by Isak Saaf (’24)

Monk poem. (no title.)

MONKS CHANT:
TAXIS TAXIS PARATAXIS PARASAMTAXIS
TAXIS ARRIVE.
MONKS IN, OFF TO ANOTHER PARTY.

Truly my Satan.

Thou’rt but a dunce,
In-sign, in-step, grumbling
Of barbarians, the optimized
Drift of bergs and
Burgs, marching slow
Along thy map. In nom
INI, unbuilt, I scrapped
And down-torn, cities
Walked a way. And down
Town wee voices in the
Air shout, into the air, mis-
Ratory, odd birds you, Dis
Respectful, conduct of Hell.
Manners of Hell, taste in
Furniture. Fold & unfold
maps , listen to tunes
And voices. Butter, burrata,
Vomit and goose fat, filth
Mask on yer eyes, damn
howling . Leads map. Circles
Out, ring roads of hell,
Trunk legs above thy city.

Courtless.

All in one self. Worm-like,
The page is the length of the thing.
Upstairs. It’s the women. One of ours.
To clarify. The dark block draws everyone outside.

No difference between in and out.
And less speaking. Тачки гоняют in the street.
A recorded adhan resolves into a shout
Or lack of. Diffusion. City’s empty.

Heat like an equalizer. Proteins denature.
And the buzzer, and the hotels
Like ice-sculptures, like Soviet postcards.
Specificity closing through the years.

Many histories, many possibilities.
A single meeting of. Sentences built
Patchwork. Out of time. Like torrents.
Assembling a film.

We quit the configuration, try another.
Staged and iterated. Poor-set paving stones.
Bad fit. Bad teeth, all gold. Mother
I would prefer if somewhere else were home.

Zaporozhiya.

Yup. Stand we at the pit
Nudging rocks in, some calm pros
Watching land about us, old
As time, circling, memory in the
Blood, open sky in the heart, bones
In the hole. Sad to say.
Song unlearned since them days,
Suffer by experiment. Sang they
At this fire, chewed bones
And odd vegetables, stink and
Sweat, offal well-eaten?
Knew they rhymes? Ask one,
He’ll break, stowed in steppe-mounds
Sword and bride, writing ill-recalled
But present, etched in eye-teeth
As ever it was. Priests we,
Mushroom hunters, clerks and eunuchs,
Usage ill-managed, no song left to sing.
Stones in the hole, bury them twice now
No song without music,
No verse without pen.

---

Isak Saaf (’24)

I want to cut the I out of poems as much as I can and don’t let pedants point to the few instances here. Looking back I’ve made the probably-conservative to replace it with a ‘we’ where necessary but even this feels less stable than a unified subject experiencing poetic feelings whatever those are. I am interested in hell and pre-history and what those are like since both can be experienced any time, hell is a kind of pre-history. Read these poems over a drum.