen, and Jacket.

Most recent collections include Sharpsburg, from Cy Gist Press, Blake's Tree, from Blue & Yellow Dog Press, Whole Cloth, from Avantacular Press, Red Power, from Quarter After Press, Kansoz, from Knives, Forks, and Spoons Press, Web Too, from Tonerworks, War, and After, from BlazeVOX [books], Scorpions, from Unlikely Books, and Humors, from Paloma Press.
 
 
previous page     contents     next page