LE TROUVÈRE PRÉTENDU

PETER SIEDLECKI

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Le Trouvère Prétendu
by Peter Siedlecki
Copyright © 2019

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover art by: Mary Roehm

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-340-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930790

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Dedication:

To all of the people who

through the many years
allowed me to make music
with them.
Photo by Mary Roehm
CONTAINERS OF TIME

I bought it at Rockler’s woodworker store. At a sale. A see-through plastic

canister of my favorite wood screws--#8, one-and-a-half inches long, with a flat
Phillips head. There were hundreds of them; and, at this late stage, this is how I
measure out my life, not with coffee spoons, but with wood screws: how many of them
will I use before my consciousness fades into clouds.

It’s the same with that expensive compound I buy at the pet store on Elmwood
Avenue. Made in Sweden, it promises to attack built-up tartar and breath odor in
dogs. It usually comes in a small white plastic container, along with a blue cocaine-
sized spoon. I mix that tiny quantity with Heike’s morning meal. But the last time I
asked for it they had only the large size available--three times more expensive than the
regular size. When I brought it home and contemplated the container’s enormity and
the minuteness of the spoon, I wondered if the substance might not outlast both me
and Heike. So, like Prufrock, I am measuring my life in spoons, but not coffee spoons-
-in blue cocaine-size spoons of Swedish dust that combats tartar, gum disease and bad
breath in dogs.

This is how a mind works at my age; so I was taken aback when Dr. Jain told
me he was worried about a sloshy sound in the steady thumping within my chest.
What I felt as a comforting thump was sounding through his stethoscoped ear more
muffled, more murmury. To him it sounded as though the blood pumping through
my heart was being flushed back by a valve too tired and worn to work as it always
had. I was given choices: I could let it be and die, or have it fixed.

15
 The thought of fixing flashed pictures on my mind of slicing open my chest,
spreading my rib cage and assaulting my quieted heart; but those pictures were erased.
The penetration would be robotic. This news made me think of that absurd movie I
saw so long ago in which Raquel Welch and others were shrunken to microscopic size
and injected into a man’s bloodstream to save him from assassination. I admit
watching it not for plot or medical edification, but for the landscape of Raquel Welch,
even in her microscopic version. Since then I have developed a more mature
consciousness, but still, the thought of that robot piercing my heart with its
companion camera made everything less absurd and more frightening.

Perhaps that fright, that awe, is what causes now my persistent breathlessness.
The sheer amazement of it all and the gift of more time to use up my wood screws and
make Heike’s breath less foul.

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EASY TO ASSEMBLE

The instructions are vague,

as though translated
from a secret language.
They describe hardware
variously numbered
bolts and screws,
washers and nuts,
distinguishing between
stove bolts and others,
between
lock washers and others.

The long pieces,

the ones with the inlay,
form the front
when connected to the legs
(see illustration 2
parts a and b).

Using number 6 stove bolts

(part h)
and lock nuts (part i)
fasten first long inlaid piece
(part c-1) to upper legs
(parts a and b).
Then fasten identical long piece
to lower legs (parts a and b)
as shown in illustration 3.

Repeat the process, with the

non-inlaid long pieces, and connect
front and back assemblies with rails
(part d) using number 8 stove bolts
(part g) and lock nuts (part e).

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Living is made complicated
by its many pieces
constantly construing challenges.

He might have been a renowned scholar

had he been able to focus.
But then he might never have learned
to rout dovetails
or throw a knuckleball
or determine at less than a glance
the difference between
a star washer and a lock washer,
between disc brakes,
which he couldn’t fix by himself,
and shoe brakes,
which he could.

All of the complicating pieces

teach lessons of limits.
Narrow focus is a limit in itself
from which we can learn nothing.

The steel frame

completed by the lock washer
(part k) and standard nut (part l)
attaches to the leg assembly
as shown in illustration 3
with two number 8 stove bolts
(part g) and lock nuts (part e).
Be certain that wiring channel
(illustration 4)
in left front leg remains clear.

Construction is a syllogism
in process.
How beautiful
is the logic of electricity.
How effectively
it crackles its criticism

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of any lack of logic
in the connection of its wires.

How important it is
to make connections
within a process.
How sad it is
to approach
the final illustration.

That story about the death urge

and how it functions in us all
is a fable literature professors
tell when attempting to
convince their charges
of the logic of tragedy.
the logic of the final illustration.

But look!
Here on the workbench,
there are parts remaining,
an extra g and two k’s.
Yet the structure seems right enough.
Is it possible to begin again?

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MY DEAR DEAD DR. WILLIAMS

It IS indeed
difficult
to get
the news
from poems,
and people ARE dying daily
for lack of what is found in them,
dying in places all over the globe,
from Connecticut to Syria.

But who can force anyone

to find things?
Can poetry hold its own
against all of the variants
that shape a brain’s responses?
Can a poem trump biology?

If a man whose body has made

more testosterone than it needed
while his cortisol lagged and lingered,
can a poem quell his rage?

And if clarity is clouded

by an excess of serotonin
and too little oxytocin
for him to maintain empathy
will a poem keep that feeling
from flowing away?

And if stubborn neurons

refuse the release of enough
nitric oxide to permit
his controlling his aggression
no matter how hard he prays
or how much news he receives
from poems, he will still be

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only what
his brain commands.

And what of
the possible unwillingness of
vasopressin to bind sufficiently
to the receptors
of the sub-cortical neurons
in the brain of any normal human being?

Can the brain effect

or predict the many balances required
to subdue a man’s want of war?

Humankind is mythic,
a concept generated by imagination.
There are men.
There are women.
Individual
and occasionally able
to get the news they need
from poems.

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TWENTY-ONE GUN SALUTE

The paunch and wrinkles

of the legionnaires told their story
and it was an old one made glorious
by the mist of memory.
They moved their rifles shakily
through the manual of arms,
raised them and aimed at something
in the sky, fired once
and then were done.

Another of them is at rest, and yes,

their war has grown old,
and that old misty glory
has blinded them to what
it has become for today’s young men
—an occupation:
a means of dealing
with a dying economy.
These young men cross their fingers against
the horror of deployment.

While paunchy ancient heroes

with rifles raised in the ritual of passing
knew only the misty glory of their cause
or whatever other words once
wrapped themselves
around the sacrifices they made
before war began to age.

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FIERY LIGHT

It was one of those days,

heavy
with mindless love
for fruited plain and waving grain
and flapping flags
and lost memories,
and lost memories.

It was one of those days, fading

into shadows
that muted the flapping flags
and blackened the sky
in time for those bombastic
showers of fiery light
growing by moments
ever larger and louder,
drawing breathless applause
from a congregation eager
to revive the glimmer
of lost memories.

It was one of those days that evaporated

into a memory to be filed away
and lost.

Now
this is the morning after,
wet with dew
that the sun catches
like a handful of diamonds
and places in a spider’s web
in flashes of fiery light.

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MY WAR

It is a time of war,
of pitched battle
in the vacant lot
at Gilmore and Fifth Avenue,
just beyond the last house on the block
where kind old Mr Drozgala
tends to his flowers,
welcomes butterflies,
smiles at our adventures,
and gives us fruit from his trees.

We hunker down in our foxholes,

wary of the advance of the shadowy enemy.
We have learned our craft from
John Wayne and Victor Mature
and from newsreel after newsreel
and know that this is not the time
to lift our heads
above the lip of our protected pit.

To do so would turn it into an imaginary grave

containing our imaginary death.
This is the moment to lob grenades
in the direction of our enemies
and their sneering smiles.

We pull our ammunition from the milkweed stem

and lob the pods toward phantoms
to ensure the victory.

When I consider now

the ancient passing of Mr. Drozgala
and the lessening abilities of monarch butterflies
to flutter tropical storms into existence,
I feel a twinge of guilt

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at having wasted so many milkweed pods
on my imagination.

My war has long been over

and a peaceful apartment complex
has covered our foxhole.
Our soldiers have grown older
or died.
Milkweed has been plowed under
and has grown more scarce.

Monarchs are going hungry

and tropical storms are weeping to be born.
Dreams of conquest have gone aflitter.
A faint fluttering is not enough to make a breeze
or force a brazen rain
that might wash away apartment complexes
leaving space for milkweed.

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PRESENT

A life
ample as this one
and the constant possibility
of sudden death
remind me of Christmas
and those weeks of
searching and finding
not always what we searched for,
weeks of waiting
and decorating
until the day arrives
and suddenly leaves,
with only that one present
sitting there
unwrapped and literal
under a tree bright with memories,
too real to turn away from,
too secret to open.

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THE NECESSARY ACT

Because it is the necessary act

that averts the atrophy toward stone,
I want to select and place
two elegant and proper words
side by side
in the midst of other company,
other players,
other proper but less elegant words.

One of the elegant words

must be the actor in this play,
the other, the role it plays
within an assigned space,
a space that will predict and dictate
other spaces filled with words
both elegant and not.

These spaces will assemble

and flow into parts of lines
that parade right to left upon a field
and will ultimately halt, leaving only
a blankness in front of them
that oozes its usual plea
for more.....more.

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NATURE’S WAY

The poet once posited,

as he attempted to indict
the prejudice of our perceptions,
that if you snipped the bunny’s
comic ears and fluffy tail,
you would have a rat
--such as the one
who squats quiet
within the shadowy foliage,
its tail sitting on the ground
like an exposed root, motionless
until your probing hand
prods it into scurry.

The poet was wrong: the two

--rabbit and rat
--are not even of the same family,
but the chipmunk is another matter.
Protected by its cartoonish cuteness,
it proceeds in its ratty function:
ravaging the serviceberry bush;
turning lilium stems into caney stalks;
and devising new ways to circumvent
all of the coney, spikey obstacles
employed to defend the birdfeeders;

And so,
into the garden at the base of the hill,
I welcomed the occasional residence
of the coyote and its sinister dog-smile,
The coyote, whose registration
as omnivore
applies only in the absence of fresh meat,
whose black turds speak of blood.

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And I welcome too
the renewed virility
of the serviceberry,
the tiny hint of new leaf
on a stalk of lilium,
and the confidence of
chickadees and sparrows.

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