Bonsai Master
By John Barr / from Dante in China
Arts
Poems about the Arts.
Mss
By John Barr / from The Hundred Fathom Curve
Since I start things on the margin
–cocktail napkins, cancelled checks,
timetables trying to be reliable–
and since I save it all, I know
there are good words buried and lost
in those fat accordion files, words
that sounded good at the time,
that I promised to get back to,
rhyme trains that never left Grand Central,
monikers that chattered like silverware
at 30,000', sounds struck
sheer of sense–coin of a realm–
from a currency of air, pronounced
like blessings on an express world,
soul puffs, plain mistakes,
angels, working definitions of.
The Book
By John Barr / from Dante in China
There is no Frigate like a Book
to take us Lands away
-Emily Dickinson
I find you in these sunless stacks.
Your poems might be uncommonly fine
but your pages darken to brittleness
and you've never been checked out. Unless
your anchor's weighed and you proceed
to find the harbor of another's mind,
nothing will come of the cargo in your hold.
I stand in the gloom of the unread, and read.
Dante In China
By John Barr / from Dante in China
Exiled for life, he conceives the Inferno.
Had his wanderings brought him here–Take Bus 9
for the Red Seabeach– he might have been stunned
to find Nature so unequivocal.
An endless flat grows nothing normal,
while a weed–arterial red–unrolls
a welcome mat to the unwell.
He sees the tidal river crawl
through deep reversals,
looking for the sea.
He walks the Bridge of Nine Turnings.
Posted up ahead, warnings–
in language he cannot divine.
Strutting cranes patrol
the muck, stab for clams–their
shells like voided efforts at immortality.
Flaring well-gas night and day,
towers rise as if to say,
"Pollution can be beautiful."
He cranes to see what all this will become,
beyond the reach of naked eye,
beyond what earth's receding curve allows.
Sooner or later the bay
will merge with ocean swells,
the only way he can imagine getting home.
The Boxer of Quirinal
By John Barr / from this Archive, The Arts
For two gross of statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Ezra Pound
When Goths cut the aqueduct
the Romans buried you with care–
a bronze presence to protect.
Lost a millennium and more,
you were found, foundry-perfect:
hide-wrapped hands, ruined head–
battered nose, ears, neck–
still fresh with copper flecks of blood.
You look up, spent utterly
by what laurels cost the victor,
see with an explosive vacancy
Europe girding for the Great War.
The Dial Painters
by John Barr
"Over the past two decades, the bodies of at least a dozen women who once painted watch and clock dials with radium have been laid out here for a final measure of radioactivity."
–The Wall Street Journal September 19, 1983
Pointillistes,
you made your points punctiliously
(big hand, little hand, 1,2,3...)
made faces readable on wrists,
in bedside dark.
Chorus of good girls, busy bees,
waiting for the whistle's blow
you painted your toes day-glo,
seeing the possibilities
clowned circles on your cheeks, in jest
Egressed
like wraiths, the best
of spirits. From afar
townspeople could remark
the green fire in your hair.
Twirling in lips
the radium tips,
unaware your brushes were
with death,
how could you, hazarding a hair-
line numeral,
know that you enlightened yourself as well?
Seldom has artist been
so taken by his work,
seldom illumination seen
so unintentional
or unconventional.
Elgin ladies, your bones protest
that marking time at best
is hazardous to health.
By the time
it dawned on you that to ingest
even a trace of these trace elements
involved grave consequence,
you were possessed:
Host to an unholy ghost
who farmed your flesh for tumor's bloom,
who made of your skin a palimpsest,
who made of your bones a metronome
that beat time to the stars.
Slightly to our chagrin
you showed mere industry–
punching out, punching in–
can gain the immortality
the rest of us quicken for.
Mute furies,
interred in the circle of the clock,
you roam
as Greek as tragedies
the stations of your zodiac.
Saints of our time,
Mme. Curie's
curiosities,
to the leaden ark containing your phosphor
skulls, italicized bones we come.
Alive with salts
whose half-life
is your afterlife,
in university vaults
you shine for thousands of years.
Still Life
by John Barr
Standing out of time, the
"porcelain bottle
monochrome sang de beouf
Kang Hsi, early 18th c."
does better than the bronzes whose verdigris comes
from a compromise with air,
than silver under nightfall of tarnish,
or iron, fresh-cut the color of daylight,
but soon recouped to rust,
the cup the crack travels a millimeter
the millennium,
tapestries larvally tatterdemalion,
the rest of this place losing its grip to
arms of the damp, acids of air, pell
of the particulate.
The ceramic hull does better than the Liberian
charter whose economics preclude paint,
and the potter who, the story goes, unable to please
the emperor with more of the blood-red ware
that occurred when a pig wandered into his kiln,
himself jumped in, in despair, thereby repeating
the right reducing atmosphere.
From sleep in the hill, long weathering, the levigation
of the basins;
thrown in a time of peace between pressures from the East
and pressures from the West;
compelled by the unlabored decisions of hands to bloom;
it excels in the way it avoids excess:
debased court tastes, self-imitation, virtuosity.
From its base it plums for an ordinary use,
but gathering to the top of its round
it turns, at the same time, into neck,
continuing to rise and taper,
and refuses, at the top, to flare.
From the family of reds found by copper
sacrificial red tea dust
sky-clearing red souffle
ox-blood liver
rust coral
comes this bing cherry from the accidents of fire.
Displayed in a case
made of Wisconsin molecules, assembled in Queens,
it bears to futures that will welcome it or not
red chemistry and a musical note.
Dropped
by John Barr
Released the pieces of the porcelain vase
depart on paths they've waited to pursue
since first enjoined to hold a shape in space:
shrapnel to its own ballistics true.
Hunting For A Tool
I stand by the basement shelves
breathing the odor of the mouse who died
of love for cardboard, powders or tar.
Here is sandpaper with its bite of wood,
bottles with labels telling what to do.
No carpenter, I go to the bins below.
Early TV's, radios built like chapels,
vacuum tubes with silvered skulls.
My father accumulated in the dream
of hams: to tune the babble of frequencies–
Augustan time checks ... the BBC–
to make Marconi's leap
and travel in the company of light.
I relish the clean-cut teeth of gears,
a rheostat devoid of ohms.
A magnet feeling steel still pulls.
A lump of lead still wraps the hand
around itself, expressing heft.
Still waiting for its proper use,
a light bulb rattles its tungsten tongue.
by John Barr
Muse
She likes the long maple workbench, the tools
and stickered boards. She likes to watch a flitch
re-sawn, opened, and matched up with its mate
to read as if a book. She likes the rules, squares,
and marking knives, the sliding bevel gauge,
the trammel points and templates of French curves,
the lines they make for chisels, shaves, and saws.
She likes the hand-stitched rasp, the way its teeth
perfect a shape; the linseed oil and turpentine,
coat after coat, and how the pumice rubs
a luster that invites an eye to look,
a hand to linger. She likes the finished piece
placed in its place, to have it seen, as if
to speak of what it means to be complete.
by Jim Haines
Measure, A Review of Formal Poetry, Volume XI Issue 2, 2016
Reprinted with permission of the poet.