Sean Singer's poems have appeared in Pleiades and Callaloo, among other magazines. He's recieved
a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a Hart Crane Scholarship to the
Catskills Poetry Workshop, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. He lives in Cambridge, MA.





Organic

Pink as Annie, pink as an onion, pink as a stop,
Pink as harlequin, pink as girls, pink as strawberry Napoleon.
This is what happens when you look.

What is a spring dusk?
You can feel it seeping out of the roots
And you can see, cocoons of columbaria,
Pink in the purring, bundle of confidence,
A glass tear vase on a velvet ribbon.
The wagon wheel outside my window rolls
The ocean floor, with only a little color in the left corner.

But you can see there is a painting underneath
The painting. There is a person under the name
And under the streets, there is much movement.
What is to become of the dusk?

Love, love, love.
Flamingo tongues were a delicacy at Roman feasts.
Or skin is only a lyric shell. It has nothing to do
With us, flickering in the mine, aubergine vines in the walls.
Forget what you know and follow the tunnel
The earthworm digs, through the portals and fibers.
Pale dirt, legumes as large as flowers, deeply.
This is not the dark part.

Crypts of Lieberkuhn, antrum of Highmore,
Former spaces, even pouches, with pale heather.
The bow of the key leads people to the heart,
Which unravels in wormy tang.
The heart chews the wood, like the figurehead on a ship.
The water is a belly.

Downpour of blue tablecloths, stars glowing softly
Like exploding grasshoppers, hot tapestries.
I'm touched by bubbles, large pink jars,
Like the memory of a stonemason.
Between the heart and the tubes around it
Are linings, declaring to heaven. My love, why?

I hope to reveal to you, like dark brown sugar
For the starlings. . . I am a collection of feathers,
Just as a ballerina is not traveling in an arc.
She is suspended in a series of fixed points.
She suggests things and does not stretch her body.
That is why you do not want to name an object.
Its divination is its name, captured like the spoke
Of a pleasing wheel. Here and there are sadder
Features, plumes, plums, mulch, empty birds.
Cold as a harp, she drifts away,
Lost like in silent films:
Menilmontant, Dreigroschenoper, even
Broken Blossoms. Yes, it was that way.
Her skin is a bell full of nightgowns.

Let us kindle a fire from purple.
A huge vault like a planetarium,
A machine rotates and shines on the pinholes
In the dome. That is how I see you, my love,
Pure cherry, pangs in the hills, on and on, full of opera!
Dusk opens like an orange.
The color and the color and the color.







The Sweet Obsession Bleeds from Singer

Singer is dead today and in the ground forever.
How astonishing, his blue vapor
is seeping, not consuming itself, outward
from his honey and body. He is buried
in fine linen, in the old style,
and his saxophone is engraved as a tiger
lily. There was love in him.
His love was not a wild stag,
nor fragrant oils, nor hills of cinnamon.
It was a light through the ocean,
cool and content. He handed this poem to me
and was gone, sifting up to the surface:

All the passions of my organs
Are soft doorways. The garden
Turns inside out. One dream
Is white as a sky, one black
And crowded as trees. Each
With a door, a rude odor, a reed.

Remember him, darkest eyes,
playing like hell in the mountains,
love like that blue, making up
in depth for what it lacked
in brightness. . . We will not speak
of love with him again.







Transference of the Blues Dynamism


1

There is one known, battered copy.
The girl's letters go down my throat - a tablespoonful of cherry.
She lived in a cottage by the sea.
It was in Nova Scotia, and she sang her world:
a brush, fish, bristles, trails, tonnage of stones.

A midair radius of clouds: humped fields.
I put down the letters. Rescind, decide, ease, erase. Who was she?


2

She did not sing about slivovitz, le Juif Errant,
or theories of heredity. She was not a Jew.
She did not see the sin in Singer. Who will sing, like Dock Boggs
with his hellbent banjo, of the liquidation of the Lwów ghetto?
The Ossolineum Institute is sewn into the sky.

If she cannot bend the gods, she will unleash herself.


3

Unleashed, even the blueblazes of that pain travels
from her to Dock Boggs, to me, to some sleepwalking dressmaker
or tailor in Europe, drinking dry, colorless wine.

Dock Boggs, feeling it in him, wailed:

Have never worked for pleasure,
Peace on Earth I cannot find;
The only thing I surely own,
Is a worried and troubled mind.







Robert Johnson (the film, the car ride, & the ghost)

“…over 10 seconds of grainy film footage surfaced somewhere of what may or may not be
Robert Johnson. Nobody has seen the film, which apparently is being offered for $1.5 million,
but everybody has an opinion about whether or not it's of the blues legend.”
                                                                                                    - from a magazine article


- Roll camera:

Iron-colored homburg, burr of cigarillo
dangling out jook-lips.
A spider light behind spider-hand,
& fliptop flimflam
of the thumping thumb on the green guitar.
: Lights on -

In each Mississippi town during the car ride:

Friars Point:
A terrific echo tango filled the Terraplane: yowl & powder
red in the air from his well, this is it girlish voice.

Midnight:
“Man, be careful! My wife's percolating.”

Itta Bena:
H.C. Spier ran a music store in Jackson.
All the ladies knew.

Nitta Yuma:
…the blue light was my blues and the red light was my mind…

Rena Lara:
his mattress was roughage & provender,
his shoe was a queen of spades,
the Gatling gun of his wet blue heart
was like the dead shrimp on his floor.

Some little places that didn't even have names:
Thin blues from a steel string
Reel brothel mouths.
It would put your kidneys to sleep.


Resolution - :

Slippery jass: our needle-thin man
died of poison & general dissipation.
Never mind the Strychnos Nux-vomica
or belladonna in his liquor,
never mind the broken seal,
but the film! First the gray-yellow tape
clicks through the numerals
like a peeling tangerine,
then that devilment, minty voice
like a jack-in-the-box singing
Chinese opera. O the dark steeple
& the peach falsetto are one.
The dog & the mosquito rough
it up. There is a terrible cry
doping doing all through the grape night.