Christopher Bakken Poems

...me likey. http://www.mississippireview.com/2005/Vol11No4-Oct05/1104-100105-bakken.html

First Objects

… unstoried, artless, unenhanced.

The moment we set off on the ocean,
steering pine boxes with nothing but faith,
we became ideas, the bas-relief
of an army the gods set in motion,
hardened with an integument of gold.
Dandelion, limestone, free enterprise.
A hurricane of glass beads and horseflies.
Things we believed at the dreadful thresholds
of canyons. All too grand. Steeple, chimney,
tower, sky: erections proved our destiny
to contract the size of the hemisphere.
We might have stayed put, but couldn’t bear
the sense that we were rising, calm as geese
caught between the sights of a shotgun.


Eclogue (4)

You managed to swell the conversation, plying
me with grog and a platter of blue-throated mushrooms.
Then I was awakened by the call of Silenus,
his frantic dirge from Thrace refracted through the leaves
of a pistachio tree—each branch smoldered
while we stared, then blossomed into a swarm of eyes.

I was awakened again, but didn’t hear you
wish you lived far enough from the world, wish some
hermit wisdom epigrammed the pages of your book.
But you won’t write an anchorite’s healing Bible;
your dreams spring from our common trenches of ash
and graveyards greener than green has a right to be.

I was awakened again, but didn’t hear you
since all I heard fell open like a broken gate:
I was dumbfounded by the hammering
clatter our lambs made when they plummeted to earth
--no one else could bear to see the semaphoric
epic they bleated out in their dying.

I was awakened once more when the sky’s atlas
scrawled its noise on the basin of my skull and five
armies marched between us, fighting over seeds
we spit. Three distinct excuses made them shell
the empty goat-pens, but I didn’t learn them.
Their pyres singe the edges of our poetry.

Outside everywhere, we see as far as vultures,
what history can’t, invent an anthem to survive.
Since there’s nothing beyond the rise, past the verge
of our vineyard, we invite nothing in, fix it
with our cairns, with our tangled wire and fence posts,
and allow ourselves the luxury of that lie.


Eclogue (5)

Now the season comes when the birds fall,
their migrations bewildered by missiles.
They litter our lawns without saying a word.

Thus every feverish apathetic
earns cash to buy his suburban beer:
we all must keep the country clean. So much

that is common has become uncommon.
Our pastures are supernaturally
green. The dirt itself is dying of health,

pleasing only the Emperor’s right eye.
From where we sit, our view is all volcano,
spurting with impossible crudeness.

The sacred bees, tired of mining essence
from thyme, swarm the public statuary
to vibrate the marble groin of Caesar.

Once, the cattle stopped chewing when we sang;
insightful goats wobbled from the mountain,
spurred by Pan and the promise of acorns.

Now that nature mocks us, we say farewell
to the oracles and caryatids
in favor of an awkward, backward bliss,

clip the hedge between dissent and despair,
no more unruly than a clutch of lambs,
yet company, somehow, to the vulgar.

Our distress is merely metaphysical,
we often wish, an inconvenience
we constitute, in spite of ourselves,

by continuing stubbornly to live.
So we pound out, with little sticks and stones,
the lewdest music: singing with our mouths shut.


Bakken's not afraid to veer about, or to cram a bunch of unexpected nouns together (see: dandelion, limestone, free enterprise; A hurricane of glass beads and horseflies). I mean, really-- "hammering/clatter our lambs made."

Enjoy!