Lee Ballentine (Western Voices 2020)

Exclusive: Western Voices, 2020: Edited by Scott Thomas Outlar

Bio: Surrealist Lee Ballentine’s poems have appeared in Abraxas, ACM, Caliban, Denver Quarterly, Drive They Said, Exquisite Corpse, Mississippi Mud, Painted Bride, Portland Review, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies, and he is the author of seven books of poetry. His literary and publishing papers have been acquired by Ohio State University for its Avant Writing.

Donna Snyder’s poetry collections include Poemas ante el Catafalco:  Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu), I Am South (Virgogray), and The Tongue Has its Secrets (NeoPoiesis).  Her poetry and book reviews appear in many publications including such journals and anthologies as Red Fez, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, VEXT Magazine, BorderSenses, Mezcla, Inanna’s Ascent, and Speak the Language of the Land.

HOW WE KNOW THINGS 

first, intimately

entire and sudden like a fall of rain

later, less well

as time fritters on them

then, in parts

we labor to connect

melancholy, disconnected ships

 in a flotilla of change

and then, for a long time

only by accident and stumbling

finally, not at all

some stranger getting wet for the first time

Lament for the end of the world

Collaboration with Donna Snyder

no more sweet dreams

of granite, jade, and glue

offered or permitted

& no scowls

the order of the day is death

but the hundred episodes of death

are not permitted now

only two or three

a few coughs, fever, then death

a quick goodbye, then death

its bones gleaming

like a pearl-handled revolver

death in the bed

death beside the bed, not in it

outside

white streets and stone steps lit by the sun

inside

an aching back, then death

a twisted neck

lungs burning like Australian brush fires

dirt burning underneath the floor

creatures falling from the sky at my back door

then nothing . . .

an empty train, an empty car

a singer who incants but who does not wake

any more

no more sweet dreams

but colors in the evening sky

and the soft thuds

hitting the ground

but silence is never silent

Collaboration with Donna Snyder

Like an ultimatum of birds gone to their winter nests,

I refuse to speak in the shadowed echoes of your applause.

Like things you will never hear again, sounds tremble as they fall,

leaving nothing but your voice telling me what I cannot be.

As my honest self fades to gray, I hear its damp echo.

A machine preaches tolerance, but I see only scowls.

The eruption of unbidden tears. Imperfect duplicates.

A divided spirit—sonorous voice, gregarious smile—

belies the familiar fist. The slammed door and bruised spirit.

Heartache demands shame’s silence.

But silence is never silent. Car doors slam. Jets

roar through dirty sky. Distant dogs complain.

Choppers enforce imaginary lines between Us and Them.

Or maybe bear torn flesh, twisted bodies, the comma of death.

Train tracks thunder a despot’s rage that stops for nothing.

A teacup knocked to the floor, a tympani of windows and roof,

a glorious vibration, the sound of fragile metal, a car

dropped to the concrete floor of a garage in the next block.

Pigeons trill sweetly, then scold anyone without seed.

Water flows through pipes like the presence of god.

Breath rattles through tubes of flesh and dying lungs.

Snub nosed dogs snort and snore in irregular rhythms,

like the voice of ghosts from beyond a non-existent wall.

They cannot stop telling stories of all that’s long forgot.

Footfalls from wooden floors where no feet walk.

I breathe poisoned hills and smell toxic water. My life

demolished like a listing shed in the rail yards.

Lost as the travelers who never returned home

bathed in the midwinter scent of a sea’s perfume.

The migratory odor of abandonment lingers,

and I have nothing to say to you.

The waves you would not see

shimmer like a mirror of clouded ice

gone frozen over the falls.

Setu, April 2020