COLLECTED POEMSERNEST SLYMAN

The Battered Wife

The first time
you crushed my skull
I was happy,
but that was a thousand years ago.

I have been tossed from windows
and set aflame as I slept in bed;
I have been shot in the head,
gagged and dropped from a train.
I have been poisoned
and left in the dark beside a road.

I have given birth to a thousand children,
and each one I loved.

You were tall in France,
and short in Spain,
and often handsome
and occasionally bald and fat --
with blue eyes in Austria
and brown eyes in Italy.
You drank vodka from a hat
and played the violin.

You were Jack in England,
Juan in Peru,
and Tom in Hungary.
(What was that tune
you were always whistling?)

During the Ch'in dynasty
you bloodied my face
and broke my arm.

You cursed at me
everyday for centuries.
I have wept in many centuries.
You have scorned me too long.

Never have I hidden from you.
Always I met you at the station,
greeted you with a kiss.

You placed flowers on my grave --
not once have you wept.
I lay still in my favorite dress.

You cursed at me
everyday for centuries.
I have died in many centuries.

I shall come again
and wait for you at the station
and greet you with a kiss.

Ulcer

Rhinoceros-scented the gaseous clouds
Trickle up the esophagus.
Quarrel in the saucy funny dark,
Stomach contemporary of the liver,
A silvery salty sweet subtle storyteller
Of indigestion. The comic Zen,
The surprise of anti-acid, the King of gout
And the birth of mortality, craziness,
Zany the plumed piquant gastric grumbling
And the perversity of a rich diet---
The toes ringing with rigor mortis.
Liver's lost child spoiled
And the green meadow cries,
The evening star rises in the pit
Of the stomach, paws from within
The dead carcass of sponge cake.

Colloquy

Evening the tongues of seven old men
kicked the skulls of dead babies
around in a long, boisterous argument --
and stirred the wild dog,
yapped literature & philosophy
and bit their flesh
till one or two died of commonsense.

Torchbearer

Day's a scorned child
At play in the fields.
No thing can comfort it,
And each time the sun blunders
Then shall we also perish
Laughing together
Like patches of light
At dusk which go peacefully
Without harsh words,
Their simple joy
To please the stars.

Who Has Not Gone Queerly
To Their Grave

Who has gone queerly to their grave,
and laid in drunken solitude,
when so lewd and mean the day
night and stars come cling
around their knees,
and pulled them down;
and in a frenzy, told
what lasts never lasts,
all ends darkly and soon
shall be born bright --
how the sinner's soul let out
like the old gray cat
hugs the moon.

Sleep

So I lie in the dark
and faintly under my brow
I feel the earth. Red clay.
The ground breaks loose,
And out of my mouth,
Flutter the moon and the stars.
My eyes leap across the sky,
Jumping over mountains.
I put my hands out to stop the days
from pulling my hair.
All over the world, I am holding on
to hands, and soft voices touch
the tips of my toes.

American Stock Exchange

1972

Let fall the stocks and bonds
From height of great hypocrisy,
Twirl round the downward spiral of morals
And so miserable a ne'er do well
As the failed economy,
Flat on its back at the closing bell.
Suffer the art of buy and sell.
Bear away the drunken and debauched state
Upon such crooked shoulders,
And tumultuous tirade lend ignoble fate
To the comfort that fall to the rich,
All of greed and little more,
The discomfort that falls to the poor,
And pain the pleasure of the paramour.
As turns of money and power
Swing round the hour.

Ears

Cawing like a rook, one ear
snarls dog's teeth, gnaws
loudly the loneliness.
The other speaks
the broken vow,
the bells of a old church
that clang in the night.
The good ear hears the whoop
and the mystical whoosh;
it wakes in the dark,
slips out, looks up
the moon. The evil ear
wicked sinner, lout,
man of the world,
pug-faced, pushes a pram
to morning mass, red ribbon
tied about a dead baby.

Two Mad Aunts

A dance is a measured pace,
as a verse is a measured speech.
--- Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)>

Far too many poets have stopped dancing,
but gracefully, fancifully writing
to their own inner music, which secretly
only they can hear. The words they apply
by this cryptic measure, a sort of whistling
in the soul, summon forth to the page
their spirits and haunt the reader
like an old clapboard house,
where someone's cooking cabbage,
and a spoiled child's off running through the rooms,
looking for two mad aunts
who've hid in the cupboard.

The Good Son

Mother's Day --
and from sleep I rise;
and know
a last time I must go
and leap
into my mother's eyes.

Bafflement

One summer afternoon
Jack cracked a walnut
on the sidewalk,
and out burst
from the hard black shell
his sister Kay
riding a red-chrome bicycle,
and a church choir jumped out
of the dogwood tree,
clapped their hands;
and three o'clock
opened wide its eyes,
flung its wide-lapelled cloak
over the schoolyard,
as the shock of love
on sunlight's face ran wildly
through the day,
blithely calling
the sky its mother.

Spring Shower

What had gone
unspoken
by the sky thundered up
and oddly
fell and rocked the yards
like boats in a bay,
drubbed the giddy streets;
and the hours
sprung from a flowerbox,
rode a row of wild houses
around in a circle,
dragging the town
by its heels
along the wet grass.

6AM, Up The Yellow Sky and Down The Mountain

The pale orange sky
Slaps the cows,
Sticks the pigs and squeals
Kiss the fields. Here, the barnyards
Come running, squirming with death's stink,
And waddling out,
The hogs grunt like old men.
The farmer bows.
The chicken grain falls
From his hand,
The sodden-faced years pass by--
And by there going,
Trill sweet each farewell
On the high slender branches
Of strange hog-voices.

The Seven Suns of Dream City

In my dreams there are always
Seven suns and all are cool blue.
Each morning the seven suns rise--
Three in the east, one in the north,
Two in the south, another in the west.
The seven suns rise at various times,
But they always burn cool bright blue,
And I gaze on the seven suns
And see my wonderful future,
How many tomorrows it will take
For me to be happy,
For the universe to tremble with joy,
And looking into the cool bright blue
I feel the past running up
The mountains like wild deer.
I listen to their hoof beats
And when they tell me to turn away
I turn away, and do not ever look
Again, and the sky is waiting for me to speak,
But I say nothing.

Speaking With My Hands

The wild things hands say
leaping up to touch a chin
or tug at an ear,
or scratch a nose,
without regard for repercussions,
interrupting other hands murmuring,
perhaps tenderly resolving differences.
My hands fall still, perch on my lap,
but cannot resist the urge
to leap upward, laugh or weep
openly at what other hands say.
The revolution began, the maze
of gestures. The impossible odds
against anyone understand
the strange metaphors
that come to predict,
dispute the facts.
The first outburst discloses
such long-held secrets---
a single tough-mindedness
and the familiar ardor
of the carnival barker.
The crazed speech
unexpectedly has come
forth as brilliant witness
to the mysterious predicament
in which curiously tighten
around us, obscuring
the cleanly imagined worlds,
with riddles that conceal nothing
and truths that tell falsehoods.

Wild Geese

Watching them pass overhead,
That V-shaped fleet,
I felt blue sky
Beneath my feet.

I felt close company
With the winds that swirled
In perfect circles
Around the world.

I knew the best places
To fish and swim.
I knew the woods,
Every leaf and limb.

Then I awakened
With a sudden shock---
I found myself at the head
Of the flock.

The air my wings strummed
With fierce conviction.
I honked the sacred words
Of an ancient benediction.

My long neck stretched out
Across a field of wheat.
I knew the way, and felt
Blue sky beneath my feet.

We soared southward,
And the world far below
Stopped everything to gaze up
At our traveling show.

Moon

Tonight the lamp-lit houses
are like words in a sentence
spoken in anger.
Moon, old skin
of inscrutable uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts,
shine down, move
in and out of the children,
tickle the roofs and the chimneys,
smooth back the field,
and when whisked up by a wind
gently blow thoughts
like a horn. Let your bones
catch in the trees,
wail when the stars shine bright,
and pose no hard questions
to a soul tonight.

Striking The Words
(for Basil Bunting)

"Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write."
--- Basil Bunting

With chisel in hand, I strike the stone
and make of words my flesh and bone ---
two children born from my last sentence.
And once out of a fresh-cut sentence flew
a flock of black birds, an old shoe,
three monkeys chasing a cockatoo.
Wish I could make of words
a cottage in the country with a white picket fence.

Ernest_Slyman@worldnet.att.net

Born in Appalachia, Ernest Slyman lives in New York City. He is a member of the Alsop Review.
He has been widely published in The Laurel Review, The Lyric, Light: A Quarterly
of Light Verse (Chicago), The NY Times, Reader's Digest and The Bedford Introduction
to Literature, St Martins Press, edited by Michael Meyer, as well as Poetry:
An Introduction, St Martins Press, edited by Michael Meyer)

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