[New-Poetry] Poetry 2008

[AlMaginnes at aol.com]

Diann Blakely is a poet whose work I've admired for many years. Her new  book 
CITIES OF FLESH AND THE DEAD confronts mortality full on and forces us to  
ask if the distractions we have invented to keep ourselves from thinking about  
our eventual demise working or if they're worth doing. But her poems are the  
poems of a survivor and absolutely stunning in their music and formal play. 
Here  is the first poem in the collection:
 
 
Bad  Blood 

A woman stares, wild-eyed from the terror  known only when death, 
That  black-winged angel,
Appears without warning, without any time for prayers,  rescue, 
Or bargains; appears
As  a sinking car, as a plane arrowing a thousand feet 
Per second; appears
As a murderer's knife, unsheathed  and glittering. Her wet blond hair,  
Grayish in the black-and-white film, drips at the sides of her face  
And emphasizes
Those eyes, that  darkly lipsticked mouth shaped in a scream's darker o. 
Blood spatters the tile
Then the cracked drain, its  perforations flooding with stained water. 
Flashbacks to Psycho:
What middle-ager doesn't succumb, at  least in motel showers,  
Recalling these shots, or Bates straitjacketed while a fly roams
His twitching fingers?
A man too gentle to  hurt a fly, the voice-over repeats.
With brute surrender,
The actor embodied our worst fears: like dying in the  bath—
Or flames, or black  winds—
Trusting water like a lover to soothe, to cleanse off the grit  
And smudge of ill-spent pasts, to give us a new starts. No new start  
For a man offered
Only crazed  killer roles in his short life, who quoted a film 
In his dying days.
An easier story: everyone knew  Germans were the bad guys, 
That  Ingrid Bergman's
Suffering was noble, though her career was nearly sunk by—  
Living in sin? out-of-wedlock kids? One era's moral rage 
Turns ash as quickly
As the next shapes its  fears. Keep me safe, keep me safe—we repeat 
Craven litanies now,
In time of plagues, want to feel  singled out and cherished by God,
Who'll surely spare us,
Our friends, our families. Almost sensual, these  open-mouthed pleas  
For blessing, as when we let water sluice its warm passage down
Our flesh at the end
Of a day that's  pummeled us into exhaustion and blankness,
When we drop our hands
To unbutton a shirt, pull on the harsh teeth of  a zipper,
Look in someone's  eyes
And pray love me, treasure my body, don't ever let me die.  


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