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

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[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

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