Issue 17: Samuel Tongue
American Hybrid
It is grey outside and there is trembling.
Skyscrapers, and the arched bridges, all
stare into my room.
Imperfect horizon line, they have made glasses just for me (gloomy things).
You call, the one with the glass doorway, the wavy glass
contrasting light on paving stones inside the courtyard to the calligraphed
foundation stones.
This is a sideways suicide but I mean to give this to you.
It’s late in the afternoon, all napping. Then there is no need to tell anyone.
A swimming brimming cup, a trembling
mass of augury and eros was this man. His self wore or was wearing,
always condescending; vulgar, slowly separating
up from the black boots of her black outs
windowshades over grass,
his overmodulation over ‘the dark period’ - someone to miss.
Croaked and flew from the four-lettered name of God
by an inflection. In all that contour
the dove rattles the mind into thinking
hundreds of plastic halos into the ruffs of hundreds.
Then, only then, did my eyes open -
Something like images are here
It snowed; I did errands at a desk,
something beginning in an event that beginning overrides.
A little owl had learned to count, to set itself apart
like a brown cardboard home beside a dam.
Here, this speck and speck you missed:
tomorrow
is no cause for alarm.
All that beckons
ink flicked onto water
a “music that floats” (Boulez)
spreading like a patch of oil all that beckons
the gall wasp
makes ink
from the oak
by provocation
“no poetry that isn’t cruel” (Yang Lian / Holton)
over time
the ink digests paper-skin
composting
strings and lines radicals
mulch to feed the orchid’s flame
a character with lines the same
as the wasp
scratching at the wooden shrine
spitting out a paper nest
over time
the scholar-man and the farmer-man
share the same character the pine tree
falls
in a forest of ink
splashes burnt water
onto the fleeing fox
black drops thick in its burnt hair
characters dripping
onto new bark-paper
a “music that floats” (Boulez)
over time
all that beckons
is ink
Device
Make me an instrument of your peace.
I shall measure the gap between utterance
and action. I shall measure the finest variation
on the scale of gift and curse. My precision
will be pin-point. I am in your hands;
use me as a device to extend your demands.
Make me a tool of your full desire. All
that I have is yours. Make me instrumental
in the salvation of the world, bendable
to your perfect will. I am dependable.
My mind is empty, my body is sound.
I will not let you down.
Samuel Tongue has published poems in numerous anthologies and magazines, including And Other Poems, The Compass, Cordite (Aus.), Gutter, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Interpreter's House, Magma, and Northwords Now. He held the Callan Gordon Award as part of the 2013 Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards and is featured in Be The First to Like This: New Scottish Poetry (Vagabond Voices, 2014) and Best New British and Irish Poets 2016 (Eyewear, 2016). His debut pamphlet Hauling-Out is also with Eyewear (2016). He is poetry editor at The Glasgow Review of Books.
Copyright © 2016 by Samuel Tongue, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
