John Martone, Two New Poems: “Gamma” & “Juniperus virginiana”

[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns) as a project to be undertaken.  For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write.  It’s with someone like John Martone, however, that this approach turns into a life long project, for which poems like the following, newly made & often self published, can serve as a presentday, irrefutable witness. (J.R.)]

                  gamma
 

         light in your handwriting’s loops

            light in your body 

~ 

the retina’s a sail 

~ 

infrared 

even as you lie there sleeping 

~ 

a frequency  

at which the body is see-thru 

~ 

they hammer together

a wooden stairs

you read about photons 

~ 

shouting vulgarities 

a roofer stands in the light 

~ 

it’s weeding or roofing these days & both 

~ 

photons 

the pea flower’s

whiteness 

~ 

photons  

you pick

pea pods 

~ 

the wind’s direction today all those photons 

~ 

in a photon

in the light

            more light 

~ 

wouldn’t mind

just being

photons 

~

gamma rays  

right thru

mirror 

~ 

gamma ray burst lighting up all can’t see it  

~ 

your body

this room  

this room

full of light 

           ~ 

radish plants

shot to seed overnight

you climb the roof 
 

 

 

              Juniperus virginiana
 

 

nothing to do

old man

red cedar 

~ 

room enough

for me in you

red cedar 

~ 

a brief nap

a red

cedar 

~ 

people have two lungs — red cedar 

~ 

nights

that interstellar form

red cedar 

~ 

another

sleep walker

red cedar 

~ 

come autumn

a cedar chest

full of bedding 

~ 

having no one

the smell of a cedar hope chest 

~ 

cedar tree

the soul is always something else

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    summer, summer 2013