My Amazing Husband and His Poems

If you haven't already, please take some time and read some of Scott's poems over at UCity Review. They took six of the poems from his manuscript Danse Macabre, which is just about finished.  

The manuscript is beautiful and smart, sometimes biting and funny and often quite sad. And here are two of my favorites that UCity picked up: 

Concrete (adj., n., v.)

From Latin, from logic,
from Roman emperors in love with their own permanence—
the actual thing, its actual instance,
real, of substance.

From the verb Concrescere—intransitive,
a cancer spreading across a sentence:
“to grow together,” “to coalesce.”

The Romans poured it underwater in Caesarea,
formed separate concrete cells
in the harbor, hive-like,
and still it set.

They poured it in the sky,
offering the Pantheon’s dome
to the sun. The land stretched out
as if on a sickbed, and they spread

aqueducts and ramparts,
friezes telling the old stories
of broken barbarians to now benign masses,
conquest set in every surface.

From Middle English, from defeat,
from disease and misdiagnosis, from empire, death, and myth,
a late-fourteenth-century logician’s term—Concretus—

opposite of abstraction: Daughter, Wife, Breath,
Guilt, Hope, Grief,
                              hidden in dense sentences,

marker of what you can touch:
woman, bed, colon, eyelids (closed),
crypt, memory, grief.

From Latin, Italian, from Early French
to Middle English to each of our mouths,
it comes as the stuff of foundation, completion,
of exactness, the enemy of avoidance,

                              stuff of particulars:
                              gravel and sand, water, mixed, set
                              in forms, literally “grown together,”
                              real, substantial, irreversible.

You pour it by day, when you return the next
it is changed, as are you.

You are young, in love with your permanence.

All summer it grows, row upon row,
this mausoleum. Open crypts
stare out at you like the hundred lenses
of a fly’s compound eye, asking
what now?
and you know.

When you’re finished, you pretend not to notice
what it’s become—hardened place, poured from below the ground,
from its foundations it still reaches for the sun.
One hundred and forty-four crypts, some already sold,
it stretches across this hill’s crest, wide and dense
as your shoulders, topped with marble.

Stout little house, empty then, you created a place of memory
that will not leave, this place of solid, conquering concrete,
and one day years later—just like that—in front of this mass
you stepped out of yourself in your clean funeral clothes
and looked back, as if to listen to your younger self say,
This is the place I told you to expect.

Danse Macabre

1.

A true confession: we created him by accident
the time I gunned my coffin-glossed Buick into
the heart of midday Highway 40 traffic, and Veith,
trapped in the passenger seat, palmed the fuzzy top
of the interior and yelped: Certain Death!

Of course I managed to miss each of the missile-like cars
heat-seeking us with my own beautiful vehicular proficiency,
the kind exclusive to the Late-Teenage Homo Sapien
with the blessed mortality-blindness of idiocy. Still,
it was too late. The thing was named, and thus it was.

The same way Yahweh was said to create the heavens,
the earth, the things that creep upon it and us: 
badgers and bacteria, murders of crows and chloroform.
And then there are the things he didn’t necessarily plan:
rubber ducks and neck tattoos, machines created

to simulate our ends, carnival rides with rusty bolts,
mis-measured bungee ropes, all of these after Eden’s first act
of teenage rebellion gave us death for real and the need
to make mythology from bodes now meant to quit—
so too was Certain Death born of our What-The-Hell breath.

You know the story, you’re in on the joke—no need to laugh,
to humor us, though if you’d spent that summer helping
construct the town’s new mausoleum, you too
would’ve laughed the way we did, chasing blusters of mirth
through days spent trying to forget the thing that we were building.

It was good summer work between spring and fall semesters,
a chance for us to run our hands across the hood
of our own mortality, to take it off the lot,
return it with a grin and the decision to keep looking,
our last chance to haggle with the world, free to walk away.