Poetry | December 01, 2003
Poetry Feature: Anthony Butts
Anthony Butts
Featuring the poems:
- Intercession to Saint Brigid
- Mist and Fog
- Song of Earth and Sky
Intercession to Saint Brigid
Young and black, a woman rocks back and forth
on the Greyhound to Dallas, a fulcrum of night
in her white T-shirt. A white woman farther back
dressed in black scratches the top of her head with one
fingernail like a record skipping over some song
she’d love to remember, some ode she seems
to never give up on. White crosses grow larger
in their trinities the farther we descend toward
the equator, Southern culture like those high-
powered lights turned at dizzying angles upward,
faith illuminated in an attempt at the largest
manuscripts ever read. Saint Brigid is back
on Lake Michigan, The Book of Kells in my lap,
the lamp light above my head faintly culling
stronger strands from weaker ones as no one
pays attention to me or my red jersey
in the obscurity of that near-coffin rolling,
its tubular presence like the shape of a life—
that form the only person at a party who’s
interesting. I will not let go of that raft.
Islands of light. Eyes of night. Fist-sized
towns pass incredulously by. Sometimes a person
pointing aimlessly on the corner is like a pattern
interwoven in daylight, a labyrinth of sound and sight,
runes of our fate known to someone save ourselves:
the Lady of the Lake, her hair as dark as the two
women on board. One has scratched a small
hole in her head, blood collecting in the tiny “u”
in her psyche. The other sits with her small girl
mewling to a music only her mother could know.
And I am all fretwork, or so I believe, in this moment
where the next buses will connect with the terra-cotta
mountains of Utah and the windswept plains of Nebraska—
upon the blackout of intercessions as darkness closes
ranks at 1:16 A.M., about an hour before Dallas where
we’ll wake into the only light we’ll witness on this night.
Mist and Fog
Saucers and their cousins sit respectfully in silence,
the room austere in black-and-white distressed checks
lining the Formica like footprints to nowhere, two rooms
separated by more than just dusky effervescence, Saint Brigid
come ashore in the form of mist and fog. Outside, there is no
word for demure or dapper as gray inhabits both places
of the mind-the last rays persevering beneath sky’s
observation, the Lady of the Lake seeing a whistle’s billowing
with her ears. We rely upon odd senses when in need,
the couple muttering each one to themselves as if
those cluttered rooms were populated by thoughts,
as if throw pillows were like faces passing in the reflection
of department store windows—each shopping
for their own anniversary gift, which no one thought
to give. Squirrels gather the world into their own
constituency of promise and fortitude as if no other
were available, contemplative winter a sustaining
memory of more than luck and loss. Vibration
of missing sound after rhythmic chanting is like
the course of human history turned around:
a congregation in the loss of languages spoken
and unspoken after group meditation, after the hum
of Saint Brigid has inspired even the leaves to sing
along. Sound can only hurt you if you let it,
the couple somnambulistic in the kitchen
organizing saucers according to their own
phenomenology, the eerie mist above
the dishes like miniature gymnasts
twisting in the rhythm of sentences turning:
words bending thoughts like light refracted—
the couple making love with their gestures,
even if mist is not yet in their eyes.
Song of Earth and Sky
The sun rises in its happenstance of the day,
garbage trucks like predawn crickets, the lack
of streetwalkers as its own object of desire,
life more like art than the reality we reconstruct
through daily ritual imitated. Routine is candy
for the psyche, blocks of caramel on a park bench
like children sitting calmly, a jar of chocolates
individually wrapped on His table at home
in the only version of heaven I must know.
Uncle Vanya on stage, young actors allowing
their own characters to slip through at unwarranted
intervals, the black and white of the play like
a photograph developing in liquid depths
of hydroquinone the dark room indistinguishable
from the substance, Doctor Astrov imperceptible
to his own logic. This is what makes them great,
that reservoir of happenstance called upon in
ruff-hewn hours of practice and malcontent
like great swatches of heaven in the form of
inspiration when blue is the only color
assigned to the soul of an artist looking
skyward, when platinum orange is the color
of subsistence before the morning star
as the great Sky God leans in for
a peek at the day and what we might bring.
He is as hokey as all that because no other
emotion is as pure, is as metallic as ice
in the way that it looks to others, that sentiment
seeming more like the pocket miracle of
a plastic lighter, transparent and purple
before the tip of the cigarette which might
not serve as inspiration but more like a
partner with whom the would-be Astrov
might dialogue as if its white dress were
would-be wedding attire, as if Sonya would
wait forever for her man to come around.
Sky knows more than earth will tell it,
our own fates here just as easily unwrapped
and tasted like the most forbidden of sweets,
the choicest of produce in the marketplace of our
longing because perseverance from “here” to “there”
is like the last sentimental cricket inching home.
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