From Clangings
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Steven Cramer read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
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(Clang Association: in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, dissociated ideas conveyed through similar word sounds)
A finch in my chest flinches to get
heard. Wingman sewed it in. I hear
the chi-chuwee chuwee achew in there,
tiny beck beating the big heartbeat.
Mind you, it takes brains to slice
open a hide, scoop out the marble
muscles; craze a rib cage; uncoil
an aorta; slide in a gift like his:
the elf chirruping in my self, itself
elfin (the self's wit-part part want).
Pity I'm not someone else's heart!—
elf elsewhere, another body's grief.
I don't mind my beater's a warbler,
or how in-the-skin is the finch's cry.
Eat sweat, wet seat: its homunculi
pinions ping in a rock tumbler's
cavity. I place my ear to my chest.
Finch-flitters from the solar-plexus,
beaky reminders keep keeping pace.
Oh my minute pecks, tend your nest.
**
Iris of the one-eyed Satan—see it?
X-ray of a horse pout about to eat me.
Amputee kissing a double amputee.
Exploded nova; no, what an idiot
There Is Nothing Miraculous About a Tornado, Wolf Blitzer
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Steve Jobs’ Dream Device Has Arrived, and It's Made by Microsoft
Steven Cramer's fifth collection, Clangings, will be published in 2012. He directs the low-residency MFA creative writing program at Lesley University.
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