Duane Locke- Three Poems

WORD TRANCE NO. 90

The old women in olden times talked

As their thumbs turned green

From the shelling of beans

That fell into wash pans, blue

With scattered white smears.

I was five.  They were in their forties.

They dressed to look deceased,

Resembled the dress of Whistler’s mother

Painted during the age of European Dandyism.

Each one turned herself into a panticon,

And preceded a surveillance camera,

As they watched the children at play,

To see that noting in their games

Would please the Devil who was more real

Than their husbands out plowing

Furrows through red clay.

I watched the sycamore seeds,

Bronze globes that rolled

And broke to fly in air as gold.

When they discussed life it was in

Ex cathedra whispers.  The foundation

Of their wisdom was from sermons

Of an ignorant preacher.

Looking back, the scene now seems

A genre painting, such as an early  Van Gogh

When he painted Potato Eaters.

In college, I read a sociologist’s account

That he generalized as a petrified life,

But the savant, as most savant, did not

Know what he was talking about.

Their bean shelling and their voices

Turning hearsay into axioms for living

Created an atmosphere of jouissance

Of which our poplar urban culture

Are ignorant and have no understanding.

As I recall the narrative of this time

That my memory wrote, its complexity,

Its multifariousness,  its uncanny depth,

Its alterity, I recognize their voices

Hid in me.  I did not know the voices

Was part of my corporeality, but the

The voices after so many years spoke imperatives.

WORD TRANCE NO 92

Son, you’re six.

Son, my sun, my life was ripe black berries found in briars,

Briars tangled, thorned, numinous

Like the twisted sharp-edged wires atop the jail’s fence.

My brother was harassed like a horse and forced

To pull a peacock-embroidered bedspread factory

Like Sisyphus up and down a red clay hill.

His mind’s apartness, being autodidactic, was tabooed.

So, son, you’re six, so, I send you to school.

So, at school, you’ll learn to be ignorant like the others.

Once ignorant, you’ll be able to survive among the ignorant

With only minor bruises.

WORD TRANCE NO. 93

Philosophy

Begins with thunder,

Plato said.

Philosophy

Ends with an umbrella,

Aristotle said.

BIO NOTES:

Duane Locke, PH. D, lives hermetically in Tampa, Florida near anhinga, gallinules, raccoons, alligators.  Has had published 6,967 different poems, none self-published or paid to be published.  This includes 33 books of poems.

His latest book publications are DUANE LOCKE, THE FIRST DECADE, 1968-1978 (First 11 books—Order from publisher Bitter Oleander Press or AMAZON---YANG CHU’S POEMS,

Order from AMAZON---TERRESTRIAL  ILLUMINATIONS, FIRST SELECTION, from FOWLPOX PRESS.

Forthcoming 2015:  VISIONS from KIND OF HURRICANE PRESS.  Nov. 2015: TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATIONS, SECOND SELECTION (Sorties) from Hidden Clearing Books

100’S  of his poems can be found by clicking Duane Locke on GOOGLE.

He is a photographer of Surphotos and Nature.  Has had 545 photos published,

Some as book covers.  A book of 40 of his surphotos  has been published by BLAZE VOX,

POETIC IMPRINTS, RESPONSES TO THE ART OF DUANE LOCKE, by Connie Stadler and Felino Soraino.

His paintings have been described in Gary Monroe’s EXTRAORDINARY INTERPRETITONS,

Published by University of Florida Press, and are in many private collections and museums.

He is a student of philosophy—favorites: Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

Jacques Lacan,  Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze...