Martin Vest

February 3, 2023

“Normal in Wyoming” by Martin VestPosted by

Martin Vest

NORMAL IN WYOMING

from a letter to Jay

My doctor says I’m doing fine. He tells me everything
is normal. Honestly, I no longer know how to rattle him,
and it scares me. I miss the days when my physical 
problems were unusual for my age. As you know, 
I walked with a cane by the time I was forty-five. 
Everyone knew it wasn’t normal. Everyone knew it 
was the result of an injury. Now people just expect it. 
Women look at me as if I’m a starter home they can’t 
believe they once lived in. I miss my wife. My ex-wife. 
My second ex-wife. But when I remember touching her
I imagine my now-hand on her then-body and I shudder. 
I mean, just wait until you see the thing. My hand. Good god 
and my nipples. Not that I’ll show you. But wow! 
And they droop and kind of reach out, somehow eager 
and worried at the same time. Like a tourist at Sea World 
puckering for a kiss from a dolphin. My breasts, in general. 
They’re breasts now. And I have throatum. A portmanteau 
I made of “throat” and “scrotum.” Because that’s exactly 
what it looks like. You know the thing. Like Ronald Reagan’s. 
All the irony is gone from my hat. The On Golden Pond hat 
I used to wear. I still wear it but now it’s just befitting. 
Sometimes I think I’ll buy another, a different style, 
but then I just think why bother. There’s no getting that back. 
The last time I saw my doctor I told him. He was politely 
trying to usher me out of his office. So I stopped 
in the doorway. I stood up, kind of sputtered up my cane 
like a spark up a damp fuse, and I lingered, and I decided 
to mention about the weird screaming and hissing 
in my legs where the liquor did the damage. 
I finally said, “My legs … I can’t quite reach them, somehow. 
They feel like radio stations in the middle of Wyoming.” 
He just kind of half-smiled and eased me into the hall.
That’s perfectly normal, he said.
 

—from Rattle #78, Winter 2022

__________

Martin Vest: “Sometimes just the mention of ‘poem’ brings unwanted baggage, unwelcome pressure. I don’t feel that crap when I’m writing a letter to a friend.”

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October 16, 2020

“Asterisks” by Martin VestPosted by

Martin Vest

ASTERISKS

Reading a book by a respected poet,
I come to a poem that I don’t understand.
It’s one of many, really, but as this one
is particularly famous, I surrender my pride 
to the internet and conduct a quick search 
from which I learn that the piece 
is about the death of the author’s father.

More confused than ever, I return to the book, 
wondering how I could miss something so essential.
It’s here somewhere in all these words,
this tangled rosary of stanzas linked by asterisks.
But I could never find Waldo in his red and white world,
the crown among the zigzags in Highlights’ hidden pictures—
and even now, I concede, I am not clever enough
to find the death of this man’s father in his poem.

As a boy, I was in special education,
pinched into tiny cinder-block rooms that stank
of citric cleanser and earwax.
We studied the mathematics of bananas
and apples, fought with prepositions,
tried our hands at haiku,
converting syllables into one
too many blackbirds, while in other rooms 
students turned numbers into music and made 
chemicals react in puffs of natural magic.

Monumental! blurbs one writer.
Resonating! raves another. Erudite! Unflinching!
I stare into the page the way one stares into a 3D poster, 
waiting for an image to emerge,
but nowhere can I see a dead father.

Frustrated, I lay the volume aside 
and begin tidying the room,
anxious to shake off this sense of inadequacy,
as I was once so eager to escape
the syndromes and impediments
and congenital hygienes of my classmates,
when I stared into the night sky
of a workbook—
the constellations, dots I couldn’t connect,
figures I couldn’t grasp,
which existed, I was told,
somewhere above me.

—from Rattle #68, Summer 2020

__________

Martin Vest: “Until recently I kept a Sharpied slip of paper taped to my wall: ‘SHUT UP,’ it said. I put it there to remind myself to do just that. The sign didn’t work; I didn’t shut up. But on the internet I see plenty of admonitions against speaking too freely: ‘overshare,’ ‘TMI.’ Shut-up signs are everywhere. My favorite poets often reveal ‘too much.’ I don’t know what I’d do without that generosity. I’d have probably died long ago of something lonely.”

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September 10, 2020

“Man on Fire” by Martin VestPosted by

Martin Vest

MAN ON FIRE

At first he looked nice lying in the hearth.
On the end of a torch he kept Frankenstein away.
He lit the streets on a dark walk from a seedy bar.
When you wanted to dance he danced.
When you wanted to sleep
he was a lamp that wouldn’t shut off.
He seethed and roiled in his body of tongues,
climbing the walls like a madman …
He flickered and snapped.
He grew to a roar.
Alarms went off, sirens sounded,
the throat of his upturned flask
chanting go, go, go,
like a flammable cheerleader,
but you stayed …
His smoke clung to your skirts
and coated the dishes
as he tumbled from room to room
screaming more, more …
You remember the night that you met him.
There had been others to choose from—
the drowning man who sat next to you
groping at your blouse as he sunk
to the bottom of his whiskey and soda—
the rain-maker with cold gray eyes
who stared into the melancholy
of his gin and lime.
But Man-on-Fire never stopped grinning,
Man-on-Fire with his twenty shots of everything,
with his flash-paper sleights
fueling the crackle of their own applause—
And you, parched wind,
whistling like a spoke, like a runaway train,
howling in your body
for a keyhole of quick escape,
for a fast way through the wall—
What would you want with water?

—fromRattle #28, Winter 2007
2008 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor Winner

__________

Martin Vest: “If my house were haunted, I would toss buckets of flour into the places where a ghost might hide. Eventually, the flour would find its mark, and the ghost would be given a form. When I write, I often begin with only a sense that something is there—a presence of some kind. I start throwing words around. With a little luck, they hit their subject and a poem appears. I’m always shocked by what they look like.”

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September 5, 2018

“Should I Spill My Beer” by Martin VestPosted by

Martin Vest

SHOULD I SPILL MY BEER

an automythography

I used to teach kung fu.
That’s a true thing I tell people
when I’m drunk.
As if to say I didn’t always
sit on this stool.
This is all part of a plan—
I’m not destroying myself;
it’s just that I have a keen sense of timing,
and now is not the time.
As if to say I could kill you
with the death touch.
Or I might kick you in the head
without bothering to stand up,
if the hour comes around.
As if to say this is not how it ends,
sulking in the bony half-light like a ghoul.
On this stool I trudge along,
waist-deep in the corpses of myself.
I am the mysterious wanderer
playing his flute in a forest of bamboo.
I am meditating beneath a waterfall
where the vain peony clings to its treacherous petals.
I am coming to the aid of a town extorted.
The imperial army cannot track me 
in the pure snow.
Should I spill my beer, the Jade Dragon
will rise from the foam
and agitate the ten thousand things.
I will ride it through the Jewel Gate
across a bridge of magpies,
which will scatter in flight behind me.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Martin Vest: “Growing up, I had few friends and I never attended a school-sanctioned sporting event. But I practiced kung fu seven days a week, and I began teaching while still in high school. My instructor introduced me to the first ‘serious’ books I ever read—The Tao Te Ching, Journey to the West, The Book of Five Rings, and other Chinese and Japanese classics. Much of the work was over my head at the time, but I supplemented it with a hefty dose of martial arts movies—everything from Kurosawa to cheesy blood-and-gore flicks from Hong Kong. For various reasons, I stopped practicing kung fu but soon afterward I discovered poetry. The transition from one to the other was natural to me. In fact, I didn’t really see a difference between the two. Still don’t. Quickly, though, I began drinking heavily for 25 years. I don’t regret it, though my many hospitalizations suggest I should, perhaps. In recent years I have undergone other metamorphoses. ‘Should I Spill My Beer’ is a cacophony of lives made symphonic (with one ear plugged) by poetry.”

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September 15, 2017

“The Day I Tried to Commit Seppuku …” by Martin VestPosted by

Martin Vest

THE DAY I TRIED TO COMMIT SEPPUKU OR, HOW I LEARNED I AM NOT A SAMURAI

Anticipating my next move,
I sold my guns.
I knew I’d eventually try pills
so I swallowed them all in advance.
In the car there were too many potentials—
the burned-out shell on a lonely hill,
hose in a tailpipe, cliff—
so I sent it away with my marriage—
that dented plate
whose blunt surface
had dimmed my head.

I wore out streets, welcomes,
made beds of gardens and police cars.
Nearly outwitting myself once,
I slept too close to the river—
jumped in with the bread sacks
and grocery carts,
and floated dumbly
in the shallow stink.
Eventually I climbed out,
legs numb as cardboard,
my pockets filled with the sludge
of missing pets.
In dreams I hanged
myself from the sky
until my belt snapped
and I awakened,
alive with a bump
on the head.

Then, while staggering
along a road one day,
I found an old steak
knife in the gutter.
Unable to reach myself in time,
I drove the dirty blade
into my stomach,
counting the pop of layers—
the steel tip just kissing
the wet nose
of some friendly organ.

In the hospital they x-rayed,
pictured, committed me
to the fifth floor where lunatics
played Yahtzee and smelled
like couch cushions.
I had no horse.
No monstrous armor.
Not a penny.
I remembered that the sword
is the Samurai’s soul
and thought again
of my little bent knife
and how I’d lost it
not so long ago
in a fierce battle
with some woeful demon
whose name
escaped me,
high on a mountain of gods.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

[download audio]

__________

Martin Vest: “What an impossible bio to write. How has mental illness affected my poetry? The easier question for me to answer is, ‘How has poetry affected my mental illness?’ I’m still here.”

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October 23, 2011

“The Clinic” by Martin VestPosted by

Martin Vest

THE CLINIC

They come smelling
        like the inside of an ear
like government curtains
        like a flagpole in the dead
of winter
        with one leg
with cancer
        with court orders
with lies
        they come like the dead
the undead
        like shells washed up
bottles without messages
        They come hooked
naked as starfish
        stinking
needing
        food and shelter
money and clothing
        they come
and come
        like blood from a wrist
into my office
        notarized and wasted
pouring their tears
        Into my mouth
goes the vinegar of the damned
        goes the pale horse leaping
liberty’s blue tongue
        sorrow upon
sorrow
        in the child’s dead eye
the red tape worm
        wiggles
and slips into
        the stars.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

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