Anna Tambour presents 


 

The virtuous medlar circle
thoroughly bletted
 
 
3 Poems
by
Mark Rich

Box of Wires

The Times We Changed

Grace Notes


 
 

box of wires

Naturally not until after the wedding
did she discover him to be a box of wires
whose mysterious workings
passed for an everyday insouciance
about the good life.
He had made good marks, had played
team-sports in and out of the office,
had a promotion under his belt.
She knew from his mother
he had been a riotous and ebullient kid:
it had happened later that he was overtaken
by his boxness, his wireness,
his compulsion to find room
for the corners of his angular being.
She took to the garden
those days when she saw him so clearly.
A season ebbed, flowed, washing over her
with scents of dampness and earth-mould,
and the river nearby raced harder
beneath the bridge. She saw
winter start with a wet snow
and heard how other spouses complained
of the boxes of wires they had wed
even when they had married well
and even when they felt unsure if they,
too, might be boxes of wires. Perhaps
she, too, had married well. It was a year
when profits were up and prices were down
and the new models of cars
moved sleekly into daydreams:
she would feel the slow creep
of happiness stealing over her soon,
she knew. She would feel it
soon.
 

 

 
The times we changed
 

The times we changed
became the ponderous clocks
on our grandfathered backs.
We devised and connived and threw ideas out
any and all windows until such a one
as caught fire or struck a passerby in the forehead
took fuel there and spread: and that
became our new way, invigorating at first,
gradually weighted down by implications
as all such new times do.
Now we must live with it:
and thinking back to our dreams of happiness
we know we are happy
this is an elysial field we cross
this is our paradise
made real
this is our new
home.
 



 
Grace Notes

Grace notes
to something more essential ...
this piling-on of effort
by all us scribes and minstrels:
filigree work.

What is this behemoth that goes ponderously on
toward the turreted monstrosity rising
at the end of the cobbled road?
Either we ride it or walk alongside
or gaze in wonder from the distance
with the heathen and the mud-caked:
miraculous human society
trundling toward apotheosis.
Either way we amount to just about dust,
skin-flakes off the hide of the beast.
Or fodder.

Yet if we do not move, it does not move.
If we stop singing, its flapping nostrils
fall silent, and its lips tremble at the edge
of lassitude. And when we close our eyes
then its watery orbs wash over
with the whiteness of the clouded blindness
of darkened age.

And so we juggle our glass beads,
thumb our music-paper, stay till late hours
chuckling over the literary extravagances
of our own decades-dusted youth.
We had dreams, once, and see sometimes
in the clouds raised by the tread
of that massive traveler of the forward road
the fading outlines of that daylit castle
where we, too, would dwell.
 

 

Mark Rich

If he were a fruit, he'd be a durian. As he's only human, he's a delicious writer, visual artist, (but if you're the jealous type, then this gets disgusting) and musician.

He was born in Chicago and spent his growing-up years in Colorado and Kansas. He began to have his poems and reviews published in the 1970s, when he also initiated the zines The Silent Planet and Treaders of Starlight, the latter which was subtitled The Magazine of Speculative Poetry. In the 1980s, he co-founded The Magazine of Speculative Poetry with Roger Dutcher. The magazine continues with Dutcher as sole editor. Rich's poetry has appeared in magazines including Manhattan Review, Poem, Amazing Stories, Light, and Poetry Midwest. His poem "Cargoes of Immensity: October 4, 2004" is currently a long-poem nominee for the Rhysling Award.

His fiction has been published by, among others, Small Beer Press, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons; and see what's coming up.

Mark has a degree in music, and as a professional musician, he composes and performs (guitar, vocals, violin, mandolin) in two bands: (acoustic) Keg Salad and (electric) Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind.

He also knows about potato heads.

AT notes: Although I love his writing and have been kicking him to do something about getting his music to a wider audience, we met through an eggplant. I have several beautiful portraits signed by Mark Rich, of an eggplant in recline.

 

Contact Mark Rich at
mark.rich (at) sff.net






The virtuous medlar circle

is part of
Anna Tambour and Others


"Box of Wires", "The Times We Changed", and "Grace Notes" copyright © March 2006 by Mark Rich. This is the 1st world appearance for each of these works.
These poems appears here with thanks to Mark Rich, whose payment was less than a brass razoo.
This is part of a series of invited pieces by people I find deliciously inspiring, always a hoot, and who write like a bletted medlar tastes. A.T.
The Virtuous Medlar Circle © 2004 - 2006