Joshua Weiner

 
POEM TO PAUL CARROLL
 
 
We never met
but the link
I took a course
in making
sculpture
taught by
Maryrose Carroll
your wife
asked me
knowing I liked
poetry
trying hard
to write it
did I tell her
that did I
know the name
Paul Carroll
the poet
her husband
and I said
no I had
never but
once I had
immediately
after and more
w. time became
a 508-page
Rand-McNally
of these contemporary
States
i.e. POEMS
$6 used
Great Expectations
Evanston gone
under Foster el
2001
great store
teetering stacks
popping up
from the floor
ambitious tubers
sun-bleached
waiting years
decades
for someone to
pluck them
like me
reaching for
The Young
American Poets
pub. 1968
ed. Paul Carroll
still there
on my shelf
color fully
ripe Alaskan
salmon roe
12 blue photo
cubes display
poets' faces
stacked coals
e.g. why is
Diane Wakowski
pointing
a gun at me
look I put
my hands up
Bill Knott was
Saint Geraud
& here's
the full text
of a poem
by Aram Saroyan
'oxygen'  
who writes
that well
glowing firebox
I pull out
lost in
evitable gloom
burns away
& earlier
yr. Big Table
issue #1
found unfit
w. Naked Lunch
impounded by
U.S. Post
Chicago that was
March 1959
fucking cold
you were 33
4 yrs. before
I was born
but no ashes
yet
your mind
in full
possession
she gave me this
look now
it was 1985
like young
American poets
are dead
April no
warmer
as then I try
to add softer
clay to clay
that's hardening
using only
my fingers
some slip
as binder
merge the
pliable
days' armature
free squidgy
contour feel
of finding
in the chunks
(Julia Vinograd
's still writing
it's 2016!)
everything.

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Copyright © Joshua Weiner 2017

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Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, including The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (all from Chicago).  His Berlin Notebook, prose about the refugee crisis in Europe, was published in 2016 by the Los Angeles Review of Books. www.joshuaweiner.com